Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh no?

But what'd I like 20 years ago? "Roxanne's Revenge"!

There, that proves it.

(Proves what?)

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-- Ned Raggett (ne...), November 10th, 2005.

TALKING HEAD: Everyone in the entire universe was watching I Love The 80's 3-D. Where else could you get Nelson redoing a ToTo song? TOTAL INSANITY!

(pauses)

TALKING HEAD (looking at camera): Am I right or what? *nervous laughter*

(crickets.)

TALKING HEAD: Hello?

The CAMERA PULLS OUT TO REVEAL that the Z-lister is not in the studio where he thought he was in, but instead a vast gravely wasteland.

TALKING HEAD: WHERE AM I?

Johnny did a LOT more than just do a silly dance, xhuxhxhxh. Granted, none of it lives up to the hype to those who've never seen it. But the audience participation and the whole spectacle was definitely more than just a silly dance.

Ashlee's fundamental model is P!nk's M!ssundaztood, but though she sounds like P!nk, she's not doing what P!nk did, which was to overthrow a budding and already lucrative r&b career for hard rock/confessional rock. An incredibly gutsy move, whatever you think of the result (Sheffield complained that M!ssundaztood was the teenpop In Utero.) And gutsy of Arista to take the commercial gamble on it. And the result was raw and powerful and endearing, and original, even though it was sometimes maudlin and it vagued out too much. And for better or worse, P!nk's risk made subsequent rock moves by Avril, Lindsay, Kelly, and Ashlee much less risky. As I said, Ashlee vagues out even more than P!nk did, so all around - commercially, personally - she's not nearly as much on the line - which ironically may hurt her commercially, since in "Catch Me When I Fall," when she says that something's killing her, she owes us details as to what. Owes us aesthetically, that is, so we can feel the danger and the pain. If she wants to matter more, this is what she's got to do. She should make something up, if she has to; just give us something to make the song more powerful.

So, in courage, in mattering, P!nk beats Ashlee. But one thing: Ashlee made the record that - song for song, melody by melody, riff by riff, wail by wail - I'd much rather listen to. One could still legitimately say that P!nk is better just for doing what she did (I'm not a "sound-beats-all-other-criteria" man by any means), but I'm with Ashlee at least for now, as the better artist. Even if she's not as punk.

Right, but since they didn't call it punk rock at the time, I always thought that was why it was retroactively dubbed punk rock: Because it rebelled (consciously or not) against Sgt. Pepper or (going back) Fabian or whatever.

I dunno, that sounds pretty naive to me! Wouldn't the mere fact that she's willing to have a TV show make it *less* likely that you're getting the "real" her? TV is acting! Including reality shows.

Maybe.

So is recorded music; we're not talking some blues octagenarian serenading his dead dog on the porch.

No, but don't record titles like Autobiography and I Am Me suggest something? Or at least tip you off that they're meant to suggest something?

Either way, I'm still not sure how that would change how her music sounds. The CDs are completely the same whether she had a reality show or not.

And I don't like 'em on their own merits, as I said above. The TV business is my theory on why she gets more crap than others in a similar spot.

"Moonlight Feels Right" rules! That chuckle before the chorus!

Ugh. Einstien, Shakespeare, Stephen Hawking, Ashlee. The Littlest simpson would have to create an ipod that runs off cold fusion to come close to deserving her name in the same sentence as that word.

"I sincerely doubt anyone's going to still be discussing the arguable merits of Ashlee's "La La," but I dare say people will still be talking about, say, the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" and/or "(I'm) Stranded" by the Saints. "

Does more than 1% of the population talk about either of those songs? The sad fact is that Ashlee WILL be remembered by a much larger segment of people, reformed tennyboppers and aging Gen-Y'ers, as an example when music was actually *good*. Everyone should shudder.

None.

Both the Count Five and the Saints singles have been re-released more times than you've had hot dinners (usually by those tireless folks at Rhino) suggests that YES, people do still talk about/care about the music in question.

I could be completely wrong, but I suspect Ashlee Simpson will be remembered more for her television show and her lip-synch catastrophe and her relationship with her equally irrelevant sister THAN FOR HER ACTUAL MUSIC. She's destined to be a footnote....an embarassing blemish on this part of the decade. She'll be a punchline at best.

And it will be mostly crap they aired. I got an ad from a 1992 GQ with VH-1 doing a Michael Bolton special...unironically! Three years from now they'll be mocking Fred Durst and a few years later some Black Eyed Peas.

What was the Hilary Duff/Loveless connection mendtioned earlier?

Nah, Fabian's last Top 40 single was in 1960. He would've been long, long gone and--after the Beatles and Stones etc--I would assume long forgotten by the time "96 Tears" came along. And like I said, *Sgt Peppers* didn't exist yet. So when '70s fanziners renamed all those bratty old one-hit wonders (and some two and three hit wonders) "punk rock", I doubt it was because they were rebelling against anything. More likely it was just because they sounded like brats. Tough brats.

i never said that people don't talk about those songs, obviously they do, but thats not really the idea. Many of the people that will get nostalgic about Ashlee many years of now will think they ARE talking about music, because they never needed/wanted to look beyond the radio or their immediate exposures.

Chris Rea's "I Can Hear Your Heartbeat" was a medium-sized hit on Montreal radio - pretty decent song (never heard "Fool" though). Greatest Gino Vannelli single ever: 1986's "Wild Horses" (a towtruck driver I worked with once told me his mom was Gino's cousin!)

I see your point. It starts sounding like "punk" means so many things that it means nothing. Which would hardly be the first word that that's happened to.

Just because "punk" might arguably mean many things, doesn't mean it means everything. Gloppy, cookie-cutter, glossy, sickly, candy-colored, slickly-produced teenybopper radio fodder it does NOT mean.

more likely guys who "took it" in prison.

Oh, I don't know. I mean, you're right, not every bit of gloppy, cookie-cutter, glossy, sickly, candy-colored, slickly-produced teenybopper radio fodder is punk, but "Hey Joe" (Byrds), "Hey Joe" (Love), "Cherry Cherry" (Neil Diamond), "Steppin' Stone" (Monkees), "Break On Through" (Doors), "We Gotta Get Out of this Place" and "It's My Life" (Animals, those songs included on this list for their Brill Building/Colgems associations), and "Kicks" (Paul Revere and the Raiders) - to name some tracks that were state-of-the-art in their time and had money and bizzers involved in their creation and were the sort of record that retrospectively got called punk rock once Marsh, Bangs, Barnes & Co. started batting the term around c. 1971. Not that I'd call any of those songs sickly, but I wouldn't call any Ashlee songs sickly either. And not that those songs have much of a punk effect anymore, neutered as they are by nostalgia and familiarity and sounding small these days given so much intervening musical roar and bombast, though maybe some kid who approached them with fresh ears would somehow feel the spark I felt in 1966. But then, the Sex Pistols don't have much of a punk effect anymore either except again on the kid who somehow makes his ears new and isn't impressed or put off by the bands' pedestal. Obviously my various uses of "punk" don't match all of yours, and I wouldn't call Ashlee a punk, just call her someone who occasionally veers punkward. But by and large as much or more good punk gets made by nonpunks as by punks anyway (in this part of this sentence I'm meaning people who think of themselves as making music in the punk-rock genre; maybe I think "punk-rock genre" is something of an oxymoron).

Yeah, why would a 21-year-old woman who's been in the music business for years have actually heard much "punk" music or emulate any of it, or think about what her image and sounds mean, limited as she is by her peers - who would be L.A. musicians and actors, right, who probably therefore only have access to a small amount of music, living in such a backwater. (Though L.A. does have a library. I know because I visited it once. Even went inside. Had books and stuff. Forget if it had compact disks.)

I mean the punks (not the nonpunks who make better punk than the punks do).

"Punk" not necessarily always meaning "good," obviously.

you know I agree with that! I'd think her collaborating with Tim Armstrong might have even been gutsier - and nobody talks about those tracks (not sure I've heard them!).

No, but it did mean the Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" before it meant the Sex Pistols' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" or S.O.A.'s "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" or Minor Threat's "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone." (But seeing as how these two meanings have nothing to do with each other, I can understand how things get confusing.)

Agreed. Second place: "I Break Things," by Erika Jo (about breaking things).

And Alex might be interested to know that the first place finisher "Kerosene" sounds exactly like an old Screaming Blue Messiahs song (and has the same title as old Big Black song).

But it doesn't.

Jeez.

(The "look at your life instead of looking into mine" line means "look and see what you did to drive your boyfriend away rather than deluding yourself into thinking I stole him from you.")

(I like Rancid and Transplants often enough. Actually, I've only heard the title track of Gangsters and Thugs, which disappointed me: I'd have as soon called it "Gangsters and Shrugs." Did anyone hear the Screwed and Chopped album?)

P!nk's vocal range is greater than Ashlee's (greater in variety as well as notes she hits), but I don't always like where P!nk goes in that range: She's a bore when she tries to be Janis, for instance. Ashlee does better with what she's got.

You should buy the third Pink album, Frank; it's the best one. The only shitty song is the first single, "God Is A DJ," and there's one on there, "Catch Me While I'm Sleeping" I think it's called (don't have my iPod in front of me), that's straight Philly soul. I'm really interested to see where she's gonna go with her next record. If she follows her current trajectory, it could sound like a mid-80s Lita Ford album or something.

More or less true, but come on....listen to fuckin' either of those two singles on her first record and TELL me they're not slickly overproduced dollops of soulless product.

Ironically, the "overproduced" part of "Boyfriend," the discoed "woah-woah HA!" part, is the only part I like. It's the raw guitar and vocal verses that strike me as blah.

I've always liked Joan Jett but always thought she came up viscerally short by oversinging and having the guitars too loud; wish she'd gone back and listened to Dixie Cups "Iko Iko" or something to learn how to get that elementary rock 'n' roll motion. Anyway, I think that "La La" pulls off what Joan Jett never quite could; it lifts the multi-guitar multi-voiced sound and makes it dance. But I wouldn't call either Joan Jett or Ashlee slick; and I think Ashlee's a much smarter singer. I think Ashlee and Shanks pull off the anthemic choruses on the new album but I also think they might have done better - it'd have been worth trying as an experiment (and for all I know they did try it, and didn't like the results) - to be less anthemic. Who knows? Alternate universe. I love Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me," but wonder if there might not be a great alternate version done by someone like the Dixie Cups in their "Iko Iko" mode: street corner rather than arena.

i have to admit i've never understand the seemingly universal notion that the sex pistols have aged poorly because they were "all attitude" or somesuch (odd that you never hear this argument levelled against the rolling stones or iggy pop or public enemy, but maybe it's just cooler to namedrop them than it is the cartoonishly ubiquitous pistols). i'm 23 and heard this album for the first time when i was 16, about a million years after the word "punk" ceased to have any real meaning, and it sounds better to me every year. one of the things i find so powerful about it is that all of john lydon's disgust, rage and bile comes in the context of what are basically great, well-produced pop songs, about a million times catchier and funner than anything i've heard by the likes of ashlee simpson (and i like quite a bit of modern bubblegum pop).

so i can't really agree with frank's assertion - but then i don't feel that any of the power has gone out of, say, little richard's "long tall sally," and i can easily imagine a teenager hearing it for the first time today and being blown away by it - *i* was. but maybe i'm wrong.