uring the climax of the video to her confessional classic “Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father),” Lindsay Lohan presses her palms against an enormous window pane separating her from a gaggle of onlookers as a digitized swirl of family photos form a mosaic wall in front of her, then—CRASH!—the glass shatters, bringing Lindsay out of Charles Bukowski’s bathroom (as someone put it on an I Love Music thread) and into the public, confronting her audience face-to-face, give or take a wind machine. Wishful thinking, maybe: glass or no glass, Lindsay has no real access to them, and at the end of the video she’s still trapped in the water closet.

Post-adolescent teenpoppers (“tweens,” in their own way) are stuck somewhere between two poles: on one side, Disney’s privatized parallel kiddie media universe shuns them, and on the other, a blood-thirsty “adult” audience wants to have its scorn both ways—i.e., female teenpop artists like Lindsay are cynically manufactured/manipulated/marketed by their faceless middle-aged handlers, but also exclusively and personally responsible for the perpetuation and reception of their public image.

Robert at Lil’ Bobby offers a nice synopsis of Lindsay Lohan’s career trajectory that also serves as a representative, if extreme, example of how the teenpop aging process works. A series of photos depict: (1) Lindsay promoting family comedy The Parent Trap in 1998; (2) Lindsay pictured at a Nickelodeon event during her ’tween/teen comedy phase (sometime between 2003 and 2004); (3) Lindsay entering a plastic surgeon’s office in 2004; (4) Lindsay after significant weight loss at some point during the (later verified) bulimia allegations in late 2005; (5) Lindsay on designer Karl Lagerfield’s lap in 2006; and finally, (6) Lindsay getting out of the back of a car looking pale, disoriented, and, as Robert puts it, “crunk.”

What an arc! This sort of perceived fall from grace is hardly unprecedented. Dominique Leone posed a question for Britney Spears along these lines in his Pitchfork review of “Everytime” back in 2004: “Doesn’t she understand that once you go down the ‘accidental’ nip-slip, drunken marriage path, you can’t go back to Nickelodeon-approved pine songs?”

He’s right. You can’t go home again, and Britney certainly knew this by the time the single was released. Were they reviewing it, Pitchfork would likely categorize the “Everytime” video as pure, unadulterated(-but-“adult”) WTF—paparazzi attacks, implied domestic abuse, arbitrary head trauma, Britney fully naked and half-drowned in a bathtub, or possibly vice-versa, and…BABIES! Jaw-droppingly mature. The “Everytime” and “Confessions” videos bear striking thematic resemblances: both Britney and Lindsay are simultaneously condemning and inviting tabloid voyeurism; they extend violent, garish invitations to look at them in their most private moments, if that’s what you really want (you jackals!).

The loss-of-innocence narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of audiences and culture commentators: the (female) performers are inevitably considered “inappropriate” for young audiences because, at a certain age, the performers’ general behavior is expected to be “inappropriate” (e.g., catching those pesky “accidental” nip-slips. I won’t go into the obvious sexism involved here, but how does Justin, all of three years older than Ashlee, get to be a Diaz-dumpin’ auteur dork whenever he damn well pleases?). I don’t know if I could successfully argue that all of Lindsay’s onlookers were always waiting for her to “go bad,” but the point is that a path was there, and I’m not convinced that she would have been any better off for choosing not to walk it.


Ashlee Simpson is a good example of how this kind of narrative can be imposed even under less WTF circumstances. Ashlee had a bum rap from the start, but her popularity crash was much more sudden and dramatic than Lindsay or Britney’s, culminating with her post-SNL-jig Orange Bowl performance. You can actually watch Ashlee getting the boot in real time, on repeat if you like (JACKALS!). Despite leading a relatively clean personal life, drunken McDonalds misadventures notwithstanding (what, you’ve never been drunk in a McDonalds?), she still found herself on a career arc similar to Lindsay’s. Eventually she even wound up in the plastic surgeon’s office, but this was where their paths diverged: trying not to further sully her image, Ashlee deflected the tabloids by audaciously suggesting this news was trivial gossip unworthy of coverage and for the most part kept quiet about it (cf. “Ashlee Laughs Off Nosejob Talk,” People, May 11, 2006).

Ashlee’s nosejob was a minor event in the grand scheme of daily tabloid news, if personally upsetting to those of us who liked her old nose just fine. But the tabloid and entertainment press are just as harsh on the modest and reluctant Ashlees as they are on the outré Lindsays, and they will not be ignored. Regardless of how “tastefully” Ashlee responded to tabloid coverage, she still faces exile from teenpop “safe zones.” It’s likely that after her current singles finally peter out on Radio Disney—where she currently still gets more airplay than on Top 40 radio—she’ll be effectively blacklisted. That puts her in the same boat as Lindsay, whose second album was ignored by Disney, and Britney, who hasn’t had a new single eligible for their Top 30 countdown since 2001. And then there’s Hilary Duff, the former Disney-pop princess herself, whose newest Disney-distributed single wasn’t even shopped to her (former?) core audience, although this could have been due to a combination of increasing tabloid coverage and clashing aesthetics.

Maybe getting bumped up to a whole ’nother age bracket, as K-Fed might say, can ultimately be a good thing. Britney took her kiddie exile in stride and still has a shot at another comeback this year, and, crucially, she won’t be expected to “clean up her act” like Christina Aguilera to do it. Lindsay Lohan is taking it in stride, too, and acts like she couldn’t care less if any kid ever spotted her on another Nickelodeon red carpet for the rest of her life. She even moons ‘em to seal the deal. Lindsay and Britney roll with the punches, and they both easily topped every “2006 Most Annoying” year-end list in America, which means people are paying attention to them. Conspicuously absent from those lists was Ashlee Simpson, whose botched attempt to maintain quiet dignity proves the damned-if-you-don’t rule.

Damned-if-you-do is more promising. I would argue that Lindsay has a better shot at rebounding in the public eye by remaining open about her private life. Recruiting Al Gore to wage war on the media might help, too. In fact, I bet Lindsay’s a few “gritty” indie flicks shy of genuine cred. Who wouldn’t be satisfied to see Lindsay rise to acclaim and respectability by portraying an abused druggie alcoholic prostitute with a heart of gold? Audiences want punishment and atonement, sure, but they also secretly want redemption, all of which are totally Lindsay’s bag; she just needs a better director. Of course it would probably kill her music career, which too few people took seriously in the first place, usually because they took her way too seriously. Plus Lindsay plays along a little too well—she told Fashion Rocks magazine that she just shouts over her pop records.

As for Ashlee—well, she might need to try something more unorthodox. She’s currently dabbling in musical theater, ho-hum, but I have a better idea: sudden life-threatening illness. Imagine: Ashlee collapses on stage at an upcoming sparsely attended concert and it’s soon thereafter revealed that she actually has some unspeakable, unheard-of disease. She wakes up, announces a press conference, and invites every last member of the respectable and disrespectable media alike to broadcast a very special message. As they crowd around, she brings the mattress to an upright position, grabs a well-worn guitar, and, with an I.V. still extending from her arm, defiantly performs a scorching acoustic version of “I Am Me” straight from her hospital bed! “And I won’t change for anyone—cough—LIKE YOU!”

After a long battle, she’ll finally get the respect and critical accolades she deserves—so long as she doesn’t let anyone know she was faking.