Ashlee Simpson 'Bittersweet World'

A long discussion on Ghostface would interest me depending on what people said in the discussion, not depending on how I rate Ghostface.

Frank, that's all I was trying to say. I'm only interested here in what people are saying. As far as whether something is "there" or not - I guess I don't have a stake in that question. I don't really care. Klosterman sometimes writes long, really interesting arguments about stuff, and I don't always buy that what he says is "there" is really "there." But I find the argument interesting anyway. That's all I'm saying.

(And I'm definitely guilty for making a meta-discussion. Maybe it should be moved to another thread. But conversations about conversations about music interest me too. Why do we talk about music? Why do we talk about talking about music? Etc.)

But Alex in Montreal OTM.

And speaking of Alexes, seeing Alex in NYC here gave me a pang of nostalgia.

I love meta-discussion. It just seems this one's hit a rut.

so i guess i can't extricate the quality of the discussion from whether or not the discussion is about something that is "there" then, and the frequency of there-ness re: teenpop determines when i bail on the conversation and when frank does

I mean, it seems to come down to:
A) It is there and it's worth discussing.
B) It's not there, and not worth discussing.
C) It doesn't matter whether it's there - the conversation should be judged on other merits.

With some dipping of one opinion into the other. Unless this really is possibly about something else?

(By which I mean, Jordan - where else did you think there was to go?)

nowhere i think you got it

assuming you mean "worth" in a personal sense not a universal one

OK, I keep getting suckered in. A kid might see a vacant lot as a chance for a pickup soccer game. A real estate man might see it as an investment opportunity. A builder might see it as a chance for a particular type of construction. All these are "there." Personally, among other things, I've seen Ashlee's words as a potential model for my own writing. Anyway, now I'm tired and cranky and had better stop now, but I put some blood and sweat into my rudimentary answer to Brainwasher above, and I don't see how anyone's putting what I said in "perspective" by ignoring it completely and telling me instead what my motives actually are.

Nighty night.

xp
Yeah. So -- that's the impasse. I mean, it's such a sophomoric cliche to say "you're entitled to your opinion," or "it's a subjective/objective argument!" but sometimes that's where you end up. I don't think anyone here (but me) is interested in weighing the merits of various literary theorists.

And Frank, I wasn't trying to tell you your motives. I was just saying - even if you want to believe that there are ulterior motives for this kind of conversation, that shouldn't make any difference. Cause I don't care what the motives are. I wasn't conceding the point so much as saying that it shouldn't make a difference if true.

btw since there is no rolling teenpop anymore ill post this in here:

One Bare Shoulder: The Effect of Dream Street on the Sexual Identity of the Teenipopper

the writing is only okay but i'm sure there is some stuff that would interest you guys

I think my problem with Ashlee--or lack of reaction--is the lack of trauma in her stuff.

A neat trick 'teenpop' performs is that it can be overwrought without its main audience complaining--I mean, its core audience *is* overwrought.

The melodrama opens up all kinds of neat, often very, very weird musical avenues. The trauma/melodrama aspect--I find it in some taTu, some Lindsay, and all over the new Veronicas--somehow elevates it from 'teen' to universal, sorta like Buffy wasn't about high school or vampires at all.

I don't 'get' the narrative floating around Ashlee, which doesn't mean there isn't a viable one.

This is hard to explain this late.

"i guess despite tim's explanation i just dont get the appeal of music with virtually no social function for me. to talk about this music id have to either a) be on this thread or b) hang out with teenagers all the time."

Deej this seems like a demand that you're making of teenpop that would seem ridiculous to make of heaps of other music. Do acoustic singer-songwriters have a "social function" for you? If they don't, are you baffled that people want to talk about them?

Man, I didn't want to get sucked into this thread either, but what the heck...

First off, to state what to me seems obvious, "talking about music" is a social function. By definition. I don't believe for a second that Ashlee doesn't serve a social function in Deej's life (even if he's actually never heard her music); if she didn't, he wouldn't be on this thread, socializing about her. To pretend talking here somehow counts less as "real life" than, say, talking in a bar seems completely bizarre to me.

That said, I have talked about Ashlee Simpson's music in a bar. At least once. With grownups, no less. Maybe a year and a half ago, a bunch of Billboard folks went out to lunch on a Friday, and somehow she came up (I think people were talking about tabloid stuff, which I never really pay attention to me much), and I mentioned that I Am Me had been one of my favorite rock albums of the previous year. One guy, who later went on to do entertainment business reporting at the NY Post, gave me a weird look and asked "rock??" And I said, uh, yeah. Not sure how much more in depth it got from there, but maybe it's not weird that Billboard people would classify music by "the audience to whom it's marketed" rather than "how it sounds."

Then again, I'm not even sure who Ashlee is marketed to anymore. Like Frank said, that detractors here keep dismissing her as "teenpop" here is kind of goofy (almost as goofy as people pretending that she's liked for her "innocennce and naivete," or that she does songs about "being rich and white"), though maybe a function of her having once figured prominently in a thread with "teenpop" in the title has something to do with it. But her music reminds me of Marianne Faithful or Stevie Nicks or Franz Ferdinand (or, as Frank said, Courtney or Alanis or Glen) more than it reminds of, say, Hilary Duff.

"Boys" reminds me of Chic. Totally. So I'm a little stumped about why Frank keeps calling it "showbiz blues" (which would mean, what, Amy Winehouse type crap, right?) The Jessica Simpson comparison Dabug makes way upthread makes a little more sense ('cause it's sort of light on its feet, I guess?), but I sure don't think "Jessica" when it comes on. (Though maybe I would if I listened to Jessica more often.)

I also don't hear nearly as much genius in Ashlee's lyrics as Frank, etc., do, by the way. Which isn't to say it isn't "there," but I've listened to her albums plenty, and maybe the fact that one would seemingly need to intensely examine them under a microscope to get all their minute nuances might be part of what bugs some people about Frank going off at length about her words so much. I find what Frank says in that regard consistently interesting myself, but that doesn't mean I hear what he hears. I hear some of it. But is it enough to justify an ENTIRE THREAD? Maybe not; there are so many albums out there now that devoting so much time to just one album always strikes me as a little odd. (In the last week, I had to write, or was assigned to write, reviews of, let's see: John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis, Los Lonely Boys, Trina, the Lady Tigra, Birthday Massacre, Scooter, Foxboro Hot Tubs, Jamey Johnson, Little Jackie, K'Naan, Restless Kelly, plus two Joan Jett reissues and a bunch of other stuff...) I know most people aren't as anywhere near as obsessive as I am, and it's not they're job to keep up with so much stuff, but still -- there are a lot of records out there, always! Which is why I always preferred the rolling threads, in general, to individual album threads, which I've always tended to avoid. Which is what made the teenpop thread worthwhile, no matter what certain assholes and idiots here thought about it. Though then again, the discussion on this thread sure goes much farther toward justifying devoting a whole thread to Ashlee than, say, the threads on fucking Battles or Destroyer or whoever I've seen in the past. (Maybe I missed something interesting on those; who knows.) And if I went to those threads, would I see trolls coming on and saying they can't imagine why anybody would devote an entire thread to Battles or Destroyer (or Ghostface, or Jay-Z)? I don't know, maybe I would. But somehow, I doubt it.

On the other hand, if on the rolling teenpop thread, people had just come on and said things like ""yo im kinda feeling this ashlee simpson song" and left it at that, it would have bored me stiff. Go figure.

I keep looking for someplace upthread where I thought Frank complained about people complaining about him spending too much time analyzing Ashlee's lyrics (and lyrics in teenpop in general) (even if Ashlee isn't really teenpop per se'), when nobody ever has any problem with anybody spending time analyzing lyrics in other genres, but damned if I can find it. Maybe I dreamt it. I hope so. Because if Frank really said that, he's way wrong. Lots of people have always had problems with rock critics spending inordinate time on the lyrics (in all genres), and I've often been one of them. A record review is not a book review (or a lyric sheet review), and turning it into one, 99 percent of the time, is booooooring. But I'm probably completely Rorschashing (old Why Music Sucks word!), and Frank never actually said anything of the sort.

Also, Frank -- Did you really mean to single out Autobiography, not I Am Me, as having the whatever-you-said-about-its-lyrics-since Eminem? Or was that a typo? Because if it wasn't, I probably need to go back and listen to the debut album more.

my only problem with the teenpop critics (frank, da bug, mordy, lex whoever) is that, even tho i usually enjoy reading your guys' crit, i get the feeling that in the midst of good discourse you guys get to the point where you're truly grasping for shit that isn't ther

that's because YOU don't find Ashlee Simpson interesting. Substitute "Bob Dylan critics" or "Public Image Ltd critics or "Atlas Sound critics."

ok, i will. lots of times all those guys talk about shit that isnt there too

thankfully there isnt a 'rolling atlas sound' thread

tim f, if i was looking for an explanation of why any grown adults are listening to teen pop and nerding out about it, yours is the only one so far that has made much sense to me - as a music critic u like the idea of it basically being an open frontier, right?? the fact is, there are amazingly talented singers and songwriters performing music that i ignore all the time, and not just doing teenpop. i can come up with kinda arbitrary reasons to ignore anything. its not like im dismissing this genre out of hand like a classic rock dude talking about rap. i just dont see the advantage of taking up brain power with stuff that doesnt serve a function for me.

and you can say its a ridiculous demand of music and you're right ... assuming im talking about intentionally avoiding this stuff altogether, but im not. Im just choosing not to engage w/ this stuff in the way you guys do!! if i hear an ashlee song on the charts and it resonates ill say so. its less about the music not serving a social function and more about the way you guys address it not really having any sort of appeal to me

as a music critic u like the idea of it basically being an open frontier, right??

Not to mention that it's ignored by cognoscenti yet is listened to by a large swathe of the population. A lot of the stuff I end up loving initially began as part of an anthropological experiment.

People like a type of music, thus like talking about it on a board devoted to talking about music. It's not hard.

Also maybe people are thrown because people on this thread are talking in long paragraphs and sentences and things but it's not like anyone's analysing it like it's Schoenberg or something.

xp yeah but the "why are we persecuted??" stuff from grown men listening to music that is listened to pretty much exclusively by pre teens strikes me as disingenuous. (not defending libel here btw)

One Bare Shoulder

Talked about this over on Poptimists and at Bedbugs, where the author herself responded. One thing that might pertain to some stuff being said upthread that I said after learning more about how the article was written (she did 500 interviews with Dream Street fans and has talked to several of the members personally):

"it's good to get the cold water in the face of 'what 500 people told me' in opposition to the personalized (and occasionally agenda-leaning) canon-making that can happen from a more rock-critical context."

Of course the problem here is that I don't like Dream Street, or any of the other bands she's singling out here, and I'm also not as interested in stuff like fansite networks and teenybopper magazines where some of the interaction is happening.

This is a non-issue for Ashlee Simpson, who as xhuxk says simply doesn't have as clear of an audience, particularly for this album (which is another way of saying she doesn't seem to have much of any audience). One of the interesting things about the teenpop threads was that for a lot of the artists discussed most regularly and passionately, it was nearly impossible to actually do a "500 people told me" style observational "know the real audience" survey that would be required to figure out "what teenagers actually think" or whatever. And it was obvious that that was only part of what interested most of us anyway, and usually wasn't was primarily interested us, though I've always thought there should be MORE stuff out there like "One Bare Shoulder," occasionally dull as these sorts of surveys can look (I think this article hits a nice balance of fact and humor until a few of the final points about sexualization that I took issue with).

I've never quite understood, though, why so much audience research has always been expected of a lot of the teenpop thread regulars, especially since usually prolonged discussion of it meant that we were basically talking and arguing about it as, for all intents and purposes, music that was "supposed to be" for us. And I'm not going to pretend that there aren't a lot of reasons that people might think that's weird, but I'm also not going to think they're right about it.

To use Hannah Montana as an example here, the vast majority of her music doesn't register with most of the pro-Ashlee posters here, and yet she has a handful of songs that really are worth checking out for anyone who likes any kind of pop music (and "See You Again" is continuing to do pretty well in pop airplay, which is to say it's no more or less "for teenagers" or younger than "No Air," in fact subject matter's not too far off).

Ashlee, on the other hand, has always seemed trapped by the expectation that she's any more youth-oriented (or just-fun-oriented) than the influences that xhuxk is rightfully citing here. That was something that took me a bit to really understand, especially re: her first album, but once I did it no longer made any sense to have the anthropological-leaning arguments OR it's-just-fun-pop arguments with people about it (especially with people who have absolutely no intention of holding this standard to anything else). Bittersweet World, on the other hand, is basically just-fun-pop, and as the discussion is suggesting, we are kind of grasping for something, because we're looking for some of the richness and not finding it, or just finding a different, and maybe not as easy to talk about, richness.

And just as a final note, it's easy to project onto a lot of Ashlee lyrics -- they're all personal, and they're a lot more sophisticated than almost all other confessional rock (from Alanis to Avril). When I play "Better Off," I can instantly see situations and feelings that I recognize from my own life (as opposed to, say, "Complicated," which feels like a jumble of cliches). And I also imagine that "situations and feelings that I recognize from my own life" isn't the kind of analysis that moves all people to obsess about a pop song. (That said, I don't think that we spend that much time on lyric analysis, aside from a few good ones that get thrown out a lot, and that when we do it's to try to evoke the whole context that those lyrics contribute to and not make it just some kind of literary analysis. I personally have a hard time with this, but then most people probably do because it's really hard to describe music! The best I came up with for John Shanks is that he somehow found a way of "lilting violently.")

xposts

And the fact that a preteen and I might find value, if not necessarily the same kind (how could any two people?), in a line like "You think you know me? Word on the street is that you do. You want my history? What others tell you won't be true..." doesn't seem strange to me at all. Anymore than "School's Out! For! Summer!" might hold value for someone who's not actually in (elementary) school.

Or YAHHHHHHH TRICK YAHHHHHHHH for that matter.

i think part of this for me to is that even when i was a preteen i was never into this stuff and always had this sorta 'music training wheels' attitude towards it so maybe for some of you dudes its like, remember when i was innocent like this? i have no idea im just trying to fathom the appeal

Maybe the appeal is that it's pop music and is kind of designed to be fun and catchy and appealing? It's not rocket science.

You were never in love or trying to figure shit out?

Maybe there's something I'm missing here because Ashlee Simpson doesn't actually have an 'audience' per se in the UK but if and when she does I can't see it being much different to Gwen's or Kylie's.

Ashlee's not singing about innocence at all, but "See You Again" definitely taps into something like that. But "See You Again" is also cute and nostalgia-friendly where Ashlee usually isn't.

maybe for some of you dudes its like, remember when i was innocent like this?

Yeah, again, who is saying Ashlee has anything to do with being "innocent"? I have no idea where that comes from; has anybody writing about her anywhere on ILM ever said they like her for her "innocence"?

innocent is a misleading word, im talking about buying what shes selling

btw i liked 'lala' lol but i have no problem with a token interest in teenpop, its this analyzing of the persona that is bizarre to me, like wtf guys - why does this have so much meaning for you???? i really dont get it!

Ay-ya-ya-ya-ya you're talking way too much, you boys are messin' with my head.

buying what shes selling

What IS this? I don't mean to seem like I'm badgering, but there's nothing even approaching "innocence" being "sold" by Ashlee. It's not just misleading, to me it has nothing to do with her -- what is it that we're supposed to be "falling for" here?

that's because YOU don't find Ashlee Simpson interesting. Substitute "Bob Dylan critics" or "Public Image Ltd critics or "Atlas Sound critics."

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Friday, May 30, 2008 7:47 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

nah it's the same reason why the vampire weekend and no age threads are just as insufferable at times as this one is at times

i just think it happens more frequently with teenpop, for one because there is a higher rate of fertile discourse among the genre's critics, but also because, as i mentioned upthread, sometimes i get the feeling of "overanalyzing for the sake of legitimacy"

for one because there is a higher rate of fertile discourse among the genre's critics

lemme say real quick that i mean in relation to something like ilm, before you guys go pasting metal livejournal urls or something

I'll agree to "overanalyzing" if it appears (to someone not interested) to be "too many words spent on _____," which is something I feel, too. But not "overanalyzing" as "looking too much into" or "seeing things that just aren't there." In which case (again) I think it probably is just a matter of some people really not finding it -- the music or the discussion, not necessarily both -- that interesting.

Something I feel not in relation to teenpop, but probably other bands.

>what is it that we're supposed to be "falling for" here?

My question as well. And what is her drama? Musically, personally, or even meta? Where's the friction or arc?

(I still haven't had a chance to relisten to this yet but I wanted to give a hearty "THANK YOU" to both sides of this debate for talking to each other rather than yelling at/making fun of each other.)

"btw i liked 'lala' lol but i have no problem with a token interest in teenpop, its this analyzing of the persona that is bizarre to me, like wtf guys - why does this have so much meaning for you???? i really dont get it!"

I think this is perhaps the core of the debate here. Deej I'm also thinking I've probably given the impression I like Ashlee etc. purely for obscure rock crit reasons which really isn't true. My point in raising that angle was more to say that it'd be disingenuous for me to complain about arguments like these because on some level they do heighten my enjoyment.

But in that case why/how do I like Ashlee?

I remember when I first read Frank on Ashlee (comparing to Bob Dylan etc.) and I thought "okay, but why would I want to think of pop in terms of Bob Dylan? I've had long arguments defending my right not to have to think of music in terms of Bob Dylan!" (At this stage I hadn't heard anything bar "Pieces of Me" (which I disliked and still don't love) many times, "La la" once (no opinion) and "Girlfriend" which I thought was an ace pop tune)

On the other hand, thinking in terms of persona was something I was already doing heaps for pop music. I had, without really thinking about it, constructed quite elaborate ideas about Teedra Moses, for example, and my conception of her was influenced by her melodies, her lyrics, her voice, the whole package coming together. This is an interesting sidepoint: many people who say "how can you take teenpop so seriously?" have no problem with taking R&B seriously, even though often the lyrics in R&B are, generally speaking, more rudimentary, infantile etc. This is not true for Teedra obv! But anyway, if at any formal level I had decided that pop should be embraced for its ephemerality, this wasn't the only way I was relating to it in practice.

For me not all or even most teenpop would merit this. The Veronicas' "Untouched" is some days my favourite single of 2008 (I really wish anything else on their second album hit me nearly so hard) but I have zero interest in, um, the psychic life of The Veronicas. There the enjoyment is purely functional: the 1987 string riffs, the warpdrive surge, the harmonies, the sheer perfection of the chorus which strike me as having the same rising-tension-inevitability as ABBA's "Mamma Mia", but better...

Whereas when I listened to Ashlee's I Am Me, I found that the lyrics that kept catching my ear as much as the hooks, and the way that Ashlee sung them seemed U&K to my enjoyment. But this wasn't reminding me of enjoying teenpop as a teenager so much as enjoying Hole's Celebrity Skin or Ani DiFranco's Not A Pretty Girl as a teenager - records that were immensely important to me in terms of the image of the persona they evoked, records that seemed to warrant endless over-analysis. Even still, if I listen to those records what comes through very strongly for me is a sense of who the performer is, I recognize them as comrades in my past struggle for adolescent autonomy.

So yeah, Ashlee did remind me of a period of my own adolescence (only about 9-11 years ago though), but not in the sense of being innocent; rather, she hooked in to that sense of disenchantment which is so stereotypically adolescent - that desire for musical artists who will be honest with you and "tell it like it is" because you sense the world has offered you candy-coated lies (of course such things always seem a bit silly in retrospect). So yeah, much of it has to do with nostalgia, and remembering the dark thoughts of my 14-16 year old self (okay so this is relative - I probably remained a boringly pleasant teenager even throughout this period), and liking how neatly Ashlee can articulate these same dark thoughts within the framework of what are in many ways quite generic pop-rock songs. Where the "teenpop" bit becomes relevant is that Ashlee not only speaks to my adolescent-self (as DiFranco and Love did) but does so from the apparent perspective of adolescence.

The drawback of Bittersweet World for me is its inability to serve this role for most of its songs.

I still can't cosign Frank's specific statements about Ashlee - I don't hear the connection with Bob that he heard, although perhaps this is more because Bob is a fairly peripheral figure in my music taste. More relevantly, Frank might pick out lyrics of Ashlee's for discussion that strike me as less interesting or notable than others. But this should hardly be surprising - he's coming to this music from a different perspective (most fundamentally, and I stressed this on the Hillary Duff thread too, I cannot talk about my enjoyment of any of this stuff without some acknowledgment of the way it's shaped by my experience of being gay -but then, this applies for Hole and Ani DiFranco as well).

Even when I think a particular line is really ace in context, I can see how it would appear unworthy of much discussion when quoted in isolation on an internet music board. What's behind this though is the difference in impact of a particular lyric when you've already been won over by the singer's persona - and this difference is applicable to any other music but especially any kind of confessional pop-rock, of which Ashlee formed a teenpop variant. So I could quote an Ani DiFranco lyric that was really importantly - say, this one from "Light of Some Kind":

in the end the world comes down to just a few people
but for you it comes down to one
but no one ever asked me if i thought i could be
everything to someone
there's a crowd of people harboured in every person
there are so many roles that we play
and you've decided to love me for eternity
i'm still deciding who i want to be today

... and tell you how at the time this seemed to sum up something really integral to me about the relationship between fidelity, promiscuity and self-identity. And your most likely response is to go "WTF?" because a) you're not in a position to know or care why the relationship between these things might have been important to me, and b) the lyrics can only carry that weight of revelation in the context of the persona constructed over the course of an entire album if not several albums.

Perhaps intense over-analysis of Ashlee is attractive to me because I didn't have anyone to do this with w/r/t the music I was listening to at 14-16 so it was all in my head. There was an awful army cadets camp I had to go on at 14 that I think I only survived by reciting the songs from Joni Mitchell's Hejira in my head and trying to puzzle out their meaning, and wishing I knew someone who cared about this stuff*... Needless to say a very different kind of rock crit to the kind of thing I mostly do now.

*Ironically, several of my friends, gay and otherwise, would happily have over-analysed Celine Dion or Spice Girls ballads with me. It was the confessional stuff that I had no-one had to talk about with.

The main reason I was unable to keep up with the teenpop threads was that for me Ashlee (and specifically I Am Me) was the only time that I had this kind of relationship to that kind of music. Although I can still love, say, "Untouched" in a rather different way.

In certain ways it's hard not to engage in some kind of "over"-analysis of Ashlee's persona (in particular) just because she had a whole TV show about her in addition to her intensely confessional lyrics... the way she is presented and read (which is to say as a whole package, personality, music and lyrics combined) means that if you want to be serious about "reading" Ashlee's music you sort of have to read "Ashlee" too.

Personal doesn't necessarily sync up with musical or meta: personally (according to her reality show) she wanted to sound like Courtney Love without actually being very fucked up (tho who knows how fucked up she might be in her brain), fears that she's going to be turned into a "pop starlet" in sound ("I do NOT want to sound like Hilary Duff!").

Musically it's precocious twentysomething blues -- she'll tell you everything about herself if you ask her, playing on the archetype of someone who seems to keep getting screwed and realizing at some point that maybe the problem is her (not unlike Liz Phair). Except she keeps answering the "who are you" question a little differently and frankly she's (rightfully) terrified no one's going to want her no matter what she says or does (parents -- says she's over it now, but I don't believe her -- boyfriends, basically anyone and everyone) (last line on "Autobiography" is "don't walk away," which she howls as her voice all but gives out).

Meta: she was RIGHT, no one really "wants" her. Comparing her albums is interesting because her first two were reasonably popular while being more direct and more honest(-seeming), but her audience was always ambiguous and a lot of people, many outside her audience, were ready to turn on her as soon as she publicly fucked up (I'm not convinced there's any great reason for it either, and I honestly wonder what her career would have been like without the SNL/Orange Bowl mistakes). Which she did, bigtime (and they politely gloss over both incidents on her show -- the latter of which is like the ending in that Monty Python "Bicycle Tour" episode, where they just insert a "scene missing" and the crisis has been miraculously solved).

So on this album, she's clearly trying something else, because being "herself" (in her music, which again, may not sync up with her personal life) isn't getting her anywhere anymore. Can't read too much into the personal stuff, but as I said, there's a difference in tone between the first and second season of her show, and since then she's been extra extra extra careful about how she's being perceived in public.

I relate to her ambivalence a lot, and I think about it a lot. She nails details -- she uses coffee and toothpaste and her hair not doing what she wants it to without seeming like she's bound for Starbucks and without being even remotely smug or blind-to-privilege (in fact she's got anxieties about that too: "I've got more than anyone should") about it. She reminds me of me more than people who are probably a lot more like me.

xpost, I agree with Tim's points about the Veronicas. I don't think the range of artists that garnered this many words really delving into the music was that big, and almost all of it was in the confessional field.

xp to myself--In other words it's unfair to your own critical project to separate out the music and restrict your analysis to that when its so clearly and obviously predicated on a persona or a set of personas (this is one place where the Dylan comparison almost makes sense to me).

(this is in response to deej's question about the analysis of the persona btw)

*There's a lot more to the show than just what she wanted to sound like, but it's hard to read into the more personal stuff with the cameras on, and frankly I judge it more for context, in the same way that I might want to know about a writer or a filmmaker personally -- which doesn't always translate back to the work. I can't stand a lot of writers/filmmakers whose work I like, though, and I've rarely found anyone who syncs up personally with what I want them to sync up with in their art.

nah i agree w/ that max, i use that approach in R&B; i just wasnt getting what was particularly interesting about her persona. or the personas of other teenpop stars; there are a few reasons i dont hang out with teenagers irl as a general rule, so why would i want to hang out with this one?

cause shes married to pete wentz?