by Daniel D’Addario

2011 will be a great year for fans of Taylor Swift and her music, I have the feeling — as every year since, say, 2008 has been. She’ll keep releasing singles off of her album, so that anyone who hasn’t torrented or bought the full “Speak Now” can join the speculation as to whether that’s what Joe Jonas, John Mayer and Taylor Lautner are really like. She’ll tour and perform, and probably Us Weekly will catch Jake Gyllenhaal with her at Starbuckses across the continental U.S. and Canada. Probably she will perform at awards shows.

2011 will be a dire one for fans (fan?) of Lindsay Lohan and her music. Her third album, to be titled “Spirit in the Dark,” was meant to have been released in 2008. I remember eagerly sending high school friends links to People articles about the album’s progress, my sophomore year of college. I have since graduated. This is “Chinese Democracy” or “Detox” minus anticipation. But if Taylor Swift is to be the queen of a certain breed of pop for however long it takes before Lourdes Leon cuts a record deal or the ourobourous swallows us — or both at once! — we need Lindsay Lohan as a corrective.

Let us define the genre within which we are working. Swift and Lohan are not pop qua pop: Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro,” for instance, is straightforwardly within the pop genre and is as incoherent about its heroine’s experiences as a Djuna Barnes novel; Katy Perry’s “Firework” and its stabs at personal appeal are marred by mixed-metaphor-itis: “do you ever feel like a plastic bag?,” Perry asks, as Wes Bentley, alone, nods along to the radio. Gaga and Perry are too android and chilly to describe their experiences to the heroic degree Swift and Lohan attempt.

Swift’s purloining from life has by now been well-documented. If her songs were collected on a Tumblr, and not three albums, I’d say “I’m not going to bother linking to it.” But her records raise questions of which I’m not sure even she is aware. Take, for instance, “Dear John.” A “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”-length kiss-off to John Mayer, with whom she had a, I guess, super-brief affair (I read Oh No They Didn’t and wasn’t sure I even remembered it happening), “Dear John” is harsh, caustic. It’s a great song, but even as someone who gives Swift more credit for her agency than most (the general attitude this twenty-year-old fosters about her age is reminiscent of Abigail Breslin bringing dolls with her to awards shows in the Little Miss Sunshine era to remind the Oscar voters she was young and precious), I wonder whether it’s incredibly calculated manipulation of the public perception of Mayer as a… calculated manipulator reflects a jadedness more befitting a wizened veteran.

Which, of course, she is by now, so.

The ad campaign for Swift’s album featured Swift saying “This time, I’m naming names.” I’ve not listened to the whole album, but to my knowledge she only actually names Mayer, though the references to Lautner, Jonas and his sometime girlfriend Camilla Belle, Kanye West, etc., are not artfully veiled. They don’t need to be. “Speak Now” functions as a Pale Fire-like revision in the margins of Us Weekly, Swift giving her perceptions of the incredibly specific circumstances in which she finds herself. That’s fine, and it fuels interest as well as a persona of super-real truth-teller, the kind of girl each girl wants to be.

No one wants to be Lohan, nor did they even at her peak, which lasted between, let’s say, 2004 and 2006. While she was perhaps the most human of all of the decade’s celebrities — messily saying too much in interviews, indulging herself grotesquely ravenous appetites, constantly seeking yet more praise — the interest in a talented actress with pathologies has to end sometime. In the midst of it all, she released “Speak” (2004) and “A Little More Personal (Raw)” in 2005, naked money-grabs requiring little vocal exertion.

And yet, despite their titles, both albums are thrillingly anonymous. Lohan, in those years, lived a legitimately interesting life, as such lives go, backed by scads of money and yet constantly messing up, dealing with the depressants Michael and Dina Lohan. Who she dated (Wilmer Valderrama, mainly — wow, huh!) was maybe the least interesting thing about her. (Taylor Swift makes her dating resume her selling point, which is depressing in its own way.)

Nothing on either album gives you any notion of who Lohan is. It was assembled, naturally, by a team of writers and producers of whom Lohan was the least important component. Or it’s personal, but to every conceivable listener in the world. The songs are vaguely about yearning for human connection, or about falling in love, but nowhere does a listener pause and say “Oh, right, that was when she was falling in love with Wilmer. She got so disillusioned.” In “Black Hole,” Lohan refers to a “box of letters lying on the ground,” and it’s a surprisingly sharp image. Rightly, the return address remains blurry.

It’s somewhat perverse that Swift’s ascendancy can give a listener appreciation for Lohan’s discretion, but even on first single “Rumors,” she doesn’t discuss her celebrity beyond the repeated line “I’m tired of rumors startin’.” Rumors about what? This could be about an office or a family or, more pertinently, a seventh-grade dance.

Contrast with the Swift track “Mean,” which is painfully specific about bloggers describing Swift’s weak singing voice. “Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city, and all you’ll ever be is mean,” Swift sings, which is maybe cold comfort to her listeners who lack the breadth of experience to convert into fame as their idol has done, and who for that matter don’t already have fame and wealth beyond measure, as Swift does. We already know Swift wants to be famous, because she tried to garner fame both through a music career and high-profile couplings, and succeeded. Does she need to keep pressing the point?

“A Little More Personal,” too, avoids much mention of celebrity (“Fastlane,” e.g., is “about” how “lonely” the “fastlane” can be, but is so studiously vague that one forgets just how lonely Lohan must have been). It goes into family issues, but “Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father)”’s big confession is that she is frustrated by her family’s “crisis that only grows older.” Michael Lohan’s specificities are left aside, as no one wants to know what they are, or as Lindsay knows the right place for airing specific grievances is to allow her mother to do an interview on TV. Pop music is for the lowest common denominator, or the common touch. “Spirit in the Dark” was, finally, the right idea for a title (if a little too melodramatic to really work); Lohan was but the ghost in the machine. She would have been, unseen, animating her listener’s notions of themselves, not Speaking Now in anything resembling her own voice.

Lohan’s celebrity, I suspect, has torpedoed her music career as it did her film career — both involve the playing of roles (either everygirl car-radio chanteuse or, you know, an acting role) in which the audience can’t envision the well-known Lohan. The jokes about Swift’s eventual single about Jake Gyllenhaal write themselves, but her work’s authenticity begins to wane as, secure in her own celebrity, Swift’s incredible specificity blooms. It is possible to extrapolate from one’s experience emotions that are universal, but Swift, at least in “Dear John” and its subgenre within her work of celebrity-revenge tracks, seems to want her audience to do the work for her.

Those friends from high school, with some of whom I’ve fallen out of touch, were excited about Lohan’s new record, though we all watched with befuddlement through l’affaire Ronson and the arrests and such. It wasn’t clear then that it would all make another Lohan album impossible, not merely because of her lack of focus but also because her experience had become so specific that there was no way to convey it. I burned “A Little More Personal” off a friend back when it was a new record, and — I was the only one with a car — used to drive around, school to Starbucks to Borders pumping the cheesy pop music, which did exactly what pop music is supposed to, really: describe how you were feeling, or make you feel it vicariously. Lohan was ours, because she let herself be.

Daniel D’Addario knows you can’t look back while everyone in Sodom is getting blinded.

by Richard Rushfield

In humanity’s last year of existence, the people of Planet Earth finally achieved the goal that had eluded them since the dawn of civilization, that prize that since men first gathered around fires had hung like a Holy Grail just beyond reach their reach. With one year left to live, mankind at last learned how to shut the hell up.

For centuries, from the earliest known communities through medieval times until the mid 90’s, the free exchange of human ideas had seemed a manageable annoyance; like cockroaches in high tech office towers, the specter of people sharing their thoughts was disgusting to look at, but relatively harmless. To many, the constant yammer was a necessary humbling reminder that, like the cockroaches, for all our pretensions to advanced evolutionary status, we are creatures of the raw and remorseless soil.

And so it might have remained had it not been for the sudden appearance towards the end of the last century of the three horsemen of the apocalypse; talk radio, cable news and blogs.

Like an advanced mining technique unveiling hidden motherlodes, the three horsemen suddenly revealed opinions were hiding everywhere. What had been a manageable annoyance became a vast flood, sweeping away all before it and drowning good people in a sea of blabbing.

Suddenly people were forced to listen to the average citizen’s opinions on politics, on culture and celebrities, on how neighborhoods had become “generic” and on how band’s latest albums had lost their edge.

It became clear to all that the first amendment had been a terrible mistake. But how to get rid of it? With streets overflowing with blather, there seemed no way to turn the tide.

And thus, when the word came down that Earth would explode in one year’s time, the news was taken by many as a blessing. For one thing, it would make it very hard for people to corner you at a party and tell you why Frank Rich’s column this week was on the money if there was no planet for them to stand on while they were saying it. And for another, in the past years the question of how to repeal the first amendment had occupied and befuddled the nation’s greatest minds, between them failing to find a way through and their debate on the issue ironically only adding to the chatter. But with the news that the world was doomed, they all got together and said, oh what the hell, let’s just do it.

And so they did.

However, with the genies of blogging and cable TV out of the bottle, they were not to be shoved back inside so easily. And cooler heads prevailed over those who suggested we should just shoot those who opened their big yaps. Instead, more progressive minds instituted a regimen of laws designed to reacclimatize people to the lost art of shutting their traps now and then.

The following laws were instituted and by mid-year, once again a long forgotten hush fell over the land:

• People were still permitted to express opinions on politics but only on the condition that they do so wearing a red curly hair wig and giant red nose, which they would honk at the end of every sentence.

• If one expressed one’s self at the dinner table, that person was required to sit in silence as each member of the party in turn shared what they thought of their brilliant insight that if only Obama would say X, then the Republicans would be forced to do Y and that would lead to Z. The big mouth would also be barred from responding as each member explained exactly how enthralling it had been for them to listen to his opinions all those years.

• Every opinion a person expressed would be recorded, the tape of which they would be forced to listen back to a hundred times straight.

• Whenever a person announced their discovery of a previously unknown band or neighborhood, all their parents’ friends would immediately buy every album and declare they had always been into them, or move to said neighborhood.

As a result of these changes, the people of Planet Earth found peace and contentment in their final days and declared they wanted it never to end, as opposed to a year earlier when they had spent every dinner with friends praying for a quick death.

And as the inventor of these laws, none of them applied to Richard Rushfield.

Richard Rushfield is the preeminent ‘American Idol’ scholar of our time, and author of the forthcoming Hyperion book ‘American Idol: The Last Empire.’ He is also the author of ‘Don’t Follow Me I’m Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the ‘80s.’

Our world, the casual sum of our interactions, is, generously, a very slender skin on one of billions of mid-sized planets that we suppose to exist. Our verified knowledge of the universe outside of the gravity well is expanding but still a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. We explore to the best of our abilities, but to be fair, the speed of light as a universal constant is an educated guess. We are a mote in the eye of some god that may or not exist. This is of course above and beyond the every day of the every day — the rent, who we love, who we hate, food, table, rinse, repeat. Existentially, cosmologically, it is a little bit existentially crushing out there. Exciting as well, the undiscover’d country and all that, but remember that the undiscover’d country is basically just death, which brings us back to a big, big scary. Which is why, if you’re sensitive to these things, every day is another little yikes.

I only bring this up because we are approaching yet another eschatological threshold, “scheduled” to occur in calendar 2012. If you haven’t heard of it, you are very lucky. But some folks are saying that a Big Thing will happen less than two years from now, which Big Thing varies depending on mileage — consult your Mayan calendar for more information. And which makes 2011, possibly, the last full year we get. Ever.

This is not the first time for a good old-fashioned end-times freak-out, not even in recent history. 1982 was a pretty big one, when the planets were supposed to align in some catastrophic fashion. It was a bust, but I was young and impressionable and happened to stumble upon a couple of shrill Christian pamphlets (extolling beliefs similar to this) that mentioned that the moon was going to turn to blood, etc. etc., and I’ll never get back the sleep I lost in 1980 and 1981. In 1987 a Harmonic Convergence was anticipated, another planetary issue mixed with, again, the Mayan calendar, but giant jaguars did not roam the earth that night, destroying and then recreating reality overnight (as far as we can tell).

We’ve always done it. Our older religions were very handy with the final scenario, be it Revelations or Ragnarok, and in the more recent centuries we have not gone wanting. Check the Three Prophecies of Fatima, or maybe you remember the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, which was certainly on topic, in retrospect. We are never at a loss for a group of humans, on the fringe or not, waiting for the end of everything that does not come.

But if you are legitimately interested in the 2012 hub-bub, then by all means — it’s a big Internet out there, and you are only a search away. I have been for years, as one with a taste for the conspiracy theory. I’m in there more for the whimsy, the irrepressible powers of the imagination, let’s say, but it is a dark and shadowy place and there’s an excellent chance that you’ll stumble across one or two things that may give you a shudder. Believe it if you will. I don’t. But I do believe in a world more interesting than it appears to be, though this is more of an aspiration than a tenet of faith. And this belief requires a steady diet of Sasquatch, UFOs and general weirdness.

The significance of 2012 is explained generally as a function of the end of a series of cycles of the Mayan calendar, which is a pretty well-calibrated cosmological clock. This is probably the aspect that you’ve heard about, and, according to a couple of New Age friends, no one is more sick of hearing about it than actual Mayans. But if you do poke around, you’ll find all kinds of wonderfully interesting correlations, like the Montauk Project, the Philadelphia Experiment, wormholes and sunspot cycles. Hours of fun research. Like, for example, in the world of “time travelers” as exists on message boards and Geocities websites and the like, there is a recurring theme of how certain time travelers that are interviewed by the intrepid talk about how they are never able to go forward past the year 2012. Do I believe in that? Well, no, but I’ve been wrong before, and isn’t it a much more interesting thing to lay awake at night thinking about than a dusty old calendar?

And if you are disinclined to give a flying fig about any of this — maybe more interested in the vestments of the material world — then comfort yourself with the knowledge that this 2012 phenomenon exists as much as a brand as it does an ecclesiastical concern. What could be more American, more now, than appropriating the doomsday scenario of a lapsed culture and making boatloads of money off it? We may be terrified of the unknown and the unknowable, but we are also terrified of not being able to buy a large television, and nothing soothes the soul than wisdom bought at no small price. Books? Oh, there are books. Seminars? We are lousy with them.

Most probably this will amount to nothing, but at least it demonstrates the anxiety we primates have over a possible expiration date. This creeping dread which is palpable and occupies a good portion of our thinking is as human as anything else we do: fussin’ and a-fightin’, livin’ and survivin’. Good times, sure. But of all of the things we have to be scared of — scorpions, embarrassment, debtor’s prison, cuckoldry, solitude, and, um, death, why do we project our insecurities into some epochal event, some end of everything?

I say, as a casual student, that it’s hubris, a mortality blown wide on a historic scale. Obviously, no matter how much we wish it were not so, we will pass away. And so we project. Why should we expect permanence when we see none? Water carves granite out of mountains, and the continents actually move. The window of our experience is just too limited to approach anything resembling permanence. Even Hubble snapshots, showing things that happened eons ago, are littered with frozen moments of stars dying. Again, eons ago.
And in our smallness, what could be more natural to become a bit unhinged? Mortality is not purely a matter for the single-issue voter. We’re soaking in it. Why not take some comfort in the concept of a world that will in some way not outlive us?

Objectively, could everything end? Anything is possible. If the astrophysicists are right, at some point we’ll be staring at the heat death of the universe, but that’s not going to be our fate. That might be a post-human fate, but we are not post-human. We are very solidly human. It’s fun to imagine, as sci-fi fans would agree, but our fate is a slow grudging acceptance. Of bad luck, of circumstances beyond our control, of mistakes we make. Maybe having the Screaming Mimis over a fate bigger than the earthly fates we can imagine somehow ameliorates those earthly fates and the diminished expectations that accompany them. And what’s wrong with being wrong? Who’s keeping score?

Ultimately: the ultimate year? It will be some version of the penultimate year. As will the rest of the ultimate years.

Brent Cox is all over the Internet.

Photo by Seth Anderson, from Flickr.

For at least a few generations — or maybe for forever, actually, and this is a matter of some argument — we as a people or we as some of the people have at times been gripped by a fever for the End Times. What does seem newish about the last century is that no longer is The End of the World just for the religious. Though sure: The End is always nigh to someone’s thinking! But, as the poet said, “plans can fall through, as so often they do.” And at some point, one does get so tired of being stood up for this particular appointment. So to observe the end of 2010, we decided to put on our most straight-on, forward-thinking hats, and presume the following: what if it’s all true about 2012 and the last days are upon us? What if the end of one “page” in one particular calendar really means the end of the world is rushing towards us? What if 2011 is to be our last full year on earth? (Well, “full,” providing that we each survive the entirety of 2011, because you know how these things go.) This week, some answers. Enjoy!

It is The Holidays! Right now, right this very NOW it is the Holiday Season! Even if you are grumpy about This Time of Year, I am going to wish you a Good Grumples, because if it is satisfying for you to be that way, then Be All You Can Be, OK?

It is The Holidays! So really, Merry fucking Jingle! Or Merry Jinglin’-baby-go-ahead-baby, if you will, because it’s all about jingling right now, some jingling in your pocket, no?

It is The Holidays! Here’s the Ichiban-Number-One thing I do when it is The Holidays; I tip double and I give money to bums. I figure that would be a good thing for The Holidays, some Green, on account of I’m right there with you, man, I got some Xmas-themed scratch-offs going right now and if I score, I’m gonna pump it right back into The Economy’s tied-off arm, you know? It is the Circle of Giving.

It is The Holidays! I always opt-in for the Be of Good Cheer aspect, you know? I Sincerely Wish you a Happy The Holidays, whatever you are, and if you are someplace hot, I hope you are cool, and if you are someplace cold, I hope you are toasty.

It is The Holidays! If you are Sick, please Get Well. If you are Sad, please get Happy. They sell it in bottles all over the place! If you are Unemployed, I hope in this order: 1.) You get a Job, 2.) You can collect on those extended Unemployment Benefits, because wow, there sure were some Serious and True Anti-The Holidays em-effers out there who were Scroogin’ it up big time, all year long, and they are even some of the type of people who would “Merry-Christmas-In-The-War-On-Christmas-So-Get-It-Right-It-Is-The-CHRISTmas-I-Am-Wishing-On-You” to you, right to your underemployed face, while they are still bitching about the Taxes, you know? This is like, the one Time of Year when people make an effort to be positive and Of Good Cheer, and there’s these goddamn “War on Christmas” Grinches who get all prickly if you say “The Holidays” and not their Jesus one. YOU ARE TAKING A POSITIVE TIME OF YEAR AND BEING ALL “THE PARTY OF HELL NO” TO IT. Quit it! Ultimately to them I still say a Happy The Holidays, Jesus Christmas, whatever floats their goddamn boat to the Party of Tea, but they need to get in touch with being Human Beings and the teachings of Jesus The Christ. In Theory. Anyway.

It is The Holidays! I don’t have time to be chopping them all up into categories. I say just go ahead and Enjoy you some, as long as it does not involved exploding my desk or anything like that, OK? Go hang some jingle balls! Drink an Egg Nog, or a reasonable and festive simulacrum of same! Make some fucking COOKIES, man, that is good for any The Holidays you can think of that have eating in them. Anyway, I love Egg Nog, man.

Joe MacLeod really loves some egg nog.

• Biggie’s Oeuvre (Including the Junior M.A.F.I.A. Album ‘Conspiracy,’ But Excluding ‘Duets’) In Order

• The Top 25 Things Strangers Have Said or Typed Upon Connecting with Me on ChatRoulette This Weekend

• The 22 Greatest Songs Written For Commercials

• Selected Liz Phair Songs, Presented in Order of Ratio of Elation to Despair

• Lesser Known Members of Black Sabbath

• Sexual Innuendoes Having To Do With Candy That Were Omitted, For Time, From Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” Video

• Winona Ryder and a Bunch of Other People Who Are Turning (*Or Would Have Turned) 40 Next Year

• Letters I Would Consent to Have Sex With, in Descending Order

• Things Visible in the Windows of the Apartment Building Across the Way

• Cost Per Tweet of Notable Twitter Users Partnered with ‘Sponsored Tweets’

• The 32 Possible Side Effects of Using CHANTIX, a Non-Nicotine Prescription Medicine Specifically Developed to Help Adults 18 and Over Quit Smoking, In Order

An amazing year in product placement. Among the big winners? Italy!

The only gay disco dance song you will be listening to this Christmas? It is Johnny Weir’s “Dirty Love.”

What Are the Feminists Refusing to Discuss at Christmas Dinner This Year?

As mentioned previously, the Christmases of my youth were spent sleeping over at my grandparents’ house. This memory comes from what Wikiepedia assures me was 1987 — which simultaneously seems like moments ago and an eternity back. I had just turned 15, and was suffering from that terrible curse of teenagerdom where you are worried that it is kind of lame to be spending time with the people who love you best and wishing you were somewhere else. One of the tragedies of our lives is how much we miss out on because we think there’s something more interesting happening wherever were aren’t; it is a lesson always learned too late.

In any event, the thing I wanted most that Christmas was R.E.M.’s Document, which had come out in the fall. My grandmother, who had wisely given up on making guesses as to what to get me, had dutifully gone to the record store — remember those? — in the strip mall near her retirement community and picked it up. I knew immediately that it was there when I looked under the tree. The shape of the longbox — remember those? — gave it away.

My grandparents were wonderful people, but they were old. They did not, in 1987, have a CD player, and I don’t believe they ever wound up getting one before they passed. So there was no way I was going to be able to listen to the album until the next day.

Older readers may have similar stories, but this is what I remember: lying flat on the ground near the Christmas tree, staring at the box and the liner notes under its lights. As my grandparents puttered around cleaning up, I played the songs I knew in my head and tried to imagine what the other ones would sound like through their titles and the deliberate obscurities of the packaging. (I’m vague on this one, but I believe the box had some kind of legend like “File Under Fire” or something on it.) Occasionally my grandmother would offer me some tardelle, and I would decline, fearing that the honey would stick to my fingers and mar my precious new present. It was warm, it was quiet, it was pleasantly dusky; it was Christmas.

Obviously this is a story that would not happen today. I would have been sitting in the corner listening to the whole thing on my iPod, walled off from everyone else in the house and missing the stray bits of conversation that would waft through my reverie. I’m not making a judgment here or saying Things Were Better In My Day; it is what it is. We all make our own memories one way or another. In any event, I am wishing that each and every one of you have some sort of enjoyable event over this holiday; that you cherish the people you love and manage to tolerate the ones you don’t. I find that alcohol helps, but as the flashback above hopefully illustrates, it is not always necessary. Merry etc.