Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh no?

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By the way (not sure when this turned into the rolling post-teen-pop thread, but what the hell), I am i am playing the new Ashlee Simpson CD now and it is GREAT. First song and single, "Boyfriend," is now officially my favorite Franz Ferdinand song ever. No kidding, that's who its music sounds like, except with a really good singer for a change. Other parts, I'm thinking Stevie Nicks and Courtney Love a LOT, but also, like, "Broken English" by Marianne Faithful, or, well, what was that sleazy Deborah Allen rock-disco song in the '80s? Wow.
-- xhuxk (xedd...), October 20th, 2005.

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Her music rocks the disco like Stevie's '80s solo stuff never did, I think, but like I always *wanted* it to. And she has more dance in her music than Courtney ever did, obviously. I am blown away.
-- xhuxk (xedd...), October 20th, 2005.

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I mean, shit - Kim Carnes, Bonnie Tyler...I'm 95 percent sure that none of them ever made an album anywhere NEAR this good. I don't want to jinx it or anything, but this could end up being my album of the year. Just about every track ROCKS, and the ballads really seem to kick, too. (Weird, I saw Ashlee on SNL a couple weeks ago and that mature pseudo-classy whine weep tune she did bored me to tears; I did not have high hopes for this album at all.) (And by the way, Deborah Allen's biggest hits were COUNTRY hits, and Trick Pony covered "It's a Heartache" this year, so Ashlee can count as country if you want.)
Deborah Allen still looks pretty sleazy by the way:

http://www.deborahallen.com/

-- xhuxk (xedd...), October 20th, 2005.

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Hardest rocking Ashlee track MIGHT be "Coming Back For More," or might not. But the only one that turns into Led Zeppelin's "Trampled Under Foot" at the end, as far as I can tell so far, is "L.O.V.E."
xp

-- xhuxk (xedd...), October 20th, 2005.

Also, "Catch Me When I Fall" reminds me "Cold Chills" by Kix, for some reason (the melody and open spaces and cold chilliness of it, probably). And "Burnin Up" reminds me of "Burning Up" by Madonna (the new wave evolved into rock-disco burning-uppishness of it, probably.) And the title track "I Am Me", while definitely not the hardest rocking track, is probably the most blatantly Courtney-grungey one.
xp

-- xhuxk (xedd...), October 20th, 2005.

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By the way, what I really meant to say about Ashlee's ballads isn't so much that they "kick" (which is not to say that they don't), but that there's generally a really visceral lushness and throb to them; they aren't just shrinking violets wilting behind the rock woodwork.

-- xhuxk (xedd...), October 20th, 2005.

http://www.zone1061.com/pictures/wallpapers/ashlee800.jpg

The Deborah Allen disco hit was... don't remember the title, actually (I'm too lazy to dig out my old Swellsvilles and find out), but it's the one with the lyric that Leslie deliberately misheard as "I know you like the back of my hand," in order to project some s&m content onto Deborah's burnt-voiced passion.
-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), October 20th, 2005. (Frank Kogan)

Weirdest (probably misheard) album on the album so far: "Do you know how it feels to be a rape, lyng there frozen, with my eyes wide open?"

Not sure what else that word could be: "Erased"?? That's weird, too!

Why is Jon saying "bird" and "paedophile"? I thought he lived in BUSHWICK.

But to say that Ashlee's ripping Gwen off is ridiculous, since Ashlee doesn't sound like Gwen, and the reason for the comparison is Gwen = pop rock girl who goes funky reggae, Ashlee = pop rock girl who (occasionally) goes funky reggae, so they must be the point of comparison. Whereas actually it's John Shanks' guitar and production that's providing the reggae, albeit in consultation with the singer. Whereas if "Boyfriend" and "Burnin Up" had been the same except done by a guy, the obvious would have stuck out: It's the Clash, who were a rock band that played reggae, who are the most obvious comparison here, with the echoed laugh right off of "London Calling" and the clipped-short guitar crunch style from that very same song, and when it's not the Clash it's the Specials and Gang of Four (and Franz Ferdinand, for that matter) for Shanks' snapping-twig guitar riff that runs throughout the verse. And I think Shanks plays it more effectively than G of 4 or Franz Ferdinand, both of whose guitar work I like a lot.

(Now I disappear for several hours.)

is g-rated punk ever assumed to be authentic (eg. not a marketing move)?

Not when I remember her own father making comments on trying to market her as the total opposite of her sister (who was a famously beautiful virgin). The anarchy symbol at the Orange Bowl also comes to mind as something a bit contrived. Her music wouldn't be better if she was had a "rich punk heritage" or really believed in anarchy but the poster asked for her image, which I said was a bit forced. If he asked what her music sounded liked I might not even touch it.

Anyone else seen the TV show, or the videos (which my dial-up connection allows me to "see," but on postage-stamp size, stop-action "video" at Launch Yahoo)?

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.

pauline kael, j.d. salinger, james thurber = more punk than ashlee simpson

I agree with this, actually. And I don't know if I'd call John O'Hara a punk, but he sure put a lot of punks (and punk) into his stories. As for what's wrong with The New Yorker, that's for another thread and another day.

Also, at the risk of getting called pompous and preachy again, I'm going to say that a lot of you need to make it a habit to reread posts before your respond to them. E.g., note the following sentence of mine, "I wouldn't call Ashlee a punk, just call her someone who occasionally veers punkward," and also note the phrase "occasional punk moments." And my reason for discussing the garage bands and the Kirshner Brill Building bizzers was to point out that from the get-go a lot of punk arose from such moments and such people. And I can't see why that particular point would even be controversial, though perhaps it's new to some of you. (Can't really tell how you took it, actually. Did you notice it?)

*I finally bought Autobiography several weeks ago, and the title song contains some of the same punkisms/Courtneyisms as "I Am Me" does. So the "punk" in the latter probably isn't just in its effect (on me) but in its deliberately placed signifiers. So I guess we can say that Ashlee herself, and not just Tickley, Cunga, and Natedey, raised the issue of punk. But for the most part there's a whole lot of other stuff going on in the music.

When I first read the phrase "punk rock," I knew intuitively what it meant. It meant the malicious laugh in the midst of Syndicate of Sound's "Little Girl." It meant the snidely obnoxious way Rudy Martinez said "You're gonna cry" in ? and the Mysterians "96 Tears" - made "cry" sound sick, loathsome. It meant kids who terrorized other kids in junior high school hallways, those years when such songs were on the radio. I remember when a couple of kids in my school picked a fight with each other and then made rules about the fight - no kicking, no punching, no hitting in the face - so they ended up just shoving each other around, across the pavement. A friend of mine and I were there watching, and I said, "This reminds me of that song from last year..." He laughed and finished my sentence for me, "You're pushin' too hard." So that's one punk rock, kids who tried to make themselves feel strong by terrorizing weaker kids and singing hatred of girls, with any old I'll-get-even-with-you song on the radio as soundtrack. It's guys like the Young Rascals, early on, and Mouse & the Traps, who heard "Like A Rolling Stone" and didn't get its adventure and romanticism at all, just heard it as a way to tell some bitch off. Of course, this was all mixed up with straight pop sap (listen to the Troggs' "Love Is All Around"), coolness, and a dance into the unknown - who the fuck knew what was happening, this new world - and remnants of rock 'n' roll bounce and intimations of the really cool psychedelia that none of the punks could master. Anyway, this is how I first understood the phrase "punk rock," when it appeared in the early '70s, and if it meant any modern music it didn't mean the Dolls or Stooges - who were too self-reflective, would turn the gaze and the knife on themselves and on their audience. Might mean "Brownsville Station" or even "Sweet Home Alabama" but not "Search and Destroy" or "Personality Crisis." But then once I realized that "punk rock" was also being used for the Ramones and ilk, then of course it did very much mean those who turned the gaze and knives on themselves - the Dolls and Stooges in retrospect and subsequently the Sex Pistols (and I'd say again in retrospect the Stones and the Velvets and Dylan). And from there it could mean noisy sweethearts like X Ray Spex and the Clash and earnest do-gooders like Sham 69 and on. So that's a whole bunch of different types of punk, and there were many more to come. The most interesting to me were the ones who were mixing it up between "we're just normal guys lashing out at our exes" and "we're tearing everything up big-time" and "we're wearing our broken hearts under our hate" and so on, Electric Eels, Stooges, Dolls, Pistols. In 1978 I was sure that the Clash were the greatest band in the world, but I felt that the Contortions were more punk; I felt that Stevie Nicks' occasional punk moments outpunked the Clash, too, but she was just a normal heartbreak girl lashing out, not part of the Great Tear It Up or of any movement, and Ashlee's "I Am Me" [and little or nothing else by Ashlee] gets to be punk too in the Stevie way, not in the oppositional tear-it-all-up sense nor in the turn-the-knife-gaze-on-yourself-and-those-around but as a normal kid doing her lashout. And I think normal kid doing the lashout and dancing to the lashout is the wellspring for a lot of the other types of punk.

(And as I said above, there's a different and maybe even deeper well-spring, some obnoxious 10-year-old at the back of the schoolbus deliberately annoying the hell out of the driver, the teachers, everybody, including me, by singing "You make me want to la la" over and over and over until you want to scream, and it's not because "La La" is particularly punk - it's not - but because it's annoyingly catchy. And so "La La" is a wellspring not by being punk at all but providing the dance of the inner brat, maybe the real proto-everything-else. Though to be realistic, given what's on the radio, the kid's more likely to pick "Laffy Taffy.")

(When I was ten, and this really happened, the kids - there were two of them - were singing "She loves you yeah yeah yeah" about two million times, and boy was it irritating.)

That is, might mean "Smoking in the Boys' Room" by Brownsville Station.

What IS punk about Ashlee Simpson? Nothing.
What IS NOT punk about Ashlee Simpson? Everything.

I mean, come on guys, I know you love to argue, but any part of this girl's image/"music"/success that works well is no thanks to her. It's a team of about 800 ppl. that is contractually obligated to ensure that this disturbingly average talentless shadow of a Texan virgin does not reveal her mediocrity to the world. Besides the boobs. But that was god's decision, really.

Well, one of those names was on the cover of the album, but certainly I wouldn't say that some of the others aren't also deserving to be there. But that goes against standard practice. Arrangers, producers, songwriters, stylists etc. tend not to get their name in lights. Nelson Riddle didn't make the cover of the Sinatra records, Sam Phillips didn't make the cover of the early Elvis records, Andrew Loog Oldham didn't make the cover of the Stones, Greenwich and Barry didn't make the cover of the Shangri-Las, Holland Dozier Holland didn't make the cover of the Four Tops, etc. etc. etc. But anyway, even if you want to say that "I Am Me" is primarily Shanks and DioGuardi rather than Ashlee Simpson, how does that make it not punk, or not good?

("Wild Thing," if you're interested, was written by Chip Taylor, who had previously affiliated with Chet Atkins, one of the architects of the Nashville countrypolitan sound (Taylor wrote a song for Bobby Bare, "Just A Little Bit Later On Down The Line"!); after "Wild Thing," Taylor went on to work with James Taylor and to write and produce the country-inflected hit "Angel of the Morning." So, does this make "Wild Thing" unpunk?)

I haven't read Lester Bangs' "James Taylor Marked for Death" in quite a while. Does he mention Chip Taylor? Did he know that there was a James Taylor/Troggs connection? A lot of the piece is about the Troggs, and one of the questions it's posing is why the MC5's version of "I Want You" isn't as good as the Troggs', implying that it was now hard for people in the MC5's position to pull off what the Troggs had pulled off a few years earlier.

Oh DO PLEASE give me a break.

I don't think my aesthetics blind me to the fact that punk can come from anywhere. It's certainly present in Wild Thing, though I suspect that there it derives less from the sheet music than from whoever had the idea to have the loud guitars and drums all emphasize every single beat all the time, and of course from the sneering, leering, over-the-top vocals. And from the sheet music too, though the Troggs inhabit the song in a way that Chip Taylor may never have imagined when he wrote it. It's kind of present in Steppin' Stone, though in a much more controlled way. (Think Eddie and the Hot Rods, vice the Troggs' Sex Pistols.) Mickey Dolenz pushes the "anger" button, and out comes "anger," fairly convincingly, but still in quotes. There's nothing about the Troggs song that's in quotes.

I'm not sure that I know where the Troggs or the Monkees are coming from socially. Too far away in time. And it probably doesn't matter. The point here is that while punk is an interesting lens through which to view Wild Thing, and perhaps Steppin' Stone, it doesn't help much in explaining Ashlee. She's the wrong test case for the "Is ****** A Punk?" meme. In Ashlee's case, the more-or-less clear consensus here seems to be, well, "no." It's not that she can't make music that could be called "punk," just that she doesn't. There indeed may be a line tracing through Stevie to Courtney to Ashlee, and that's a more interesting line to pursue than the thin one that might connect Wild Thing to her.

Meanwhile, I now work for MTV.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/arts/music/popcast-ashlee-simpson.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fpopcast-pop-music-podcast&action=click&contentCollection=music®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection&referer=https://www.nytimes.com/column/popcast-pop-music-podcast

first of two NYT podcasts on Ashlee

Boy, I was an angry young dad in 2005.