Fun fact: Allah is the Arabic word for God, also used by Arabic speaking Christians to refer to their deity.

Bandwagon jumping is no crime. And, in fairness to Taylor, she has rooted for the Knicks for years. Indeed, bandwagoning is, perhaps, the essence of healthy, evolved "normie" behavior: recognizing a winner and/or conforming to what is most popular. And it is this "normie behavior" that makes Taylor Swift a rock star at the End of History—the final Sabbath of this era, which is reaching its exhaustion and closing. Taylor can be elegant, to be sure, but her most characteristic poses are like this one. She is communicating, "I can't believe I'm here, and I can't believe I'm on the jumbo screen right now!" I, in fact, can easily believe that Taylor could acquire and afford court-side tickets, and I'm not surprised she's being photographed. This pose allows Taylor to perfectly reflect or even merge with her audience of millennial basic-bitches. She is not above or beyond them—as the classic movie stars or rockers were. She is them. I still don't fully believe that anyone actually loves Taylor's music, which is unobjectionable if forgettable. My sense is that the multibillion-dollar fandom she has created is a gigantic "what if?" experiment participated in by legions of women: “What if we all pretended to like this music, and pretended to adore this icon, who's so much like us!" It is a collective narcissism of "relatability." For at least 60 years, parents have fretted over the music listened to by their children. Rock was too sexual ... too dark ... too edgy ... maybe demonic! Taylor Swift is the first salient rock musician whose music is heard by Gen-X and Boomer parents as cringe ... wholesome (in a bad way) ... vapid ... conservative! If our daughters get into Taylor, we worry that they might not rebel! And rebellion (at least in moderation) is part of growing up. Rock-and-roll is the spirit of Dionysus. Parents were shocked by Elvis's gyrating hips—something we now view as inoffensive. The "love" of the Beatles was, at bottom, the indiscriminate love of Bacchus' orgia. And the aptly named Nirvana gave us a glimpse of the nihilism and death brought by the wine-god in the end. Dionysus can be criticized or even rejected—but his power cannot be denied! Taylor comes at the end of rock, when it no longer even attempts to be subversive or anti-social, but instead stands only as an entertaining soundtrack for 30-somethings in middle management. Dionysus has been banished, and yet her music is not Apollonian either. She, at most, reflects the spirit of Persephone, at least Persephone before it all went wrong. If Taylor is the world's biggest star, then rock has lost all its potency for social change, for better and for worse.

Every time I see that chick from Haim, I think to myself, "Ah, there's that chick from the terrible P.T. Anderson movie, Licorice Pizza, which I made the mistake of watching in its entirety"