Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh no?

(And anyway, in listening to the Sex Pistols now I'm no longer feeling the scabrousness and throat-retching thrill, now that the scabrousness and the throat retch have been assimilated to normality by 50 million subsequent bands.)

Hillary Duff in /Loveless/ album cover to THREAD.

Fair enough, but if "punk" is such a fluid concept, how is anyone supposed to win that argument?

What about: she's not interested enough in pissing people off?

(And even if the Sex Pistols did break an old pattern, which they may well have in some ways, there are plenty of rock bands who break *other* old patterns that nobody, even me, would ever consider punk. So if breaking old patterns is part of it, it can't be *all* of it.)

Yes, but maybe intentionality is important here.

(Yeah, Chuck, I agree with your disagreement about "breaking old patterns" per se, but maybe not per se there's is something to it: not just breaking any old pattern but the thrill of defying old patterns in a punk way. (That phrase brought to you courtesy of the Department of Tautology Department.) So the pattern you're copying is breaking someone else's form. (Department of Specious Reasoning?)

But then again, I think Stevie Nicks' Fleetwood Mac songs c. 1977 were more punk than anything the Clash or Buzzcocks ever did (which is not to criticize the Clash or Buzzcocks), so obv. I'm not saying that defying old patterns is the only way to be punk. (Stevie Nicks once referred to herself as the antipunk, which just shows she has no self-knowledge.)

In the late '70s I used to force myself to listen to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 every week, and I must see that except for the disco stuff the show was pretty dreary going for me. But maybe if I reapproached that era with my current ears I'd like it far more. For instance, I couldn't stand Hall & Oates, and I haven't really given them a relisten since, but I suspect I'd appreciate them far more.

I actually wish this would've spurred a Chris Rea discussion, but no such luck. (As in: In the U.K., or at least on the jukeboxes of the Irish bars in Sunnyside, Queens, he is apparently considered an AOR star, maybe an equivalent of Seger or Cougar or Petty or something. But in the States, to my knowledge, he has never been played on AOR radio, which makes him a one-hit-wonder who nobody heard of whose loan sad adult contemporary ballad hit #12 in 1978, then zilch.)xp

It's not that Ashlee is Punk or Punk Rock or Punky or not (and, for the record, she isn't)..it's that SHE DOESN'T WARRANT THIS MUCH DISCUSSION! She's a fucking momentary blip on the radar.

Well, he never wanted to tour in the States, which affected the degree to which he registered on the radar. Me, I like "The Road to Hell" and "Texas," though not nearly as much as "Fool." For some reason, the noncelebrity barroom rock of 1978-1982 has slipped through a black hole in radio, and so we miss out on not only Rea, but Paul Davis, Player, Gino Vannelli, Benny Mardones, and Greg Guidry. A shame, especially with Davis.

Sorry to digress, but you asked.

xp

Thanks, Joseph, you rule! I should totally check out Paul Davis; I want to have a more concrete opinion of "Cool Night," "I Go Crazy," and "'65 Love Affair" than I currently do. As for those other guys, let's see here, I definitely kinda like "Baby Come Back," I really like the Gino Vanelli song about those nights in Montreal, I have very little memory of Benny Mardones even though "Into The Night" apparently hit the top 40 something like 14 different times (always in the early summer), and I never heard of Greg Guidry til now. But if I see any of their albums in the dollar bins, I'll go for it! Ditto Chris Rea's other stuff; I bet he has a good best of CD. I should compare track listings on those Sunnyside jukeboxes (which also feature plenty of the Thin Lizzy by the way. And Thin Lizzy were sort of punk in a few different ways as well, it should be noted.)

I think if/when Ashlee is thinking about delivering a "punk" emotional and intellectual experience, she's probably aiming more at the Green Day/Blink 182/Sum 41 school of (pop) punk than anything. While her writers/co-writers/producers may have a lot more in mind, you're ascribing a lot to one kid who probably hasn't thought about it more than in passing. If she's consciously emulating anyone, it's the music she may have actually heard or her peers.

Punk-inflected pop rock.

I'm not talking about actual time in existence, I'm talking about the quality of their respective contributions. Twenty years from now, I sincerely doubt anyone's going to still be discussing the arguable merits of Ashlee's "La La," but I dare say people who still be talking about, say, the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" and/or "(I'm) Stranded" by the Saints.

Not that I'm an expert or have any cred, since I'm still pretty new around here, but I listened to these recently, and for some reason "I Go Crazy" was a lot worse than I remembered, and "'65 Love Affair" was a hell of a lot better. "Cool Night" I can take or leave.

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Chuck, you should have your facial hair vigorously waxed off for invoking Lydon's Bandstand appearance here.

Nice parallel, Chuck. Who's being cheated?

He does. 1989's New Light From Old Windows.

You could be right. But then again, if somebody had shut down discussion of the Count Five or the Saints way back then, there's a good chance that nobody would be talking about them now (inasmuch as anybody still is. Not sure when was the last time I heard anybody say anything really *interesting* about either of those bands. Maybe a decade or more ago, when Metal Mike Saunders told me that, when Alice Cooper came out, he thought they sounded like a Count Five ripoff.) Anyway, for that very reason, I don't see the point in shutting down discussion of Ashlee now. (Hey Lester, why the hell are you writing a Count Five essay? Who's gonna care about *them* in 2005, you dork?)

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

There, that proves it.

(Proves what?)

http://datelinehollywood.com/wp-content/04092004153506-1.jpg

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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.