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

[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.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The difference is, I am interested in Moggy FIRST and that is why I read her journal. As with my Fergie example above, it's not until I get to know a pop artist that I start paying attention to what their lyrics might mean or where they got them from. It might not matter whether the lyrics were bus-originated or from the darkest depths of Fergie's psyche, but my prior knowledge of Fergie deems which would be the more likely (and here's where my reasoning goes a bit fuzzy...) and from that I start inferring whether she has a sense of humour, whether I should feel sorry for her, should I be inspired to emulate her, should I spend my valuable listening time on something else, should I buy her entire back catalogue... It IS important! To me, anyway.

>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.

Not quite. I understand that other people can place an awful lot of importance on lyrical nuances, but my nuance-detector is honed towards music (and vocal delivery, so the voice counts as an instrument really). This might seem like I'm detaching from the 'human' (hmm, not the right word) side of pop somewhat but I just don't think I could cope with responding to lyrics in the same way as I do music. I'm overwhelmed to the point of tears by a tiny piano break in 'Come Into My World' - if I felt the same way about the words I wouldn't be able to listen to it without exploding.

[koganbot]

I think I understand. Anyway, I have no problem with how you write about music, so there must be something going right with how you listen to it. But I would say, to kind of tie up some ends here, that one reason I have an emotional investment in what you and Hazel and Jessica and Jeff write in your livejournals is that you're good writers and therefore you're in your words, and this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with personal content or writing down problems (Jeff rarely writes either, just gives you the flavor of his take on things, his own wording and habits creating a person in prose). But I don't believe I'm reading things into you and Hazel and Jessica and Jeff, just as I don't believe I'm reading things into Ashlee Simpson. I mean, her words say what they say, strongly; the tensions I see are there. Sure, my imagination reaches out to her words and fills in some spaces, just as it does when I read you. But you're the one who's been doubting that there's poetry in Ashlee's songs, or a human in there, while I'm sure of both. Which again, is not something I require of music, that it contain either poetry and rich characters, and of course a lot of the time when I get the character, I get it from the voice and the sound and the musical drama that accompanies the voice as much as from the words, or more. But when I do get this involvement with a human being, through song - John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Grace Slick, Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten, Spoonie Gee, Teena Marie, Axl Rose, Courtney Love, Eminem, Ashlee - the connection can be amazingly powerful. Of course, they always break my heart. (Odd one is David Johansen, who for two years was the greatest songwriter who ever lived, and what I connected with was the people in his songs and his attitude towards them, all the Miss Lonelys who were wrenching his sentimental heart.) By the way, I feel a lot towards Avril on her first album, the thin, fierce line of her voice.