Ashlee Simpson 'Bittersweet World'

shut up lex

my problem with her is that i've seen her in interviews

This can definitely be a problem. Also a problem for Santogold, if for completely different reasons. But I don't think "boring and kind of vapid in interviews" is enough of a reason to think she's not in control of any of the music.

"Outta My Head"

Vocal production by Jim Beanz, who did a lot on Blackout and Welcome To The Dollhouse, and I'll have to figure out to what effect.

I think Logan's and Harmon's beats are terrific, the tone deliberately cracked and thin.

She can be a deer in headlight in interviews, and goes to giggle as a default mode. But Tracer, you need to get ahold of the first season of the reality show.

Second season is worth watching too, in contrast. It feels a lot less spontaneous (and there are a lot more obvious "PR clean up" moments, esp. re: SNL and the Orange Bowl performances).

I had forgotten that Lex was so annoying. I really didn't miss him and his lack of substantive contribution to discussions at all.

I'm not coming back to this thread until I've actually heard stuff from this album since right now all I'm doing is pontificating in the abstract.

(xpost: She does come across amazingly well in the first season of that reality show; that was the number one reason why I was rooting for her when her first album was released although the SNL debacle kind of put the kibosh on that.)

I don't know if she could be viable without the modern recording studio..., but then I don't know how Sinatra or Jagger would have done without a microphone.

Which doesn't mean she's a "studio creation" any more than Sinatra is a microphone creation. (Think of all the singers the studios have failed to create.)

yeha pontificating sarcastically and insubstantially in the abstract isn't annoying ~at all~~

i thought you were leaving.

Dan, I think Lex is the greatest writer on current r&b. But I can see why that particular sentence of his was missing a certain amount of elaboration.

Er, xpost.

o don't worry, i'm leaving now, i just wasn't going to let someone who as far as i can tell has posted nothing but unfunny dick jokes/lame music theory oneupmanship over people who aren't even trying to compete/"pontificating in the abstract" for like half a decade or whatever call me insubstantive

i didn't see dom post in this thread

anyway lol @ lex getting all mad at someone saying that they think it's a little silly for people to spend so much time thinking/pontificating about an ashlee simpson album

a lot of us think this and it has nothing to do with oneupsmanship

"a lot of you" are fucking dumb, jordan sargent. "lol" @ you.

This argument is very boring.

Rather.

exactly what im saying

yes it wasn't boring before at all, people kneejerking "b-b-but it's ASHLEE SIMPSON" and acting all shocked that people want to talk about her music A-FUCKING-GAIN

at least we can all agree this doesnt need to happen again

hey lex did u miss the part where i posted the songwriters of 'outta my head' and dan got excited about that and said he would talk more about the album after he'd listened to it?

(I tend to assume the Lex has been drinking heavily whenever he appears on ILX these days as he never does so when sober and his posts are more foaming-at-the-mouth in rage than usual. But he's right in that the "why do you want to talk about this at length?" thing is really tired and dull at this stage and no one needs to go through it all yet again).

agreed brainwasher shouldn't have come in here and said that but lex should have also ignored him

Lex feel free to come back when it occurs to you that one poster (to whom it might not have occurred that one can take pop seriously) does not constitute THE RETURN OF OLD PEOPLE'S HEGEMONY. You're sharp and I enjoy your contributions to pop threads.

xp Yes and yes, respectively.

(I shouldn't really be here either as I haven't actually heard this album or to my knowledge any Ashlee Simpson song so bye)

fwiw i've got nothing against you lex. i think you're very shrewd wrt your self-constructed genre box but as matt says if you're gonna come back and post here don't do it in rambo mode plz

xpost xpost xpost

Lex, take a breath, the people you're mad at aren't here.

Brainwasher, here are some serious though rudimentary answers to your question (which I summarize as wtf people?): I'd describe Ashlee's first two albums as absolutely towering achievements except that (or maybe because) nothing about them comes across as "towering achievement." They're just workaday pop rock albums, albeit with a distinctive singer. And they, especially Autobiography, have some of the most emotionally moving and complex lyrics I've ever encountered. The only other album to come close this decade in that regard - for me, based on necessarily limited listening, and the fact that I actually often don't pay attention to lyrics - is The Marshall Mathers LP. But it's not obvious to me why the words are so good, since the situations are basic straightup girl and boy stuff (w/ one girl and sister thing and one personals ad and one about being pinned down in terror) with no attempt to get beyond everyday words and often no clear story being told. So I can go back to them and keep wanting to talk about them, to figure them out. And then lots of talk on this thread is, ok, how come the person who was once doing that is now doing this? But also, the fact that you asked the question is just further evidence that Ashlee has been a cultural flashpoint around here almost on the order of someone like M.I.A. That is, it isn't standard to assume on ILM that you don't go on about music at ridiculous length, in fact that's what ILM is here for. So when that assumption is suddenly supposed to shut off, and when people are puzzled enough to ridicule and even attack the discussion and the discussers, some of the attacks being astonishingly vicious (without Ashlee, there'd have been no rolling teenpop), the question arises as to why.

Also, as Matt DC so eloquently put it on another thread (I'm thinking of getting a t-shirt with this emblazoned on it), we are Self-Important People With Wonky Tastes. Also, John Shanks, the producer and main musician on the first two albums and a co-writer of a lot of songs, is astonishingly inventive but again I can't figure out the why or the what. I'd say he's someone who plays mushy chords but in a jagged and sometimes even lacerating way. I also don't think the previous sentence is all that intelligible. And Shanks is consistently good with Ashlee whereas he's sporadic with almost anyone else, and that's also puzzling.

And I haven't even mentioned Nurse Kara. Kara DioGuardi wrote (with her band Platinumn Weird) the words "And then you'll see my greatest gift/Is falling down and taking it" (Nia points out that the word "gift" can have two meanings, that Kara's gifted and that the gift she gives you is that she'll fall down and take it, which has a lot of disturbing destructive overtones) and then in the exuberant Ashlee song "La La," which Kara helped write, Ashlee sings "I like it better when it hurts," so you think that must be Kara, so you go to the next song on that Ashlee album and Ashlee's singing "I'm the one who's crawlin' on the ground/When you say love makes the world go 'round," and you think "That must be Kara too," but it's not, read the credits and it's Ashlee on her own (I'm guessing that co-writer Shanks had no hand in those lyrics, though I could be wrong), and the falling down and breaking and taking it/not taking it theme seems so much more developed on the first two Ashlee albums than on Platinum Weird, especially on "Love Me For Me," which Ashlee wrote with Shelly Peiken not with Kara - it's not that it particularly matters on some philosophical level who wrote which words, but if you're interested in the creative process at all, or the cultural process, there's this question: how is it that these themes and these people came together at this time, all of whom seem ordinary enough?

And then of course the "meta" question, which is why are so many intellectuals and music fanatics proud of the fact that they don't notice such lyrics, or even bother to think that such lyrics might be there to be noticed, when in any other genre people would want to notice or care and would want the songs to reveal riches? And some people who celebrate pop are just as disturbed by our kind of conversation as are the people who disparage the teenyboppers. It's not meant for such analysis! (But why should we limit ourselves by what something's meant for? Imagine, for instance, if hip-hop producers cared about what sounds were meant for.)

Ashlee's now beyond the original situation that fueled her (which is a whole nother discussion) and she's abandoned the original collective that created "her" achievement, so there's been real wonder (by the ten of us who care) what she'd do next.

I've barely scratched the surface. But believe me, there are some performers I love (Midi, Maxi & Efti and Boney M come to mind) whom I've never been able to find the words for. So, that I don't talk as much about something else doesn't mean that the other thing is less worthy (or less worthy of discussion, and I'd be eager to hear someone who could discuss Boney M well, and I'm really glad for someone like Dan who can discuss things differently from how I do, even if he finds most of what I say boring and might suspect that people like me are mentally ill).

Btw, I love Lex, but if there is a position that a lot of people take, and I get mad at the position, my getting mad at the position isn't going to help me understand why people take it. One thing I got disparaged for on the Hilary Humbert thread was that I went around asking teenagers what music they listened to, but a reason for my asking was the understanding that often the teenpop I was loving might be felt to have an oppressive effect by some people who were growing up surrounded by people who liked it, and it's not like there's no good reason for that feeling, or that it might not carry on into adulthood. So I wanted to get the sense of how the music I was loving worked in that cultural landscape as well as my own. Not to say that that cultural landscape is any more valid than mine, but being able to compare landscapes helps one see what's happening in one's own.

I have listened to this and my first impression is that I don't like it very much but I think I would like to try it again. I don't have a problem with her voice (a little less interesting than on I Am Me) or the slightly less bruised songwriting (compared to Autobiography), or the production..

I'm just not that into most of the songs, but I'm willing to give it a chance because the last two really did pay repeat listens (even though at first blush I liked them a lot more than this).

Good point re ILX hegemony by BIG HOOS there. Weird personal attacks are one thing, but stupidity like Alex in NYC or Brainwasher's comments have always been with us, and they've always just reflected badly on the poster themselves. The notion of going through such arguments again is exhausting in itself, which is why no-one bothers. But the only alternative is a closed community and that really doesn't appeal to me - even in its Hellenistic period ILX has produced a lot of interesting debates, primarily prompted by (relative) newcomers.

Personally, I suspect that if I tried to act appalled that people think Ashlee and critical debate are mutually exclusive, I'd come off a little disingenuous. Not because I believe it's true in the slightest, but because if I'm honest with myself I have to admit that it's partly the prevalence of that kneejerk assumption that makes me interested in this music - in addition, of course, to it actually being very good music at times.

In some ways music crit is a process of articulating ways to relate to music, and even in these relatively enlightened times there remains a deficit of that process-of-articulation for music like Ashlee's in comparison to its market presence and cultural impact. One-dimensional observers see this state of affairs and pronounce it "natural" in the same way that contingent historical arrangements have always been pronounced "natural" by one-dimensional observers. So the attraction of this area of music from a listening and crit perspective is that you get to be involved in articulating those relationships in full for the first time - a journalistic scoop as it were. Whereas in indie or even in dance music there's about a month's lead time at most in which that can happen before consensus is formed (as an example of this, I felt a fair amount of haste in trying to write an article about UK Funky House for Idolator, like, I wanted to get my take on the music out there before I was beaten to the punch too many times - I'll freely admit this is a rather ignoble attitude)

I am assuming that the same holds true for other people writing about teenpop seriously. To some extent hostile observers taking positions of uncomprehending disgust at yr decision to write about Ashlee or Paris or whoever only makes doing so seem more interesting. If nothing else, it's a rock against which to sharpen yr own opinions.

To tie this back to Ashlee, perhaps part of my ambivalence with this album is that the confessional rock of her first two albums was a more confronting strategy in the context of teenpop. You can see this in Alex in NYC's triumphant smirk a while back (on another thread) about Ashlee getting her nose job and appearing in Chicago - like, "we always knew she would turn out to be just another pop star." Whereas when he first started attacking Ashlee on ILX it was like she had both affronted and personally wounded him by daring to lay claim to his sacred rock tropes (interestingly, the dynamic works very differently with Avril, who I suspect is perhaps more offensive to people like Alex in NYC the less grrr-rock she is).

Of course such smirking is well beneath the level of meaningful intelligible debate, but I did enjoy the way that earlier Ashlee unsettled such people.

By comparison, Nu-Ashlee makes more sense as a teenpop star. Which is probably (hopefully) good for her market share, and neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad for her music, but perhaps what I miss is the sense of frission generated by her former Courtney-Love-gone-pop strategy. Which is kind of unfair for Ashlee, but there you go. Still, I have to listen to this album a lot more before any of these reactions are anything more than provisional.

Excellent post by Frank too!

Whatever, if it makes you guys happy to talk out of your collective asses at length about Ashlee Simpson be my guest. It's so fucking self-indulgent and masturbatory, no wonder I hate music criticism.

Don't read anything at all ever again.

with the greatest of respect, music criticism about ashlee simpson is really no less interesting than any other music criticism

Words to live by: if you don't like the thread, DON'T CLICK ON IT.

that's no fun

plus, how will I know I don't like it if I don't click on it first.

But really brainwasher, I'm interested: why is it more self-indulgent etc. than any other talking-at-length about any other music?

Tim, shh, you'll piss him off!

Ashlee...well, she was bubbly and sorta defiant, but the new thing is just numb-y.

However, the new Veronicas' Cd is fabulous and possibly THE best Georgio-Moroder-meets-Yaz-meets-Sparks-meets-The-Cranes electro glisten-pop record this year.

so much competition though!

And when the big confessional-teenpop-metal guitars do show up, they sound arch, knowing, like post-emo readymades.

And the cello/viola samples that open "Untouched" sound like an original Kurzeill in a metal band and then it just keeps getting smarter/funner.

Indeed! The Georgio-Moroder-meets-Yaz-meets-Sparks-meets-The-Cranes electro glisten-pop market is so glutted and so The Veronicas' triumph all the more sweet.

But really brainwasher, I'm interested: why is it more self-indulgent etc. than any other talking-at-length about any other music?

-- Tim F, Friday, 30 May 2008 02:35 (2 hours ago) Link

But really brainwasher, I'm interested: why is it more self-indulgent etc. than any other talking-at-length about any other music?

-- Tim F, Friday, 30 May 2008 02:35 (2 hours ago) Link

-- Tape Store, Friday, May 30, 2008 5:17 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Yes, and?

I can copy and paste old messages as well.

And avoid the question, fantastic!

Hey, Brainwasher, I'm assuming that you're an interesting person who may have interesting reasons for your stances, and I wish people weren't trying to put you on the defensive here and you weren't trying to put us on the defensive here. And let's not gang up on Brainwasher, please?

Thanks Frank. I shouldn't have singled this thread out - really, this is a problem that I have with majority of what passes for music criticism.

It's bizarre how in literature the question "why are you discussing this album like this when the artist didn't intend it" is basically totally dead (Barthes put the nail in the coffin decades ago), but on ILX, there's no concept of "death of the author." If it limits the discussion, who cares what Simpson intended? We're critics. The texts are there for us to read; we have no obligation to honor the creator. (Derrida really emphasized this: The critic is no less than the text he's reading.) So if it produces interesting conversations, fab. If it doesn't - that should be the only criteria for dropping the analysis.