John Roderick, writing for The Talkhouse:

I can’t really be cynical about Kelly Clarkson’s Christmas album, Wrapped in Red, as much as it’s my instinct to be, because it would be culturally insensitive to suppose I could ever understand it. This Christmas album is not intended for me. It is not written in a language I understand or could ever understand. My America long ago stopped effectively communicating with the America that produced and/or consumes Kelly Clarkson’s Christmas album. The ironic smirking of Williamsburg/Silverlake snob culture may as well be clicks and pops to the Nashville/Dallas axis of earnest insincerity. I have no option but to respect the difference, the “otherness,” and try to inhabit the controversy. Kelly Clarkson, a white country artist from Texas — at first blush a member of the same privileged white uberkultur as I am — is in fact as removed from my world as we both are from the imams of Islamabad or the glowing anemones of the Marianas Trench.

This piece is too weighed down by truth to ever go far, but my goodness—nail; head. Okay, just one more piece of the lovely:

Kelly Clarkson's album is called Wrapped in Red and I am left to conclude that SHE is the present, and I, the listener, am meant to unwrap her and consume her. The humorlessness of my ivory-tower neo-feminist education requires that I point this out.

Joe Stracci