Rules Of The Game #10: Embracing The Ashlee Whirlpool

[koganbot]

The Rules Of The Game #10: Embracing The Ashlee Whirlpool



Still think my writing suffers from a bit of stage fright at LVW, and I've only scratched the surface with Ashlee and don't say much about the sound. But I like this, hope it'll open up Ashlee for some of you the way my Pazz & Jop piece opened up Eminem for some people back in early 2001.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

[UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html]

(Oh, and to answer the question that LVW poses in the subhead, I way prefer Ashlee to Alanis, but I think Ashlee's best, "La La" and "Shadow" and "I Am Me," gets edged out by my favorite couple of Beatles songs ("She Loves You" and "You Can't Do That"). I've always hated "Let It Be," however.)

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I think you've helped me finally figured out why I don't put that much importance on lyrics. An example: I will always love singing along to 'Heard It On The Grapevine' despite never having been in a similar situation. The lyrics are memorable and tell a great story, but I like the song because of the menacing arrangement and Marvin's brilliant vocal line (the Gladys Knight version doesn't do it for me at all). He could be singing about Kraft cheese slices for all I care.

Unless lyrics are witty (best done by rappers - Eminem, Dizzee, Princess Superstar), nonsensical/surreal (Fergie, TashBed, Bextor) or unbelievably catchy ("ella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh", "Muteeeya-don't-panic-panic"), the song will have to be pretty boring musically before I give the lyrics any attention.

I say all this because your article is focusing on Ashlee's words - maybe hers, maybe her writing team's - and reading all this meaning into it. You may be right and Ashlee could be a brilliant poet, but I find it very difficult to believe that there's anything more to most pop lyrics than whether they rhyme or scan well. I mean, I used to write bad poetry 'song lyrics' as a teenager just like everyone else! I couldn't believe anyone would want to hear about my trivial problems so always binned them. And (at the moment) I can't believe Ashlee has anything to say that I want to hear, either. I'm willing to be proved wrong but she's got an uphill struggle to convert me and my lyric-ignoring tastes.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I am willing to be seduced by lyrics, because sometimes they crystallise a feeling (one I have, or have had, or could imagine having) so absolutely perfectly. That thrill of emotional recognition is a perennial pop pleasure for me, just as much so now I'm less angstful myself (thank goodness).

Something I probably resist doing - and I think Frank is brave to try - is unpicking the compact emotion-moments and trying to work out what they say and how. Taking lyrical moments out of a song-context and examining them runs the risk of making them seem like aphorisms - it's a hit and miss process; the "broken in me" lyric, as explained by FK, does seem impressive, ditto the T-Shirt lyric, but some of the others come across as more banal.

So I'm interested in how the sound and voice and delivery backs up or pulls against the words Ashless is using.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Ashless?? Erm.

"The T-Shirt" lyric being that one skyecaptain quotes a lot, I don't think it's actually in Frank's piece.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Haha I am totes going to start calling her Ashless now (cf Hilarity)!

[koganbot]

But "Ashless" is too negative, in that it sounds as if it's minimizing something, identifying a lack, whereas Ashlee Simpson contains multitudes (that's the point of my piece!). Of course, "Hilarity" could be taken as negative too, but it's too ebullient to be really negative. How about Ashilee, as if she were an adverb. "We were wobbling and prancing so Ashilee." By the way, you would love her reality show, at least what I've seen of season one. I don't think what she shows the camera is ultimately as interesting as what she created in the recording studio, but there are aspects of her on camera that I wish she'd get into the music. I had no idea she was such a scamp and a sprite, how much mischievous motion there is in her.

[koganbot]

I used to write bad poetry 'song lyrics' as a teenager just like everyone else! I couldn't believe anyone would want to hear about my trivial problems so always binned them.

Seems like a crucial passage. But, you know, you do write about your problems occasionally and about your ideas and your triumphs and joys all the time. It's on your livejournal. You don't write your life down to the extent that poptasticuk and piratemoggy do, but that's not the point. Putting words to music is a basic way of communicating, has been for milliennia, and the restrictions of line and rhyme, and the addition of vocal timbre and rhythms, have a way of intensifying everything so that the ordinary can jump out at you as extraordinary. E.g., I think the following is actually quite profound, an entire ethic, when you hear it, in the context of a dance, or a life: "Let the music play/He won't get away/This groove he can't ignore/Just keep the groove and then/He'll come back to you again/Let the music play/He wont get away/This groove he can't ignore/He won't leave you anymore." But bare on the page they're rather "eh." And I don't particularly agree with the message anyway. (Why shouldn't you push a river? Why wait on the groove? Why trust it?) But the music adds persuasion. But the words add persuasion to the music, too. And why would you shut your ear to the persuasiveness of the words? Is there some kind of rebellion here (against your problems, that probably aren't so trivial to live through, or about some capital-M Meaning that your problems don't stack up well against, or some capital-Q quality and some capital-I Importance that good music dances circles around and that bad music lays on you like a dead fish)?

I think I'd have my work cut out for me to explain how "Let The Music Play" works as greatness. I'd have to give it a whole context for it to shine forth, and that's probably beyond my ability. Ashlee's easier because she's always pushing back against rivers and fighting against her inner grooves, which is easier for me to write down. Her struggles are fairly ordinary because life is ordinary, for the most part, and she's not writing down holocausts or epic battles. And it's "ella-ella" and "la-la" and the quick eloquence or the coming together of meter and rhyme that give life - ordinary life in song, that is - its flavor. And sometimes you're also - while, I'm also - getting flavor and a sense of mattering from the the analytical abstraction with which Ashlee lays out her issues. (As well I should, as someone who likes laying out issues with analytical abstraction.)

Often a song has won me before I even know what the lyrics are, and one of my absolute favorites ever is Paradisimo's "Bailando," which is in a language I don't understand. And when I heard them in English in Angelina's cover version I immediately forgot them. But often, when I do get to the lyrics, and the lyrics matter to me, they can then shape a whole bunch of emotions about the song, and even reshape the sound for me. Kelly Clarkson's "Because Of You" was soft and sad until I really paid attention to the words, and from thereafter the song was very loud, was wailing in my ears.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

> But, you know, you do write about your problems occasionally and about your ideas and your triumphs and joys all the time.

Ah but the difference there is that although I usually write with an audience in mind (hence less focus on my problems and more on squeezing humour out of the yoghurt stone), I'm not writing to music. If I could write music as easily as I could write sentences about it (and dammit, I'd love to - wouldn't we all?) then I wouldn't bother with words.

>I'd have my work cut out for me to explain how "Let The Music Play" works as greatness.

Hearing that song for the first time on an electro compilation, it stood out because I picked up on that "burr-bing, burr-dip-bing" noise - the lyrics didn't grab me at all. I just don't think I'm wired to pick up on them. Another example is Kylie's 'Come Into My World'. I obviously know Kylie as an artist very well, and had heard the single half a dozen times when it was out (6?) years ago. But a few months ago I saw the video on telly and gave it my full attention for the first time. By the end I had started crying because it the song was so gorgeous. I had no idea what she was singing in the 'I need your love, like night needs morning' bit but the melody was all euphoric and soaring and felt like she was going to burst (I'm welling up now just thinking about it). The lyrics are perfect but on their own they'd never make me sob like a big old soppy wuss. And even when they are coupled with a great song and a great personality like Kylie singing them, all they do is stop the song from being spoiled (like if inspection of the lyrics happened to reveal Ms Minogue was singing about eg killing babies with spikes).

> But often, when I do get to the lyrics, and the lyrics matter to me, they can then shape a whole bunch of emotions about the song, and even reshape the sound for me.

The problem is, is that this doesn't usually affect me in a positive way. Popstars telling me what they've written their songs about spoils what *I* think the song should be about. Let's take Nelly Furtado's 'Promiscuous Girl' as an example: I couldn't tell you exactly what Nelly and Tim are yabbering to each other about, but I know from the tone and interplay of their voices that they're both trying their best to be cool and indifferent & as such are spiting themselves out of a potentially good relationship, oh the ironing etc. That's my idea of it - if it turned out from the lyrics that say, Nelly was being cool but Tim was being all whining and pleading for Nelly to go out with him, it would change the angle and remove the tension from the song. I'm fairly sure this isn't the case here, but it really annoys me when you learn the true nature of the song and can't go back to why you first liked it so much, or you get a lovely song about "oooh I love him" and turns out to be a clumsy metaphor for God or drugs or something. I feel cheated! I want to indulge my imagination! And most importantly, I don't like having my assumptions proved wrong. :-) I've just realise how closed-minded and unadventurous that sounds, but where response-to-music is concerned, it's such a personal thing anyway that I guess I'll keep listening the way I like it.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Luckily, as we know, no songs are about drukqs.

[koganbot]

Nelly F. is an interesting case in that the few times I've paid close attention to her lyrics she's come across as a pretentious idiot. And on the stuff I like of hers ("Say It Right" and "All Good Things") this doesn't matter as I find a way of ignoring them. Or their badness can even enrich the songs: I've managed to compartmentalize so the burnt ache of the voice can move me and the fact that she's desperately trying to communicate something though ridiculously bad lyrics also moves me (the poor thing) (well, she's crying all the way to the bank) but also there is the sheer joy of my relaying to someone else how terrible the words really are, an exuberance in pointing out the badness. And in doing so I even some value in the lyrics, in that, whatever flaw I find in Nelly F's words, I can't say they're timid.

In History Of Jop I'd have had no problem ticking Joan Osbourne's "One Of Us" despite the bad lyrics if I'd had any ticks left, so bad words aren't necessarily an impediment. Well, on that one the lyrics actually are something of an impediment but aren't debilitating, though I think the words inspired Osbourne to some cutesiness in delivery that I also don't like, but if the song were in another language delivered with the same moments of cutesiness I wouldn't notice them; the words highlight where the singing goes wrong.

It depends who's doing the singing, but postwar show music often doesn't work for me, and this is owing to arrangements that overemphasize the words and the wordplay and the wit or the plot elements so that the music loses its emotional force. I think some dance or even rock versions might help by de-emphasizing the plot points or whatever the singer is telegraphing about the character's psychology and moods, could find a way to let the music sing as music.

[koganbot]

Nelly's trying to communicate something THROUGH ridiculously bad lyrics, that is.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

it really annoys me when you learn the true nature of the song and can't go back to why you first liked it so much

Wait, why can't you listen to the lyrics and the delivery/music at the same time?

[koganbot]

Er, misquoted "Let The Music Play," so he keeps not ignoring the groove, over and over. It really goes:

Let the music play
He won't get away
Just keep the groove and then
He'll come back to you again
Let the music play
He won't get away
This groove he can't ignore
He won't leave you anymore

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I used to write bad poetry 'song lyrics' as a teenager just like everyone else!

But Ashlee's not writing bad poetry. If you're just listening to catchy choruses, you might think she is: catchy-chorus-wise, there's no discernible difference between Ashlee Simpson or Fefe Dobson or Avril Lavigne. But look what Ashlee can do that Avril can't: I'm always, always, always late / And my hair's a mess, even when it's straight. Two lines, and you've already got a clear character.

Avril's lyrics are...well, to be honest, I can't actually remember any Avril lyrics, hold on. Here we go: I can't stand the way you act, I just can't comprehend / I don't think that you can handle it / I'm way over, over it. It scans fine, it rhymes, it's even catchy--but she's just filling space and it shows. She doesn't finish her thought up in that first line. She doesn't need another "over" in that last one. She doesn't actually say anything--and that's why it's so easy to dismiss her as brainless and bratty and incapable of writing a good song on her own.

Or here's a better comparison:

Stay there, come closer, it's at your own risk / Yeah, you know how it is / Life can be a bitch.

Uh, okay, I guess so. Versus:

Shut up! Come back! No I didn't really mean to say that / I'm mixed up, so what? / Yeah, you want me, so you're messed up too.

These are from Avril's "Runaway" and Ashlee's "Love Me for Me," respectively, which are essentially the same song: The Messy Girl's Guide to Love. Except that Avril is unfocused and indistinct, where Ashlee is clear and meaningful.

Avril meanders from her own bad day (some vague shit about crashing the car and her phone being out of range, which I guess happens if you're in Canada) to her push/pull lyric, to some more vague shit about life being a bitch and how she just wants to scream and lose control and run away.

Ashlee stays focused: this is a song about herself and her guy, and the conflict between wanting him closer and wanting her space, from beginning to end. Her push/pull lyric is the center of the song. And she manages to slip in the best lines of all time: My head is spinning but my heart is in the right place / Sometimes it has to have itself a little earthquake. And the other best lines of all time: Here I am, perfect as I'm ever gonna be / Stick around, I'm not the kind of girl you wanna leave. And more best lines of all time: It's been three days / You come around here like you know me / Your stuff, my place / Next thing you know, you'll be using my toothpaste. See how much life is contained within those three lines? These people, this place, the essential conflict. Those are the opening lines, by the way--she doesn't waste time, or words.

And that's the thing. Ashlee's writing pretty fucking good poetry: detailed, evocative, every word earning its place, with a voice that's strong and distinct. Avril's writing bad poetry, because Avril operates under your assumption: pop lyrics don't have to do anything other than rhyme or scan well.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

All fair points, but sometimes one humdinger of a line trumps a whole lyric comprised of thoughtful, "fucking good poetry", so...

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Oh, well then.

[koganbot]

Right, it doesn't have to be fucking good poetry to be a good song, but it sure helps to have those lyric chops if you want to pack a young woman and a living world into a few lines of verse (esp. given that the poet(s) in question actually produce some humdingers themselves: "You can throw me like a lineman/I like it better when it hurts" sure grabs the attention, as does "What's she got that I don't have" as a song opener, and "On a Monday I am waiting, Tuesday I am fading, and by Wednesday I can't sleep," which isn't just good fast exposition, it throws you right into its mood), though the purpose of my piece wasn't to point out how the poetry worked but to show the mind that was at work even where the poetry faltered, and how this young woman with her normal troubled past and her normal troubled and joyous romances gave voice to what felt at stake in that life and those loves.

[koganbot]

Maybe to sum up what I'm feeling from the convo here is that there isn't a way to listen to songs, or a "way that songs work" - there are lots of ways, either way - but that giving Ashlee close attention sure helps me to see more, feel more, and makes the songs rock harder in me and makes the humdingers hum more fiercely. Just like in life, I'd say, and the music of Aly & A.J., for instance, grows richer everytime someone here posts about it.

SPOILER, but you've all already heard "Pieces Of Me," right? That line "On a Monday I am waiting, Tuesday I am fading, and by Wednesday I can't sleep," gets reflected back at the end, in new circumstances, and I find this transformation heartwarming: "On a Monday I am waiting, Tuesday I am fading into your arms so I can dream..."

[koganbot]

Thank you Nia!

You know, I'd really like to see you in print, I mean in magazines that pay money and with readerships in the hundreds or thousands. You're funny, you're smart, you've got a strong personality, and you have ideas. (Of course, Kat and Tom should be in print too, but people are telling them that all the time.) Anyway, would you email me at edcasual at earthlink dot net? Not that I'll be in position to do much for you (New Times taking over Voice Inc. pretty much has stomped out my influence), but I'd like to ask permission to quote various things you've written, and to use your last name, which I don't even know, etc.

(I don't know Kat's last name either. I'm assuming that it's not Stevens.)

I will say on Avril's behalf that she can be moving at times. "Unwanted" has a piercing sadness, and the words work for being so simple. And I love "Mobile" too, and she struggles with the metaphor (she's saying that she's an Alexander Calder type mobile, that she's spinning around), which is somehow appropriate.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

It is Stevens!!

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!

Me too! Check your email.

I do like Avril sometimes. When she's going for spare and lonely, like in "I'm With You," the simplicity works in her favor--and the space suits her voice anyway. Haven't heard "Unwanted" or "Mobile," though. (Or maybe I have and didn't notice. I had both her albums for about a week, then traded them away.)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

A quick reply as I've got to keep an eye on dinner - my bad lyrics were definitely more like Avril's than Ashlee's!

I can't confess to knowing anything about Ashlee other than what Frank and the other poptimists dudes have mentioned, and this is why I'm being a little harsh on her. I know Avril is bonkers - I know WHY she writes bad poetry. Frank says above that the personal 'problems' lyrics can be like reading everyday livejournal entries, but on LJ I'm reading about my friends who I have a personal interest in even if they're writing about what they had for lunch. I know Avril and can tolerate her tantrums and vague hand-waving. I didn't even know what Ashlee looked like until I saw the picture at the top of this entry and so I don't trust her - how do I know she means what she says? Anyone could have handed her a sheet of paper with that on it. I don't doubt she's a great writer, but I'm just playing devil's advocate here. Could we be reading all this meaning into some words that just happened to fall out of her pen one day? That she saw on the side of a bus? I think I've been spoilt by Xenomania in this respect :-)

[koganbot]

What difference does that make, if they fell out her pen or she saw them on the side of a bus, or if someone gave them to her on a piece of paper? They don't mean anything less that way. They still create a woman in song. And I have a personal interest in piratemoggy 'cause I read her livejournal, and maybe she's a fiction and you and Tom alternate writing her journal entries for "her," and so what? I have a personal interest in Ashlee 'cause I've heard her songs. I feel here that you think song lyrics shouldn't contain Ashlee's richness, like it's taboo for pop to have the nuances that, I don't know, real people have.

[koganbot]

Of course, I doubt that Shannon's lyrics* (who wrote them? did she?) tell me a damn thing about her, and they're tremendous lyrics and tremendous songs anyway, they put you in a situation, on a dance floor or into that night.

(Or what they tell you about Shannon is that she belongs to the disco-freestyle world that produced such songs and such sentiments.)

*I only know two of them, "Give Me Tonight" and "Let The Music Play."

Hope you enjoy your dinner; maybe it'll be in your book of recipes, along with commentary on dance music? By the way, I think Kylie's "Spinnin' Around" has tremendous lyrics, and it was co-written by Kara DioGuardi, one of Ashlee's co-writers!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

My favourite Avril lyric is "LET'S TALK IT OVER IT'S NOT LIKE WE'RE DEAD" because it is JUST SO BAD (and then she goes on to rhyme it with IN A CITY SO DEAD!) (except she doesn't, Cis and I worked out the rhyme scheme and it's aabb not abab) (but it's still quite bad because in the first verse a=b)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Why all this trust for Avril, who's been slammed multiple times by multiple co-writers for plagiarism and/or laziness, but not Ashlee, who's got a whole television show documenting her involvement in her album? At some point, you didn't know what Avril looked like, either. When did you decide she means what she says? (Unless when you say you know Avril, you mean you actually know Avril, in which case...well, feel free to tell her how much I hate her.)

I mean, I'd love to believe that Kara DioGuardi wrote everything ever, but as Frank always reminds me, the things Kara writes with other people don't come close to the things Kara writes with Ashlee. And maybe these words just fell out of her pen, or she saw them on a bus, and we shouldn't read so much into it (which I don't think is true, anyway, because consistently good writing doesn't happen by accident)--but then again, maybe Nabokov and Shakespeare were just fucking around, so let's cancel class and call it a day.

But now you're talking authorship, which doesn't really have anything to do with the fact that pop lyrics should do more than rhyme nicely. Good lyrics are good lyrics, no matter who wrote them. And actually, wait, you must care about lyrics if you care whether the singer "means what she says." If it were just a bunch of pleasant-sounding nonsense, why would it matter whether she's truthful or passionate?