Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh no?

She's got a whole bunch that are better than "Caught Out There," which I like for the "I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW" parts but not much else. I mean, it's a good solid Neptunes track, I guess. As for an Ashlee song that outpunks it, "I Am Me" just slaughters it, not in hatred but in bowling me over with a loud syrup of virulently beautiful sound: must be due to the overproduction, the loud pretty melody, like "I wanna be/an-ar-chee" was a loud pretty melody; and seizes your eardrum vocals, like "Go on take everything, take everything I want you to"). Jeesh, I can't believe I'm comparing her to the two greatest rock singers of the last 30 years. Well, I wouldn't say the song is in those two songs' league... not quite in their league... I don't think it's in their league. I'm playing it obsessively but I'll get over it, I'm sure. (Right?) The words aren't remotely as interesting. But the fact that I can even make the comparison, some starlet doing Courtney style vocals to an almost "Anarchy" quality tune and coming within range, despite not really having the pipes...

I completely disagree about Micky; he was a great singer on some of those tracks! Listen to "Sometime in the Morning" and "As We Go Along" for proof. He didn't have so great a *rock* voice, but as Carole King interpreters go, I'd rank him third only to Dusty Springfield and Carole herself. (Mean Grace Slick impersonation on "Zor and Zam," too.)

This isn't fair. I'm sure that Alex experiences the song as "glossy" and "slick." When he hears those massed guitars and that burr of a voice and those la-la-la melodies, his ears register it all as dripping with slickness and gloss. His reaction is quite visceral. I don't doubt him. What frustrates me about ILX - not just about Alex - is that too many people treat their experience as bedrock; nothing can challenge it, nothing can dislodge it, hearing is believing. So too few people try to say where their experiences come from. I don't only mean that they refuse to analyze what in the song provoked their response, but that they refuse to analyze why they in particular are having their particular response. What is it about your friendships and upbringing and social allegiances and individual identity that result in your hearing this song in the way you hear it, feel this music in the way you feel it? It doesn't just happen that one person hears gloss where someone else is getting rocked to his socks.

(X post: I haven't listened to Mickey Dolenz in years, so I need to hear again. His voice certainly wasn't within a thousand spacetime warps of Jagger's or Burdon's, but he had moments when he could achieve something close to their achievements anyway. Don't know what Jagger would do with Carole King. Burdon's "Don't Bring Me Down" is fabulous.

Interesting point, except the payoff on record seems rather extraordinary. I think Chuck once complained about Iggy method acting on Raw Power or somewhere; and I once complained that Courtney tends to overract, to try to hard when she doesn't realize that she's got the chops anyway and doesn't need to force it. (I'm complaining about one of my favorite singers. I'm a born critic is what I am.) With Ashlee, I don't think it's method acting so much as she feels she needs to hide behind the bruise.

(And all that stuff Chuck and I are saying about the garage bands and punks are to suggest that thinking of "punk" as a genre and "punks" as a social set misses where punk rock actually comes from in the first place, not from a genre or from punks but from people who found themselves in a punk mood or in a pissy-hissy spat or in sudden war with oneself or from other people who simply copied a mood-spat-selfwar but somehow got it down definitively on record.)

But Frank, are those factors necessarily relevant in this case? I wonder if you're making the assumption that the root cause of people's criticism of some of this stuff is social and psychological rather than aesthetic.

When I hear a piece of music that I don't like (assuming I have some understanding of where it's coming from), my reaction is generally not to question the social and psychological constructs of my life that led me to the reaction. It is merely to reflect on the fact that I think the music isn't well written, isn't well played, isn't inspired in any way, etc.

Did I? I may have (and it may be) (oh wait, there it is in *Stairway to Hell*: "method acted nihilism; Iggy gives himself top billing, sings "like" a coyote, but he's *lying*; of course I still say I like the album a lot and rank it #104, when I should have ranked it a lot higher.). Anyway, I *definitely* used to accuse Courtney Love of method acting (and still believe that about some of her earliest stuff). "Courtney Love's nag-rock therapy screaming is a shtick," I say in *Stairway* (#7 among '90s albums) but when *Live Through This* first came out I hated most of it, and was even meaner about it.

And this is because "La La" is fodder for the teenyboppers and has no redeeming social blah blah blah and hence isn't encrusted by the decades' worth of piety that adheres to things like "Anarchy in the U.K." The future punk rock, if there is to be any, won't be caught dead calling itself "punk rock."

This starts getting to the point, but it's backwards. (Not exactly backwards. It depends which side of the fence you're on. It makes as much sense backwards, anyway.)

Critics who favor transgression, who look for love in all the wrong places, who like it when punk pops up its head in music that's nowhere near traditional punk, will grab hold of an Ashlee Simpson as a totem. Her music is *better* than punk, because it's bringing punk to a place where there are still some unconverted to preach to. Even better if the artist is reddish rather than bluish, mallish as opposed to boho.

But the desire to make Ashlee one of those totems outstrips her success at transgression. Like, not *all* red-statish mallsters who adopt punk are going to be good at it, you know? So the reverse equation may also be true -- some people just can't conceive of someone from Ashlee's social demographic making bad punk, because someone who's so ripe a transgressive symbol as Ashlee can't possibly have missed the mark. Like, it's at least possible that Alex is saying that though he's down with transgression, Ashlee just isn't doing it for him. (If it sounds like I think he's right, I do, though I like Ashlee just fine. Not that I'm against transgressive totems, either. Big$Rich work quite well for me. But to me it sure looks and sounds like punk is something Ashlee picked up at the mall. She spent too much on it too, and didn't get the right kind. She looks uncomfortable in it, unconvincing, something that could never be said of Joan Jett. Which would all be beside the point if the hooks were better. You can reward her for trying, but if you reward her too much by comparing her to name-your-favorite-artists-of-all-time it oversells the case and turns people away from a useful line of argument. Overzealousness knows no ideology. Important half-failures are still half-failures. I mean, as Bob Christgau might say in a generous mood, B+.)

The main thing, maybe, is this -- for punk to have any power as transgression, there needs to be a little place somewhere where punk traditionalism, in all its preaching-to-the-converted, bohemian, elitist, purist glory, *exists*. Otherwise there'd be nothing to transgress. So the world sure needs its Alex in NYCs just as much as its Frank Kogans. Its when they're on the same page that it's time to start worrying.

Really? I've never met such a person, not even once. Where do such mythical beasts live?

(Not that I disagree with everything else you've said, mind you.)

>Really? I've never met such a person, not even once. Where do such mythical beasts live?

Maybe I lurk around on ILM too much, so you're right, maybe these mythical beasts don't live anywhere in the real world. But whenever these discussions come up, the artists in question *always* seem to be picked out of the same pool. Ashlee, Britney, Montgomery Gentry, Brooks & Dunn, Skynard, ZZ Top, whatever. And I like all of them, which makes my argument a tougher sell, admittedly. But when red-state artists tilt toward transgression, they seem to get the big benefit of the doubt. Where's a thread on a conservative artist who crosses genres and is *bad* ad it?

Not that people start threads too often on things they don't like. Argh, it's so hard to prove a negative!

Anthony, whether you hear punk in Ashlee or not (I don't see how the statement quoted in your first post in any way DEPENDS on thinking Ashlee has any punk in her), how exactly do Alex's comments on this thread NOT suggest that he "can't conceive of someone from Ashlee's social demographic making punk, because someone like Ashlee can't possibly have the attitudes that makes one a punk, can't possibly understand"? "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"? "Just because "punk" might arguably mean many things, doesn't mean it means everything. Gloppy, cookie-cutter, glossy, sickly, candy-colored, slickly-produced teenybopper radio fodder it does NOT mean"? "Teen pop", "aspirations for stardom," "teenybopper radio fodder", "trussed up in conventionally 'punk' finery" --sorry, but that IS her social demographic. I'm not even saying I necessarily agree with Frank's statement there; I'd have to give it more thought. And like Sang Freud (and Frank) I am *glad* Alex is on this thread; he makes the discussion *better,* and he exemplifies an important point of view. Hell, he might even be *right*, for all I know. But if his dismissals on this thread aren't an example of thinking punk from Ashlee's demographic is impossible, they're certainly a pretty good imitation.

But I guess what I'm saying is that if we're so sure about the future, maybe we'll be blindsided when it doesn't turn out like that at all.

Rolling 2005 Country Thread

People write as much there about what Big & Rich, Broooks and Dunn, Montgomery Gentry etc (and countless other such acts) do wrong as about what they do right. None of those acts get a free ride, and neither does anybody else. Doesn't seem uncritical to me at all.

Well, yeah -- see what Frank said about Latin freestyle in 1987 (which he mentions above). I think that was part of his point. But hey, being blindsided might be part of the fun, you know?

Well, if the Duhks or Donna the Buffalo or Patrica Vonne or the Warsaw Village Band or Dallas Wayne or Bill Kirchen (all of whom I like, and praise on that thread) (and who, first off, are in some ways MORE conservative than the Nashville acts you've decided to rope together as "conservative" for some reason I don't quite get) made as good an album as Miranda Lambert's, they might rise farther up the pole. I'm still not sure what your point is. That people there tend to prefer pop country to alt country? Well, some do. I do! But that doesn't mean I accept the former or criticize the latter blindly, or that I don't like lots of the latter better than lots of the former. (And there are people on there who like alt-country way more than I do. Edd Hurt and Don Allred defend it quite often, it seems to me.)

and ...

>"Teen pop", "aspirations for stardom," "teenybopper radio fodder", "trussed up in conventionally 'punk' finery" --sorry, but that IS her social demographic<

So, he's being accused of bias? It's not that he just thinks that Ashlee Simpson - 'trussed up in etc.' with her 'teenybopper radio fodder' - happens to stink; it's that he couldn't possibly conceive of someone like her ever doing something good?

(And people defend Steve Earle on there too, come to think of it!)

xp

But either way, this question should really end "punk," not "good," Tim. The question is whether Alex could possibly conceive of someone like her ever doing something punk (whether it's good or not).

Passive aggressively yours,

Frank

And Alex, I think you have a lot to teach me. I just wonder how to drag your knowledge out of you.

(Back to the day gig.)

Pure projection, and wrong. NO ONE actually thinks this. come on now, we are ten years past both Dookie and Nevermind, for God's sake. It's been done, and much better.

"Hell, [Alex] might even be *right*, for all I know."

He is.

Parting comment: Ashlee Simpson's is simply not Punk Rock. If an alien from another world appeared and earnestly asked to be shown examples of Punk Rock, would you cite Ashlee?

wiDow