Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh no?

Intent is a tough thing to glean from a piece of writing, so it's more like a feeling, just based on having read lots of stuff in my life. I mean, I *wish* the intent were just to describe how the music sounds. But sometimes statements are made where the intent seems to be to incite, not describe. Like when Frank says up above that Ashlee "and Shanks rock harder than the Gang of Four and Franz Ferdinand, both of which sound like toy bands in comparison," it doesn't really help me understand what Ashlee's music sounds like. Admittedly that could be because I hear Ashlee differently than Frank does, so maybe it's just that his description doesn't connect with me. For instance, to me the Ashlee CD sounds like a lush studio construction, not a band at all, per se. Even when she gets angsty, every hair's still in place. Gang of Four sound positively ferocious by comparison. Certainly there's more money behind Ashlee than Go4, so yeah, the guitars are way fatter and the drums are deeper and the vocals are centered better in the mix. But the sound of Go4 is so completely different from Ashlee’s that the comparison isn’t useful to me on a descriptive level. To say that Frank is trying to “incite” Gang of Four fans with that statement is too strong, and probably baseless. But I think there is an element of that in there, of let’s push that button and have a little bit of fun with this.

I imagine that she is very attractive, though who knows.

OK, just scrolled up the thread and saw a picture; yes, of course she is.

pinefox -- 'la la' is the one song people (maybe including you?) have heard. it's really, really good.

xpost

by far the most intelligent thing said on this thread, yet it continues...

So what "same place" do Ashlee and Montgomery Gentry come from again?(Like, the United States? So do Living Things!) You're stating a tautlogy, I think: "When certain writers define bands as part of genres the bands are usually not associated with, those bands come from genres other than the one they're being newly defined as."

Only if it out of context, and leave out:

>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. <

Frank was describing how the record *sounds,* Sang.

(None of which to say that writers can't describe and incite at the same time. Nor that they shouldn't. Hell, inciting is punk rock too. {And right, it's the oldest cliche on earth, just like punk rock is.} But sorry, "that's not the way I hear it, therefore this guy must be trying to pull a fast one over on me" really doesn't hold much water.)

I'm a hair's breadth from waving the white flag. What I think I'm saying, though, is "When certain writers define bands as part of genres the bands are usually not associated with, those bands come from genres they feel are likely to get a rise out of coastal alternative newspaper readers." I.e. bands whose main audience has a different ideological makeup from the readers, more typically conservative than liberal. As a rule, though I'm sure there are counterexamples aplenty. I agree that Ashlee and MG don't share an audience, but I also suspect there are few readers of the Voice music section who cheerlead for either one, and that that has something to do with their ideology.

But you've made a lot of good points, and I don't feel strongly enough about my argument anymore to argue it vehemently. In any event, the wife and I will be soon be making the long drive up to Hartford CT to check out the Gretchen Wilson / Big$Rich show, so I must be signing off now. Maybe I'll report back on Rolling Country. Hope my directions are good.

Have fun! Drive safely! I hope it doesn't snow! (And by the way, you might want to note that Frank's Big & Rich piece in the Voice this week was basically about how they are pretty much the LEAST punk thing ever. Not sure how that might fit with your thesis or not....)

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.