Ashlee Simpson 'Bittersweet World'

And normally, I'd rather stick an angry fiddler crap in each ear than subject myself to the worthless poopy-pop product that gets stamped with her name. But invoke Lene Lovich and I feel obligated to hear it.

Your cunning plan is working, guys!

I hear that scat porn has a lot of Lene Lovich influence.

stick an angry fiddler crap in each ear

Alex, honestly, this sounds really painful.

>I've realised what prevents me from loving this album is almost solely the airbrushing on the vocals (simultaneously multitracked and fainter).

OTM. The other CD it was real audio spectacle the way her voice consumed the pop metal track meat, like serious confessional carnivore shit.

Now they've sort of gouged away the midrange where her personality lives in favor of pimping and compressing the really high end where dogs listen to things. If she couldn't sing, okay, but.

It's the total opposite with the Veronicas CD.

True - even when they're both singing today their particular inflections and tone-of-voice (singular) are really clear.

both singing together even.

"Resigned joy" isn't what I'm going for above. It's something more like "joy in the face of disaster." Manages to feel the disaster without losing the joy. In contrast, Marit Larsen is disaster in the face of joy -- some seriously intense self-loathing going on beneath the carnival. (Ashlee's new carnival is joyous in its own way, but there's not much disaster in it -- though there's a healthy dose of trainwreck.)

Her position seemed to be: "My life is fucked up, but this is to be expected and it's preferable to the kind of shallowness I would need to adopt in order not to be fucked up."

(part of the relative weakness of "Beautifully Broken" was that it was a bit too straightforward in this regard - show don't tell, Ashlee!)

Sorry if this has already been covered, but i don't have time to keep going through posts...

i dont think brainwasher's point was that ashlee's opinion of what the music is about matters as far as authorial intent, it was an attempt (right or wrongheaded) to give some perspective, to say that sometimes the point of a song is to be fun and brainless. i dont like analyzing shit sometimes - i dont spend hours writing up essays on why 'say yeah' by wiz khalifa is fun, or what his audience thinks about it, its just FUN. Like, in my writing i want to be balancing the emotional, overall impact w/ some intricate nerdery but here it seems like its just all this weird left brained mega-male analysis without any perspective on PURPOSE. Not neccessarily authorial purpose, but purpose as perceived by the listener

What do you mean by "I don't spend hours writing up essays on why [x song] is fun"? Are you saying that ilx pop critics spend too much time trying to discover what aspect of a song causes feel+ings of joy? Or that they become too invested in the lives of the artists, trying to connect fun/sad/x emotion songs to the fun/sad/x emotion events happening in the actual lives of the performer (often incorrectly using lyrics as a source when those words could very well fictional, not to mention written by another person)?

If you're referring to the first possibility, I agree, if that actually happens. I'm not a huge fan of in-depth music analysis, esp. when it comes to dissecting a song (that's kinda like lit class, when you spend twenty minutes talking about a couplet). But if you're talking about that second possibility, I completely disagree w/ yr hate. Example:

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.

The question that raises seems super interesting to me. Why is she suddenly creating the music she was supposed to be making all along? Has she grown up? Does she now like Timbaland's sound, or was she driven by money? I think that it's wrong to look at this sort of thinking as music criticism. It's more like music journalism...Perhaps people rely on music too much when trying to discover the answer (to their credit, though, you can figure out some answers through music...for instance, I think it seems quite obvious when you listen to Justin Timberlake that he actually likes crafting amazing pop music...I hear the passion).

Instead of using music we could just, y'know, set up an interview and ask her. And again, to the credit of these people you're bashing, many of them do interview the pop stars they write about...Ultimately, to me, it's more of an interest in people than it is in music (though I...they...do enjoy the music, too, obv.)...And why these people instead of Craig Finn, Sufjan Stevens, et al? First off, we enjoy there music more. Second, I guess I think there are probably more layers to a pop singer who is sorta forced to live a fucked up life filled with paparazzi, stalkers, etc. than there are to an indie rocker who plays a show, gets in a bus, smokes pot, plays cards, checks his myspace, plays another show and goes to boring desk job.

Jesus, seems like you could dissect a lot from Outta My Head's really fucked up music video. Kinda caught off guard with all those references!

when will you lamers learn that it ain't about 'rockism'/'popism' blah bullshit zzz, it's about wanting to talk about a great album that people like. oh wvs, bye again, wasn't worth coming back for this at all.

-- lex pretend, Thursday, May 29, 2008 10:14 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Link

haha fucking golden: it was never about an insanely reductive and fatuous version of popism for lex.

Good lord that's awful.

why has h.k.m. come back to stalk me

fuck the lot of you stupid, stupid people

(nb: this is directed more at the stupid, stupid people across this godforsaken board than the people valiantly trying, and sadly failing, to keep this thread interesting)

why has h.k.m. come back to stalk me

o yes i 4got, fauiled meeja career :D

Awesome.

This thread has nearly made me listen to some Ashlee. Not quite but v nearly.

you can fuck off too, stupid person

I'm trying to be supportive!

i would have so much more respect for the snarky dumb people who seem to have like a MAGNETIC attraction to ashlee simpson if they, like, had the slightest idea of what she sounded like

i'm trying to be nice

i think we're both failing

d/ling now.

but yeah, this goes for MOST OF YOU: fuck off until you've listened to ashlee! maybe you can try 'little miss obsessive' cuz it has the best chorus i have heard in like six years or something. not that i am holding a candle for you to produce thoughts of consequence afterwards but we may as well give this a try eh

ok i will take the lex challenge

ftr i haven't heard an ashlee simpson song since "boyfriend", which iirc i thought was a pretty good franz ferdinand song

i think 'little miss obsessive' sounds like paramore ballad fronted by a worse singer but i like them a lot so that's not exactly a slight-- chorus is good tho

sounds like a paramore ballad

less arch than franz ferdinand and therefore a million times better. also, aimed at lindsay lohan!

key to genius of 'little miss obsessive' = KARAOKE POTENTIAL

i think paramore are nearly good but i don't like the singer, she sounds like a smug(ger) avril

also she has annoying hair

"outta my head" is genuinely awesome tho. sounds like pylon trying to go disco or something. she definitely can play with her voice (i listened to "boyfriend" again before these two and i didn't pick up on how good her verses were) so i thought the background vocals coming in on the chorus of "little miss obsessive" were kinda muddy. the space they give her on "outta my head" works in her favor imo

sounds like pylon

Cripes, can we please keep the freakin' blasphemy to a minimum?

alex listen to the song

glad you're still reading this thread tho. otoh i didn't read you as a masochist.

Really?

well yea maybe you're right eppy

An Ashlee fan sez:

It's not so much joy at the thought that things aren't worse, but joy at the fact that things are exactly as bad as they are. How many songs on Autobiography contain lists of negatives? At least four -- "Pieces of Me," "Better Off," "Love Me for Me," "Autobiography" -- and they're all celebratory. The negatives are precisely what make her worth loving, or what make the situation so great. She's not joyful in spite of them, she's joyful because of them.

she sounds like a smug(ger) avril

"Misery Business" is "Sk8er Boi" with no sense of humor instead of a bad one. Never really clicked with Paramore, but I do think that "Little Miss Obsessive" sounds kind of...not imitative, but weak, like an approximation of what an older Ashlee song might sound like. But the chorus is appropriately beat-you-over-the-head catchy even though the verses are kind of lame.

"Misery Business" is "Sk8er Boi" with no sense of humor instead of a bad one.

i don't think emo is supposed to be humorous so this seems like a weak critique of that song-- if you don't like the chorus or w/e or you think the singer is smug that's cool but judging emo bands or songs on their humor is probably like judging tacos by their sweetness or something

Some emo doesn't have a sense of humor, but a lot of it clearly does, I think (all of the pop emo at least tries for a sense of humor, and I think Paramore comes more from this line of it than the more intentionally humorless stuff) and I think Paramore specifically kind of wants both at the same time...Avril (to the extent she's humorless) is just generally clueless.

Maybe Fall Out Boy is to emo as Choco Tacos are to tacos.

yeah maybe you're right, i just assume that girls like boys and cartel etc. are overly serious at least when it comes to music but i'm not exactly poring over lyric sheets

lol maybe

i like fall out boy a lot but they probably swing the humor pendulum a little too far the other way

she definitely can play with her voice

i think the sense of playfulness on bittersweet world is really key to why i love it so much - it could totally have been a botched self-conscious move away from her old sound (and full-on method of performing) (unlike frank i way prefer i am me to autobiography - at its best it's so towering and visceral) (like WHOA 'eyes wide open' and the title track! like, totally c-love)

anyway yeah it coulda been botched, and i did go through similar phases to dave when i first heard 'outta my head' - 1) catchy tune but not right for her voice at all, surely just a demo; 2) can't get it out of my head; 3) hey her goofy mannerisms actually really work; 4) damn fine pop song - but idk i think the way she sounds as if she's about to crack up laughing throughout half these songs is just really good to listen to. she sounds as though she had loads of fun making the album (and she's funny, too, which helps. "i got a BOYFRIEND, we like to FIGHT A LOT. we got a lot in common: he thinks i FUCKING ROCK.") (nb 'rule breaker' is hilarious but as suspected 'ragdoll', despite being less quotable, is the better song and the one i return to more.)

uh sorry for shouting drunkenly last nite, y'all deserved it upthread when i was actually sober, contra mdc's assumption, but i was just taking out annoyance at some other lame threads i saw and didn't want to dignify with my presence. miller is still laaaaame and boring though.

Nah, it's good to have the drunken Lex back.

I listened to some of this on the tube this morning but the bits that didn't remind me of Gwen reminded me of Hazel O'Connors more uptempo tracks from the Breaking Glass soundtrack and neither of those float my boat.

The version I have just has a big gap in the I fucking rock bit where the swear is which was a little disconcerting.

some people just ain't cut out for HARDMAN status

-- gershy, Sunday, 14 October 2007 19:11 (7 months ago) Bookmark Link

wtf at ilx: gershy gone, blount and lex back?

the parallels with the tory resurgence are to obvious to point out.

big gap in the I fucking rock bit where the swear is

When did they start doing this, having NO available version where you can actually hear someone say "fuck"? Ruins one of the best lines on the Britney album, too ("just save your foolishness and fuckery I'm handlin' my bidness"). In the liner notes, they don't even print the swear words, or acknowledge there's an edit -- it just says "we got a lot in common and he thinks I rock."

Fuck this bulshit from a hater.