A time of extremes as politics mixed with pop culture

It was a Janus-faced year in pop culture, and not because it seemed to provide us with duplicates of every It girl -- Paris and Nicky, Jessica and Ashlee, Hilary and Haylie -- or because it handed us one Mr. Britney Spears, then another.

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The past 12 months put forth two faces because American entertainment was riven by partisan politics and the culture wars emanating from them. We saw all the symptoms of split personality play out every day on our TVs, DVDs, CD racks, bookshelves, and movie screens, in reds and blues that rarely blended into a peaceful and Princely purple. Even the most benign of pop provocations -- a metal-clad aureole, stage prattle from Linda Ronstadt, ''Saving Private Ryan" -- were transformed into politically divisive events analyzed relentlessly on talk radio.

Quick, on your right, there's Mel Gibson, his suffering-filled ''The Passion of the Christ," and the Bush-identified Christian America its success was said to represent. Now look, on your left, there's Michael Moore, the secular attack called ''Fahrenheit 9/11," and the Hollywood liberals who hoped it would help bring down Bush's presidency. Swing back again -- it's the Fox News Channel, which continued to win viewers with its right-wing spin, not least of all when its Bill O'Reilly called Jon Stewart's ''Daily Show" audience ''stoned slackers." But now turn back again -- Stewart is a best-selling author and the most celebrated of news anchors, especially after Tom Brokaw's retirement and Dan Rather's announcement of retirement after delivering fake news of his own about Bush's National Guard service.

Certainly the year did have its share of stubbornly apolitical effluvia -- William Hung, for example, the man his ironic fans called both ''the Hong Kong Ricky Martin" and ''Leader Hung," who turned his own reality humiliation on ''American Idol" into a novelty act. You couldn't tease a Democratic or Republican meaning out of the ''She Bangs" crooner with the porn-star name if you tried -- and why would you try? Or Courtney Love, whose annual courtroom pranks weren't about freedom of expression so much as drug abuse, ego bloat, and promotion of the Nirvana box set. She was as untethered to reality as new cover girl and nightclub hound Lindsay Lohan, whose parents were trapped in a war that sent their daughter's tabloid stock through the roof.

Other 2004 vanity fare included the ascension of the personalized cellphone ring tone, whereby hand-to-ear addicts shelled out more than $300 million to the record industry for a few tinkling notes. It was all about personal politics and defining oneself with a Top 10 riff. Meanwhile, mash-ups, which find mad DJs expressing their cleverness through multisong remixes, began to hit the mainstream and blur the identities of rock icons. Yes, folks, Green Day, Oasis, Travis, Aerosmith, and Eminem can coexist in the same groove and -- despite their individual messages -- sound almost the same.   Continued...