Lily Allen's second debut album rounded me out like her first one - a singer songwriter whose lyrics and music weren't terribly original and her voice not completely unique to the sound of girl pop, but her biting sarcasm against her exes and discussion of their failings a uniquely MySpacian, LiveJournal-esque diatribe against people who she'd dated from nineteen on.
I heard her first song "Alfie" rolling down the road on KEXP, picked up the import and listened to the whole thing in one go, and it took me like a butternut squash soup - overly sappy with enough backbite bitterness and out-of-sync realism that made me think it was actually well-written.
I really don't know that much about Lily Allen's songs or her abilities, her personality, or the fact that the British tabloid press seem to lunge at her every time she goes out in public with the paparazzi (of which I'm a little frightened, wondering if, at any point that I become famous in one form or another whether I'd have Nikons pointed at me 24/7 in the streets of London. I suppose having a good defensive strategy employed would work - a fully-charged D90 with giant cards available to shove my face behind and start taking pictures of everyone taking pictures of me might seem less interesting. Or, rather, demanding press credentials from each one and posting them plus home addresses on my personal website with a thanks for the picture taking. My motto: in Soviet Russia, celebrity stalks YOU, paparazzi).
What I do know is that I'm cringing at the rawness of the lyrics of Allen's new album. I will admit I have reveled in the misery of emo-rock wannabes for years. The teenage MySpacians at a Dresden Dolls show whose glamming self-portrait was ruined by my screaming, "PLAY FREEBIRD!" at the Dolls at a quiet moment - and the drummer and pianist breaking their serious face to laugh quietly before pulling it together and launching into "Girl Anachronism". The teenagers exchanged a look of horror at the guy in pink upturned polo shirt and tightly-belted jeans, Converse sneakers screaming for music from THEIR band playing THEIR music in THEIR sacred Showbox and slunk off to take their picture elsewhere. I snickered the rest of the night and I was bought more than one drink as a result. Like my friend Michael Holden says, you can get away with so much if you just call it performance art.
And on some level I see that in Lily Allen's music. Much has been made of Allen's musical style and intentional rips on other women. The men she sleeps with must wonder if their masculinity will be ripped to shreds in verse and lyric; her feminine side the brassy-in-your-face British pop rock cigarette-and-torn-clothing emo rock of the British. Chords pulled from 1980s hiphop and played with a backbeat or urbanity don't hide the pissed-off chick lashing out at men who hit on single women in bars, or the ex-boyfriend she gets revenge upon, or the whole vengeful giggle at those silly boys.
It tempered Allen's popularity with the women who buy CDs from singers writing passionate, deeply personal songs about what it's like to be misunderstood or excluded from the game. Frankly, Allen looked like a bitch, and a nasty drunk one as well. Even Elton John was quoted at one point cheerfully catting about Allen during an awards ceremony where Allen, sloppily drunk, slurred into the microphone.
On some level Allen's bad-girl vibe was what she had going for her - the sweet, lilting lyrics chanted with top-high lyrics and lyrics that described in tiny little chirps the myriad ways her exes failed to satisfy her in bed. For the men described in her music, it must have been like being patiently mauled by a sparrow with a sharp beak while the subject can't quite either believe the sparrow is A) doing it or B) really going to keep going as long as it can, nipping off triangle-shaped pieces of flesh.
But the music she just dropped slams into the latter category. Allen's freshman debut was the equivalent of a precocious teen - vicious, hormonal, angry, sweet, demure, and tart with a background of urbanite London behind it. The second is the bar girl who comes out of the girl in the uniform on the streets, charred with cigarette smoke and too many pints of lager behind the bar, the wisdom of feeling too many hands in too many bars and eventually finding oneself sick of the cattiness of others.
Admittedly, Allen's sophmoric debut is again filled with angst - the kind of angst found in the Strangers I, Anonymous but without the satisfying rebuke of a comments section. Allen has the ability to revile her former lovers in song; her own reviling comes in the same album. With her aging as an artist came regret and the maturity to admit that there are mistakes in brashness. But there's something in Allen that just doesn't ring true to me. The Mockney accent. The clothes. The flashiness. The attitude. The devil-may-care attitude about her life and where she came from - her success based very little, in many ways, on her own precious talent and more in the revolutions of success built by her mentor (and one of my favorite musicians, Joe Strummer) and her other somewhat famous relatives. The ironic nature of the push many Britishers seem to have in adopting the Thug Life from 1980s and 1990s Los Angeles to formfit to 2009 London - complete with tricked-out bikes and the hipsters who shove it into the forefront.
Hell, Allen's 23 and brassy, a chick with an attitude and a full docket of success based entirely on her being young, attractive, and counterpoint to the saccharinity of the USA's exports of Jessica Simpson, Brittney Spears and Kelly Clarkson. The irony being that Allen didn't get to where she was through being successful. An Alanis Morisette a decade later, Allen's bad-girl, biting, angry, vicious lyrics will fade with time into a mellower, tea-sipping girl who looks back at her wild years and wonders if she really was such a flaming bitch.
The album, if not her last, still tastes like a standard sophomore debut - holding onto the anger and the crash, reminiscent of what propelled her sound forward once the cast of helping hands shoved her to the forefront and the MySpacians fawning over her, but with that edge of sadness and regret. Allen's figured out that pubs and making fun of overgrown adolescents have a limit break, and after this, it'll remain to see if she fades into struggling popularity ala that one chick with a beehive that periodically shows up looking like a strung-out heroin-addicted transvestite on a hangover or she'll find her niche, find the balance between wryness and linguistic sweetness that hallmarked songs like "London" and "Alfie" and dips into that same realm of tough-chick songwriting. The problem is, Allen still looks and sounds like an overly-made up teenage girl trying on the ripped tights and giggling over the pilfered whiskey, whining about how much boys suck and diving into as many chemicals as possible.
It sells, because yes, that fragile, bitter, angry girl (and boy) capable of lashing out at anyone still exists in most of us. But it is nothing more than popular songwriting in the vein of the current generation whose instant description of exes can cut to the bone on networking sites. It panders to the crowd loving mediocre poetry loving how much the music speaks to them and envelops them in its own emotional trainwreck.
And god help me, I love it because listening to Lily Allen is like peeking into a journal full of tawdry, dirty secrets - stained with the last sips of vodka, smashed with the sweat from a two-days worn bra, the smell of cheap perfume sprayed over all the clothes and hair held back in a club outfit worn both as armor and attractant to the right kind of boy, the Mockney accent betraying the expensive education as surely as a Harvard Law graduate finds slang easing towards diction in the south of Texas among the "honest folks" who have lived, and learned that language by actually living there.
Allen's sophmore album is more of the same: false, tawdry, bitter, angry, and exhiliratingly dirty. She's the chick you meet in a bar and buy a drink for, but never take home to meet Mom and Dad. And she isn't the girl you'd ever play except when you wanted to mull over old relationships you never thought you'd want to remember. But as a guy who still loves peering into the LiveJournals of favored drama queens and kings whose writings and meanderings run the gamut of venting anger, illogical frustration and clear ass-in-head decisionmaking to get a daily dose of Schadenfreue, I'll gladly listen to Allen's music and wrap myself up, again, in the reality that strikes each and every night as drunken bargoers from my digs in Seattle stumble up the street, cursing heaven and earth about their failed relationships.
Allen just puts their ramblings, bitterness, and self-righteous pityfests into lyrical form, and for the same reason I love leaning off the balcony with a megaphone to yell, "Because you smell bad, you wear too much cologne, you have acne and you have no sense of humor, ya pighead" at the sobbing drunk guy plowed across my complex's porch, I love listening to her lyrics and music - because if her songs aren't a front, then simply plugging her CD in is like peeking at an ex-girlfriend's diary of thoughts from the former breakup - and laughing at her.
But then, I'm male. And kind of a jerk when it comes to this sort of thing. But I also can't stand emorock males who whine about how much their lives have been destroyed because of some emotional betrayal or breakup.
Which is why I'll still happily scream, "PLAY FREEBIRD" at any concert populated by emogoth rockers and MySpacian tweentwits absorbing atttiude and asshattery. Because hell, if the band finds it funny while their teenaged fans immediately screech about disrespect to THEIR music, I'd say someone out there needs a little bit o'reality.
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