Lily Allen - This summers biggest racist?

i'm pausing to reflect on how much of a black hole of badness a song has to be if NOT EVEN N-TRANCE can make it good!

(xp)

"Electronically produced music is one possibility of Tomorrows World!"

(I have the original 45 this was sampled from)

Actually I like the *Rod* version quite a lot.

but THEN i saw the video !! where she appears to pay for violence to be done to her ex !!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLrFAxonZwc&search=lilly%20smile

still aside from that er..quibble, album of the year for me.

and by your answers, i shall have the measure of you sirs.

ciara, xtina, rihanna, christina aguilera, tigarah, cassie, beyoncé, nelly furtado, pussycat dolls, madge, kelly rowland, trina, ellen allien and PARIS MOTHERFUCKING HILTON have all released incredible pop records this year which beat lollen into the ground.

i cant listen to the album any more.

lex leave tiga alone, he is NOT a woman he just dresses nice!!

not that i'd be that bothered either way.

Lily Allen is the seventh best solo female British artist out there right now.

Am I right?

Murphy
Stevens
'Frapp
Bush
MIA
Alesha (probably)
Allen
Nixey
Lady Sov
Church

but i haven't heard any good LadyGrime recently apologies

i expect she will in terms of exciting pop production. but she won't have quite the same commercial success. ho hum.

(okay obviously they're different and I can see why you'd prefer "Stars Are Blind" but the point is we're not living in a world of absolutes here)

(also I like Lily's lyrics too, they are kinda spiteful but the bad vibes feel like a put-on to me, in the best possible sense... she reminds me of my younger sister in that way, who's always in a bit of a bad mood when I first see her but within half an hour she's warmed up and we're making plans to open cinemas which only show films starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith)

Sorry, there appear to be no titles for which

* Keith Allen (I) (Actor)
* , Maggie Smith (I) (Actress)

are both/all credited.

i don't like the spitefulness in 'ldn' towards poor people but i would probably like the spitefulness directed at men - i have not heard any of the latter.

Hilton reserves this for outside the recording studio of course.

Lallen odds on for next year's Only Fools On Horses.

She's pleasant, and I like her lyrical personality, but overall, what I've heard is kinda dull, dry and overly polite (for all the vaunted/villified "spitefulness"). Nothing world-shaking, certainly.

The mixtapes are cool, though...

hilton = more real than allen!

Maybe you have to be English. Or indie...

I am neither and I love the album to bits! (Except "Take What You Take", which should have been on another person's album, and "Friend of Mine", which is not as good a tune as the rest.)

Most of the Lily songs I've heard fall into the latter category, and "LDN" is also one of my least favourite Lily songs. Lex you should search "Not Big" and "Shame For You" before you close the door on Lily forever.

"tim - i was called out for this on my lj as well - my response was basically that i love 'stars are blind' despite it being cod-reggae, and also because paris hilton has absolutely no investment in its cod-reggaeness whatsoever."

I agree with the second part of this statement, but I think it overrules the first part: I agree that it is important that Paris is making cheap fako cod-reggae, but it's that very cheapo fake cod-reggae that makes it so magical (the other thing I like about it is how Paris's lyrics/delivery capture a certain dazed fucked-up simplicity - I was saying in a review of it I had to write today that it comes off as kind of honest b/c you could imagine her using these lines to try to pick up some celeb's boyfriend at a boozy charity function). Certainly "Stars Are Blind" takes many more cues from "Mysterious Girl" than Lily ever does, and this is probably a good thing for Paris. But this doesn't mean that Lily is necessarily bad-indie. The difference is a matter of degree more than anything.

I like a lot of pop-cod from the past few years - e.g. both Rihanna and especially Eve's versions of "No No No" - and I broadly approve of it as a stylistic manoeuvre.

Did Dannii ever do any cod?

Also there needs to be a revival of vaguely post Soul II Soul cod-reggae-house e.g. Madonna's "Why's It So Hard".

except lily's cod-reggae isn't actually cheap fako stuff - it's a facsimile of it in the same way that MIA was a facsimile of baile funk and so on. allen uses reggae/ska as a means of demonstrating her 'realness', paris uses reggae/ska as...well, not a means of demonstrating her fakeness, i am not sure what the intention is but a great deal of its appeal lies in the fact that it seems almost accidentally great.

(the other thing I like about it is how Paris's lyrics/delivery capture a certain dazed fucked-up simplicity - I was saying in a review of it I had to write today that it comes off as kind of honest b/c you could imagine her using these lines to try to pick up some celeb's boyfriend at a boozy charity function)

YES - also it captures a certain desperation which is at once a debauched-celeb desperation and a naive little-girl desperation. the lyrics and delivery really tap into the gilded princess archetype very well.

i think 'why's it so hard?' is the only crap song on erotica :(

there's quite a lot of cod-reggae on the rihanna album though it doesn't seem cod (which implies coming at it from outside) so much as lite (coming from the inside but diluting it to good effect). like wayne wonder or shabba ranks.

why is this a problem again?

What does ska signify? I don't get a sense of there being a particular purpose behind its use in Lily's songs, but maybe I'm missing something. M.I.A. is at pains to draw out the links between the sonics and her persona, I don't think Lily is doing that though. What is the link b/w the music and Lily's realness, and how is she real? The choice of style seems arbitrary in fact, to me at least.

If anything I think it's being used because it conveys a certain lightness of touch and easy prettiness, which is probably not too far from why Paris is using it. Certainly I'd be surprised if Lily wasn't aware of a certain distance between the simple reverie of the music and her lyrics. There is no such distance in "Stars Are Blind".

I'm not sure about the interchangability of ska and reggae in all this. I have this idea that "ska" denotes more guitar than is present in Lily's songs? I know next to nothing about the application of these terms really so somebody school me.

"i think 'why's it so hard?' is the only crap song on erotica :("

I don't necessarily disagree! The production works much better than the song on top of it. I used to dislike "Words" but I've come around to it a lot in the last few years. For some reason i hated the lyrics and now I think they're great.