Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh no?

On Seventh Heaven she was not playing a fictionalized version of her music self (it wasn't a Suzi-Quatro-on-Happy Days situation). She was just another teen actress. There has been no attempt that I know of to tie the two jobs together - she seems to have simply decided making an album was a quicker route to stardom than being third-tier on a WB drama with no cred outside the Christian community. And she was right.

The videos are jammed full of standard "I'm rockin' out and wild" quick-cut iconography that's been the same since the early 80s. Young people partying in a house with no one older than them anywhere to be seen, jumping in the pool and dancing on furniture, some making out in the corners, etc., etc. Ashlee dresses "punk" (tight black jeans and Converse hightops like Billie Joe Armstrong wears, lots of bracelets, dark hair to start with but now blonde, retro rock band T-shirts)...you know the drill. Nothing surprising about them at all. The "La La" video features her and the extras cavorting in a laundromat like some kind of commercial for new and improved rebellious detergent.

As for image, what would you people (if you've seen it) say about the album photos? She entitles the record I Am Me and then gives us a whole bunch of very different looks, the Nico Ashlee, the Marlene Ashlee, the Debutante Ashlee, the Forlorn Runner-Up Prom Queen Ashlee, the Burlesque Ashlee, and - I don't know, the one in the brown two-piece, and her hair a dishmop - Frazzled Riverboat Harlot Ashlee. Pieces of her. Or pieces of her playing dressup.

(But I'm no whiz at identifying or describing fashions, so any insights you have would be a help.)

Stephen Thomas Erlewine at allmusic.com described Seventh Heaven as "square," and considered Autobiography an appealing makeover; and he was touched by its earnestness. (I don't know; "La La" seems lighthearted to me, though I suppose one can be earnest with a light heart.)

Xpost.

And not favorably enough on her desire for world peace?

(Do you consider her breasts rather ordinary?)

No, I consider her breasts pretty great. But I don't think her dad should be basically leering and pointing at them in public, y'know?

I knew what you meant about Daddy Simpson. I was just goofing around.

a toy for over 20 something pedophiles in the waiting

Well, here's another question. I'd originally assumed that her core audience was about 70% female, mostly teen or younger, but I don't really know this, and the knowledge available on the Web doesn't support this assumption, either. On Radio Disney you're hearing Jesse McCartney's cushy "Beautiful Soul" 10 times a day, just as you were 10 months ago, while "Boyfriend" is already fading, and is actually doing worse on Radio Disney than on regular Top 40, where it stalled early. I Am Me opened at number one on Billboard, but by the next week it fell out of the top 5. The first album also opened at number one but eventually moved fewer than 400,000 units. Now, if I do one twentieth as well with my book, I'd be ecstatic, but in the pop world Ashlee is not a superstar. And unless "L.O.V.E." gets "Hollaback Girl" attention on the CHR Rhythmic format (which I don't see happening, though it sure deserves the airplay), this album won't do as well as her last, since I don't hear anything as accessible on it as "Pieces of Me." I'd like to be proven wrong, since there's stuff on here that's as good as "Pieces of Me," but this is a fundamentally loud album - there are ballads, but they're all power ballads - and Ashlee's bruised, burnt voice is even more bruised and burnt than P!nk's was back on Missundaztood. By the way, P!nk not Gwen is the obvious source here, and her and Ashlee's loud confessional rock is what I assume propelled "emo" onto this thread title. If you want to call Ashlee "emo" I wouldn't necessarily argue, but I think Ashlee, Avril, and P!nk (and Liz Phair?) are a different loud confessional rock, though I haven't thought through what the differences are. I'd love to hear Ashlee sing "In My Eyes." "You tell me, that I'm better/You just hate yourself/You tell me that you like him/You just wish you did." Which is maybe what the best line in "Boyfriend" is about: "Hey how long 'til you look into your own life instead of looking into mine." Of course her income depends to some extent on our continuing to look into hers. And the reason she's falling between two stools commercially might be because she's trying to do two things at once: She's trying to model self-esteem and self-affirmation for the teen girls and tell them that can triumph through adversity and can survive without a man and that breaking up may be best thing that happens to them (you hear this message all the time in teen pop-rock, not to mention the adult pop-rock); AND she's trying to work punk rock into all this self-affirmation - which is not necessarily a contradiction; I would say that Lou and Iggy and Johnny and Courtney were/are all ultimately trying to affirm themselves, or affirm something, embrace life including one's own disastrous self. But certainly that quest takes them through a whole heap of self-loathing (at least self-loathing as expressed in song) so that "breaking up is the best thing that can happen to you" means "breaking down into pieces and destroying yourself might be the only way to save you from yourself." Punk rock gets off on this self-affirmation/self-destruction tension. I assume that the more thoughtful of you Ashlee haters (if there are any thoughtful Ashlee haters) aren't just being true to your school and therefore mad at her for belonging to the wrong social group and playing punk rock for the preps. (Why shouldn't preps respond to the self-affirmation/self-destruction dialectic?) Rather, you want someone who flies a punk flag to have some punk content as well. I don't get what anyone thinks is inherently wrong with her sound; she and Shanks rock harder than the Gang of Four and Franz Ferdinand, both of which sound like toy bands in comparison. (Sounding like toys isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course.) She goes tuneful and anthemic on her choruses, which may be too nonpunk for you, but doesn't seem so for me (one of the potent contradictions of "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen" is that they're nice wrap-your-arms-around-each-other sing-along anthems about destroying everything). I surely can find stuff in her music that ought to be better; I think the anthemic choruses would be more powerful if they relied on her bare voice rather than souping everything up with double-tracked singing and 101 guitars. It's not a powerhouse voice but it is a tough little one, the bruised feel of it maybe too consistent, too solid, so I want to hear it crack up a bit. And I miss the excitement of music potentially veering out of control, which I do get but only a little from Franz Ferdinand (and Gang of Four) and a lot from long-ago bands like the Electric Eels and the James Williamson-era Stooges, the feel of somehow keeping your wheels under you while skidding close to the cliff. And right, we're not getting that from Ashlee. But we're rarely getting it from much of anybody - bits of the first Gore Gore Girls LP might be the exception - except in pale form. (And you're not serioulsy hearing this potential in Wolf Eyes and Lightning Bolt, are you?)

I don't see anything wrong with making demands on a performer, but what's the point of making demands on Ashlee if you don't think she's any good to begin with, if you don't hear anything with promise to live up to?

I also think her lyrics vague out too much - more than P!nk's, and vagueness was one of my problems with her, but I want to get back to this question I've been heading towards:

What do you think her constituency is? I know a few kids in their early teens, and when they want rock it tends to be stuff like System of a Down or Marilyn Manson, and their pop-rock leanings are towards Yellowcard and Hawthorn. On Radio Disney, you'll still get some teen confessional pop rock (esp. the ones that hit a few years ago, which get played to death), but neither P!nk nor Avril did a good job of following up on Missundaztood and Let Go, and though you'll hear some Ashlee and Lindsay, they're hardly dominant. And the "real" rock and alternative stations won't touch Ashlee because of who she is (rock stations don't like girls anyway); actually, I don't listen to rock stations much; from what I hear of rock and metal on record there are some fascinating things going on with form, but nonetheless these guys seem to want rock that slogs rather than rock that rocks. ("Rock that rocks" is hardly my be all and end all criterion fo rock, but everything else being equal, I sure prefer the rock that rocks.) And alternative is... [peters out]. Adult contemporary is no longer averse to rock, though it goes for the more classic in arrangement - Sheryl and Alanis - than for the teen wall of wail. Kelly Clarkson's very wailing "Since U Been Gone" was too undeniable not to rush the adult charts along with all the other charts it rushed, but her recurrent adult comtempo plays are her several million ballads. (And the fact that Marion Raven's similar - and almost as good - "Break You" hasn't even got a U.S. release is significant of something, though maybe just of the fact that it needs something better going on in the video than Marion having a screaming tantrum in her kitchen.) There's an amorphous "mainstream pop" audience for Ashlee, I guess, though I'm not sure who's in it. Her bruised voice is probably too bruising for a lot of listeners but not xy-chromosomed enough for the real bruisers.

Maybe she doesn't have a core fanbase but is just pulling people in due to her fame and to the quality of her music. (I was never as ecstatic about this album as Chuck was initially - I was hoping for a lot of "La La" and disappointed when I didn't get it - but I do respond to hooks and choruses and craftsmanship, and I like bruised voices and Courtney imitations (Chuck wasn't kidding about the title song.)

I tend to believe this. I don't much care about Ashlee - haven't heard either album all the way through - but man when the next Pink album drops next year I'm gonna be first in line. I don't understand how "Humble Neighborhoods" wasn't a single.

It's g-rated, but IT. IS. NOT. PUNK., goddammit.

She bores me, as do several other artists, because it doesn't seem to have occurred to her that art can be about anything but expressing one's inner soul (and please don't come at me with strawman "What do you want her to do - sing fist-pumping U2 pomp-"political" ballads?" There's a middle ground and you know it).

And yeah, I bristle at the hypocrisy: shortly after Autobiography came out I knew knew knew her next album was going to have a "Stop prying into my life" song. Which is trying to have it both ways. Which isn't a problem with a lot of other artists - sure, there's a difference between public and private, and I can just appreciate them on the basis of the songcraft. But when so much of what you are is tied into putting across the idea that "what you're seeing and hearing is real - this is the real me," you better go all the way with it. Which is why people (including me) came down much harder on her for the lip-synching thing than they would someone else.

And I hate her voice. Can't hit a note to save her life (I saw her before Autobiography came out, on a small stage that didn't allow for lip-synching technology), and the bruise in her voice sounds like run-of-the-mill Method acting to me.

I dunno if this qualifies as the thoughts of a "thoughtful Ashlee hater," but it's what I got.

This describes a lot of punk rock too, of course. (Not that I agree that it applies to Ashlee. Which is not to say that I necessarily *disagree* with it, either; more like, "hitting notes" has not much to do with why I like music. Whether she's hitting the notes or not, her voice has some power to it. And it did when I saw her live, too.)

I don't think there are any other blatant Franz Ferdinand rips per se besides "Boyfriend," Alfred, but there are for sure other excursions into '80s-style dance-oriented new wave rock (see my posts above.)

Idol was a member of both the Bromley Contingent and Chelsea. Tony James was a member of the London SS with Simonon and Mick Jones and Keith Levene. These men knew what actual Punk Rock was.

Cheeze-whiz often tastes real good, Monsieur Alex.

If you've got low standards, then suit yourself.

joan jett was prepackaged at the start and then she busted out! (as did the runaways)

Fair point on this one. The Runaways were indeed a svengali-steered project, but it's not like they were really about to trouble the pop charts with any severity. And Joan bailed out to follow her own muse swiftly enough. I wouldn't call her a fake.

And the best music often happens even when encased in prepackaged forms (Motown to thread).

Fuck Motown.

Okay, I was wrong.

(And somebody should mail Ashlee a Bromley Contingent T-shirt.)

They weren't a band.

>Please explain, in some detail, what the big schism is between whatever "punk" means in your greying head and what it means when Frank uses it to describe Ashlee Simpson's songs.

Because if all you've got is this:

>These men knew what actual Punk Rock was.

Then I feel bad for you. Punk wasn't real, Alex; it never existed. I know you think it did, but here's a hint for you: real revolutionaries don't make albums, they make bombs. It's all just showbiz.

So aren't lots of other T-shirts!

(Unless Bromley Contingent were a soccer team or something.)

Luther Vandross had a voice from the heavens and a brain in his head.

In 2005, it's a bit late to try to tack a definition on "Punk Rock," but in the same way Ashlee Simpson's vile product isn't, say, Metal or Polka, it isn't Punk. Regardless of your perception on the genre's/movement's origins (US vs. UK, etc.), Punk Rock was a reaction against, and a decideldy more organic one at that. Ripped T-shirts, Chuck Taylors, goofy hair colors, leather jackets, etc. -- they may be nice and all, but they don't make one "Punk." Ashlee Simpson is a living, breathing Mr. Potato-Head, all trussed up in conventionally "punk" finery, but her music, her message, her aspirations for stardom are strictly teen pop to the bone AND. NOTHING. MORE. If Mariah Carey started wearing a Damned t-shirt and spray painted a big Anarchy symbol on her next album, that wouldn't make her a punk either.

Regarding the Bromley Contingent (x-post), they were essentially a bunch of kids who were around when Punk was a going concern (and yes, they included Sioux, Idol and Steve Severin, among others).

For a start, why not take your patronizing tone and shove it way up your ass and swivel? Moreover, I never used to the term "revolution". It was purely pop culture (labeling merely "showbiz" is a bit too crass for my taste). Call it was you like -- showbiz, entertainment, expression, etc. -- it had a bit more substance to it.

So did Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye!

Sure, but it's more important in some kinds of music than others. A Siouxsie who can't hit notes would be fine; a Donna Summer who can't hit notes would be dreadful. I think Ashlee's music tends toward the latter.

A week late, I thought I'd point out that "Breakfast in America" is the song you're looking for.

As for Ashley, "Boyfriend" is an enjoyable radio confection, but I disliked the singles from the last album, and what galls me about her in general is the overarching feeling that, as with Paris Hilton, a lot of people are putting a lot of work into her career and she's not one of them.

Ha! I decree this thread closed.

Nope, but if she had a song that went "Someday the one you gave away will be the only one you're wishing for/Boy you're gonna pay 'cause I'm the one that's keeping score," it might. (Oh wait, she did.) (And I'm talking punk in the "Hey Joe"/"96 Tears" sense here, obviously.)

>Call it was you like -- showbiz, entertainment, expression, etc. -- it had a bit more substance to it.

In what way? Is it because the punk bands wrote songs and then signed record deals? I don't think that necessarily adds up to "substance" all by itself. If it was their lyrical subject matter, then you can keep "substance," because frankly I'd rather listen to songs about sex and cars (Motörhead, AC/DC, ZZ Top) than songs about anarchy. (And yes, Motörhead have written political songs, but they've written more songs about pussy than politics, to their great benefit and ours.) The only thing more boring than hearing someone yammer on about politics (particularly when the assumption is that the listener shares the speaker's politics) is hearing someone sing about them. If I'm gonna do that, I'll at least keep it interesting by listening to songs with political messages I disagree with (that is to say I'd rather listen to Skrewdriver than some lefty, if only because it'll be fun to see if the Nazis can convince me of the validity of their argument, whereas with someone I'm disposed to agree with I'll probably wind up picking apart all their logical fallacies that arise from trying to cram a civics lecture into a crude rhyme scheme).

Didn't you even watch her damn show? Whatever. Continue fooling yourself if that makes you feel better.

Luther Vandross had a voice from the heavens and a brain in his head.

So did Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye!

Sure they did. I just don't like Motown and find it all slavishly overrated, but that's simply my taste.

I apologize a little for the patronizing tone of my earlier post, but your stance just seems so...teenaged and dumb, and I know you're older than me.

Keep it up.

In what way? Is it because the punk bands wrote songs and then signed record deals?

Way to oversimply things. And no, that's not what I meant. Many of the Punks (and, summarily, many of the post-punk bands) actually had THINGS TO SAY with their music and were more interested in NEWER, FRESHER, SIMPLER, MORE INNOVATIVE AND/oR MORE DIRECT WAYS OF SAYING IT. It's not simply a matter of record deals (the `Pistols, the Clash, etc. etc. were all on major labels, yes I know).

The "substance" issue comes in because many of these bands (note that I am not saying "all," as there was a hefty share of the class of `77 and beyond that had nothing to say) were doing something that was a refreshing break from the norm in both sentiment and sound. You can say I'm wearing rose-tinted glasses and looking back fondly, but the case remains that you don't remember what radio sounded like in the late `70s, I do.

I don't think that necessarily adds up to "substance" all by itself. If it was their lyrical subject matter, then you can keep "substance," because frankly I'd rather listen to songs about sex and cars (Motörhead, AC/DC, ZZ Top) than songs about anarchy.

You don't find me decrying those things. And I was probably listening to AC/DC and Motorhead when you were but a stain on your father's underpants.

(And yes, Motörhead have written political songs, but they've written more songs about pussy than politics, to their great benefit and ours.) The only thing more boring than hearing someone yammer on about politics (particularly when the assumption is that the listener shares the speaker's politics) is hearing someone sing about them.>

It wasn't just politics. Consider the Buzzcocks -- not a political song in their entire catalog, but their self-deprecating, non-gender specific love songs (playe with the same spite and verve as the Ramones and the `Pistols et. al) was a completely fresh approach. There are countless examples

If I'm gonna do that, I'll at least keep it interesting by listening to songs with political messages I disagree with (that is to say I'd rather listen to Skrewdriver than some lefty, if only because it'll be fun to see if the Nazis can convince me of the validity of their argument, whereas with someone I'm disposed to agree with I'll probably wind up picking apart all their logical fallacies that arise from trying to cram a civics lecture into a crude rhyme scheme).

Well, this is all about you and your own perceptions now, so I have no retort to that. Skrewdriver -- even beyond their indefensible political leanings -- made bog-standard, uninspired music.

In any case, Ashlee Simpson has nothing interesting to say. She has nothing new to say. She does not seek to push any envelopes or strip things back to their basics. She is merely sculpted and dressed to fit a now well established and tired little mold. Cheeze-whiz aside, it may very well be perfectly well-crafted teen pop. Just don't call it Punk Rock. That's ultimately all I'm saying.

-- xhuxk (xedd...), November 9th, 2005.

God I'm going to regret getting into this, but is the lyrical content all that made "Hey Joe"/"96 Tears" a version of punk? I thought it was about how it stripped the MOR orchestral frippery and returned to something more audio verite. (Whether that automatically translates to a more direct, honest, "punk" lyrical expression is another question, and I make no claims there.)

Anyway, I'm not getting indignant like Alex, 'cause there's nothing wrong with teen-pop, but I would agree Ashlee S. isn't punk because the first wave of punk rock (as someone, I think it was Phil, specified) was (self-)consciously different from what was on the radio at the time. (Not that those bands wouldn't have taken radio play if it had been offered, but still.) Whereas Ashlee's got post-Green Day radio rock down to a T.

This all made a lot more sense before I 1) threw back some excellent cognac and 2) started typing.

I remember too. It was great, as great as any radio I've ever heard. And lots of times (compared to, say, "Ballroom Blitz" or "Highway to Hell" or "Hot Child in the City" or "Rock and Roll Hootchie Coo" or "Free For All"), punk rock really didn't sound all that different.

xpost