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

Re: Me & lyrics

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Another good example, since Dave has brought up Marit Larsen, is "Don't Save Me". The internet is all, before I've even heard the song: "is this about her and Marion Raven? Marit says no, but..."

So I found myself forced to listen to the lyrics to try and divine every last drop of meaning from them. Which didn't matter too much in this case since it's a well-written song which survives (resists?) analysis. But it did deprive me of the pleasure of great song that sneaks up on you gradually.

Re: Me & lyrics

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Good phrase for it -- "resisting analysis." It's actually...Costelloish, really, like "reads the same way upside down" (ha, she means SOS! Cool! But...um, so what?), lots of wordplay but not a lot to really sink your teeth into lyricswise. Would probably suffer from teeth-sinking, really, since it worked for me as my sorta access point to her solo career -- if, say, "Under the Surface" was the first single, it'd be less likely to grab as many people (not that it grabbed that many outside the influence of Poptimists/Stylus/ILM anyway) who weren't already interested in following the various M's of M2M in their solo careers.