Maybe it's most telling that Lindsay Lohan's star sign is Cancer. Because given failure after effing failure, there is something malignant about how lately, no matter how hard she tries, everything she touches is terminal. Take for example her part-time charge as couturiere for Ungaro, which ended in ill-placed pasties and bloodshed and her ensuing salary, the kind of payment that a fashion house might pay an intern for her troubles: a heap of tattered rags. And now, with LiLo's label dropping her, it seems her third album, Spirit in the Dark is doomed to stay, well, in the dark.

Lohan, an American chanteuse widely revered for such classics as "Rumors" and "Confessions of a Broken Heart", has been hard at work on this album for the past 16+ months. Spirit In the Dark is only rivaled by Amy Winehouse's forthcoming album as "third album by a recording artist that will probably never see the light of day but that everyone waits with bated breath to hear anyway." Will the history of music, present and future, be blemished by the absence of a third record by Lohan to complete any sensible pop triumvirate the aspiring mogulista was prepping herself for? Quite.

So it's for that reason that Lohan needs to put down that pack of Pall Malls, take a deep breath, and jump back a few steps. She needs to examine how American music-buyers are quick to sympathize with a victim. She should fix her bloodshot eyes most notably on Taylor Swift, who sold out a batch of her first American tour dates in two minutes, probably because she does wounded gazelle so darn well. Swift is Taylor-made as a Lifetime movie-of-the-week princess, and it's here that Lohan would do well to study Swift's method acting approach to reporters and red carpets.

This isn't a particularly nuanced role. Heck, even Rihanna delivers a similar effect with all the subtlety of a catapult. Nor does Lohan ever show a sign of slowing down, which even Leona Lewis did after being attacked by way of canceling some promotional duties.

It's odd though, because in light of all her tragic failures, Lohan has shown headstrong moxie that is visibly absent from the tabloid box-steps of Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Leona Lewis, making the world at large that much less likely to endear to her. Because when it comes to nubile twenty-something starlets, frail flowers are probably easier to regard than hardy weeds.