Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh no?

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.

It's not that they've aged poorly (because they haven't), it's that they're no longer shocking, so to speak.

"shockingness" never EVER ages well!

Hey!

Because if it is, in fact, more hackneyed and cliched than Joan Jett, then I think the accusation of "gloss" is maybe valid. Gloss is dressing something that is nothing up to give it the appearance that it's something.

it is amazing, but nothing else on the album it comes from comes close. it's glaring in it's awesomeness if you play the whole benny santini album.

Dont spit on me and shame yourself
Because you wish you were someone else
You look so clean but you spread your dirt
As if think that words dont hurt
You build up walls no one can climb
The things you do should be a crime
You're queen of superficiality
Keep your lies out of my reality
And when you're nice its a pose
You're one of those

[Chorus]
Haters
Traitors to the human race
Haters
What a drag
What a waste
I'd like to see them disappear
They dont belong anywhere
Haters

Spinning a web thats hard to see
Of envy, greed and jealousy
Feeling angry but you don't know why
Why dont you look me in the eye?
You want my friends
You want my clothes
You're one of those

[Repeat Chorus]

Different life form
Different species
Broken promises and treaties
Talkin' bout exterminating
Not the haters
Just the hating
You say your boyfriend's sweet and kind
But you've still got your eyes on mine
Your best friend's got her eyes on yours
It all goes on behind closed doors
And when you're nice it's just a pose
You're one of those

[Repeat Chorus]

Haters
Later for the alibis
Haters
Any shape
Any size
I'd like to see them disappear
They dont belong anywhere
Haters

I hate you so much right now
I hate you so much right now
Aaaaah
I hate you so much right now

I hate you so much right now
I hate you so much right now
Aaaaah
I hate you so much right now

I hate you so much right now
I hate you so much right now
Aaaaah
I hate you so much right now"

(But I'm not saying it can't play a punk role, obv. But probably doesn't play that role for self-styled punks.)

But then again, "La La" doesn't even pretend to social convulsion; it's just girls doing their la la. Which puts it on the level of the Dixie Cups or the Marvelettes and such. And its artistic achievement is that it takes the weight of all that guitar overload and does bring it to the Marvelettes, does this far better than Joan Jett did. Ashlee has way more of a dance. The anomaly is Ashlee's voice, which isn't a cheery-deary party voice but is more like burnt rubber, and burnt rubber makes her party a better party.

I doubt that Ashlee even imagines that her party could spark a social convulsion, and I doubt that she'd want it to; she's more concerned with provoking her own convulsions as far as I can tell, and with subduing them. Thing is, for whatever one's convulsions, personal or social, I think that "La La" will make a fine soundtrack. It's got the beat.

that describes her dancing quite nicely, actually.

I still prefer Lohan's "First" by a mile.

She's got a whole bunch that are better than "Caught Out There," which I like for the "I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW" parts but not much else. I mean, it's a good solid Neptunes track, I guess. As for an Ashlee song that outpunks it, "I Am Me" just slaughters it, not in hatred but in bowling me over with a loud syrup of virulently beautiful sound: must be due to the overproduction, the loud pretty melody, like "I wanna be/an-ar-chee" was a loud pretty melody; and seizes your eardrum vocals, like "Go on take everything, take everything I want you to"). Jeesh, I can't believe I'm comparing her to the two greatest rock singers of the last 30 years. Well, I wouldn't say the song is in those two songs' league... not quite in their league... I don't think it's in their league. I'm playing it obsessively but I'll get over it, I'm sure. (Right?) The words aren't remotely as interesting. But the fact that I can even make the comparison, some starlet doing Courtney style vocals to an almost "Anarchy" quality tune and coming within range, despite not really having the pipes...

I completely disagree about Micky; he was a great singer on some of those tracks! Listen to "Sometime in the Morning" and "As We Go Along" for proof. He didn't have so great a *rock* voice, but as Carole King interpreters go, I'd rank him third only to Dusty Springfield and Carole herself. (Mean Grace Slick impersonation on "Zor and Zam," too.)

This isn't fair. I'm sure that Alex experiences the song as "glossy" and "slick." When he hears those massed guitars and that burr of a voice and those la-la-la melodies, his ears register it all as dripping with slickness and gloss. His reaction is quite visceral. I don't doubt him. What frustrates me about ILX - not just about Alex - is that too many people treat their experience as bedrock; nothing can challenge it, nothing can dislodge it, hearing is believing. So too few people try to say where their experiences come from. I don't only mean that they refuse to analyze what in the song provoked their response, but that they refuse to analyze why they in particular are having their particular response. What is it about your friendships and upbringing and social allegiances and individual identity that result in your hearing this song in the way you hear it, feel this music in the way you feel it? It doesn't just happen that one person hears gloss where someone else is getting rocked to his socks.

(X post: I haven't listened to Mickey Dolenz in years, so I need to hear again. His voice certainly wasn't within a thousand spacetime warps of Jagger's or Burdon's, but he had moments when he could achieve something close to their achievements anyway. Don't know what Jagger would do with Carole King. Burdon's "Don't Bring Me Down" is fabulous.

Interesting point, except the payoff on record seems rather extraordinary. I think Chuck once complained about Iggy method acting on Raw Power or somewhere; and I once complained that Courtney tends to overract, to try to hard when she doesn't realize that she's got the chops anyway and doesn't need to force it. (I'm complaining about one of my favorite singers. I'm a born critic is what I am.) With Ashlee, I don't think it's method acting so much as she feels she needs to hide behind the bruise.

(And all that stuff Chuck and I are saying about the garage bands and punks are to suggest that thinking of "punk" as a genre and "punks" as a social set misses where punk rock actually comes from in the first place, not from a genre or from punks but from people who found themselves in a punk mood or in a pissy-hissy spat or in sudden war with oneself or from other people who simply copied a mood-spat-selfwar but somehow got it down definitively on record.)

But Frank, are those factors necessarily relevant in this case? I wonder if you're making the assumption that the root cause of people's criticism of some of this stuff is social and psychological rather than aesthetic.

When I hear a piece of music that I don't like (assuming I have some understanding of where it's coming from), my reaction is generally not to question the social and psychological constructs of my life that led me to the reaction. It is merely to reflect on the fact that I think the music isn't well written, isn't well played, isn't inspired in any way, etc.

Did I? I may have (and it may be) (oh wait, there it is in *Stairway to Hell*: "method acted nihilism; Iggy gives himself top billing, sings "like" a coyote, but he's *lying*; of course I still say I like the album a lot and rank it #104, when I should have ranked it a lot higher.). Anyway, I *definitely* used to accuse Courtney Love of method acting (and still believe that about some of her earliest stuff). "Courtney Love's nag-rock therapy screaming is a shtick," I say in *Stairway* (#7 among '90s albums) but when *Live Through This* first came out I hated most of it, and was even meaner about it.

And this is because "La La" is fodder for the teenyboppers and has no redeeming social blah blah blah and hence isn't encrusted by the decades' worth of piety that adheres to things like "Anarchy in the U.K." The future punk rock, if there is to be any, won't be caught dead calling itself "punk rock."

This starts getting to the point, but it's backwards. (Not exactly backwards. It depends which side of the fence you're on. It makes as much sense backwards, anyway.)

Critics who favor transgression, who look for love in all the wrong places, who like it when punk pops up its head in music that's nowhere near traditional punk, will grab hold of an Ashlee Simpson as a totem. Her music is *better* than punk, because it's bringing punk to a place where there are still some unconverted to preach to. Even better if the artist is reddish rather than bluish, mallish as opposed to boho.

But the desire to make Ashlee one of those totems outstrips her success at transgression. Like, not *all* red-statish mallsters who adopt punk are going to be good at it, you know? So the reverse equation may also be true -- some people just can't conceive of someone from Ashlee's social demographic making bad punk, because someone who's so ripe a transgressive symbol as Ashlee can't possibly have missed the mark. Like, it's at least possible that Alex is saying that though he's down with transgression, Ashlee just isn't doing it for him. (If it sounds like I think he's right, I do, though I like Ashlee just fine. Not that I'm against transgressive totems, either. Big$Rich work quite well for me. But to me it sure looks and sounds like punk is something Ashlee picked up at the mall. She spent too much on it too, and didn't get the right kind. She looks uncomfortable in it, unconvincing, something that could never be said of Joan Jett. Which would all be beside the point if the hooks were better. You can reward her for trying, but if you reward her too much by comparing her to name-your-favorite-artists-of-all-time it oversells the case and turns people away from a useful line of argument. Overzealousness knows no ideology. Important half-failures are still half-failures. I mean, as Bob Christgau might say in a generous mood, B+.)

The main thing, maybe, is this -- for punk to have any power as transgression, there needs to be a little place somewhere where punk traditionalism, in all its preaching-to-the-converted, bohemian, elitist, purist glory, *exists*. Otherwise there'd be nothing to transgress. So the world sure needs its Alex in NYCs just as much as its Frank Kogans. Its when they're on the same page that it's time to start worrying.

Really? I've never met such a person, not even once. Where do such mythical beasts live?

(Not that I disagree with everything else you've said, mind you.)

>Really? I've never met such a person, not even once. Where do such mythical beasts live?

Maybe I lurk around on ILM too much, so you're right, maybe these mythical beasts don't live anywhere in the real world. But whenever these discussions come up, the artists in question *always* seem to be picked out of the same pool. Ashlee, Britney, Montgomery Gentry, Brooks & Dunn, Skynard, ZZ Top, whatever. And I like all of them, which makes my argument a tougher sell, admittedly. But when red-state artists tilt toward transgression, they seem to get the big benefit of the doubt. Where's a thread on a conservative artist who crosses genres and is *bad* ad it?

Not that people start threads too often on things they don't like. Argh, it's so hard to prove a negative!