Ashlee scared, not petulant
Aug. 10th, 2007 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotSeeing as it's been more than 24 hours since I started an Ashlee Simpson thread, I decided it was time for another. A couple of days ago I jotted these thoughts:
The show (her MTV reality show from 2004) is concerned with something else, of course [something other than exploring the creative process of how a record is made]: getting this wildly energetic, girly, appealing, half-scatterbrained, sweet, emotional personality on camera. Which is no problem since she's not the least bit camera-shy - she seeks cameras, she used the camera as a gimmick and a prop for getting a new boyfriend, she'll let you see her moods and her goof-ups and she'll show the entire snit-fit and mini-tempest she pulled when she expected Ryan to sing a song for her at his Valentine's Day show but he didn't. There's something very spontaneous about all this - immediacy works on camera - Ashlee instigating and Ashlee reacting. But you don't know how much the personality is a vehicle for the person and how much it conceals the person. And you don't know how much it conceals of the artist. (And of course you don't know what was left on the cutting room floor, or who was making the decisions; her dad's the executive producer, but I'm guessing MTV had a lot of say.) In any event you get moods but you don't get musings. You get the present but no discussion of the reach of the past (except bits where she's worried the record company will try to turn her into her sister).
Which is to say that a whole bunch that makes it onto record is missing from the show, lots of admirable agony and analysis. And you can say, "But of course. It's her job to make good powerful music, not to match show personality to record personality, and the agony and the analysis don't have to have real-life correlatives anyway." Which in principle I'm fine with, but I do think that part of what makes an album like this work aesthetically and emotionally (not to mention commercially) is that it does claim a connection to her life, that the musings and analyses are hers especially, not to mention the social markers and the musical...
That's where I got interrupted. Not altogether right about the show containing no musings. There's one point, at the end of episode four, where she's explaining that she'd blown the Valentine's Day thing way out of proportion (a puzzled Ryan had explained to her afterwards that he couldn't have sung the song yet, as he hadn't finished writing it). And she tells us that, you know, she's nineteen, she still needs to grow. Interesting for me, at age 53 watching this, because despite the basic differences between me and her in style (I didn't have any sisters, and my brother's kids are both boys, so the whole girly-girl thing is another world to me), there are a couple of things I identify with extraordinarily. If you actually see the incident, Ashlee's reaction makes perfect sense. It's not yet clear to her just what's going to happen with her and Ryan, but she's telling all her girls that Ryan had sung her a song he'd written for her and we're all going to see him do it when he plays the Knitting Factory on Valentine's Day. And there they are sitting in the front row, and Ryan onstage gives this introduction to a song, saying how it's about what seems to be the beginning of something, where you might be falling in love, and in the audience Ashlee is all primed, and he starts singing, and Ashlee all of a sudden is saying, but it's not the song, it's not for me. I can just imagine whoever was watching the rushes going "holy fuck; this is dynamite."
So far I think the show doesn't go nearly as deep as the record, but it does capture this lunatic mischievous energy of hers that I wish the record had more of (and remember, this is my favorite album of the '00s). Back in episode three Ryan'd asked her to play the girl in the video for his next single. At the shoot she's warning the director that she's going to do something not in the script. So the scene has them walking down the sidewalk, and then all of a sudden she pushes him against the wall and starts tongue-kissing him. And I certainly got the impression from the show that this was something that had yet to happen in real life. Ryan had been a friend for over a year - lived in the same building, I think - but this shoot is where Ashlee seizes her opportunity. (And then that night a friend of hers remarks that Ashlee and Ryan have been making out all evening.)
In episode four Ashlee decides that she needs to tone up for her own video, so she and a girl friend go to a ballet class, a form of exercise. Ashlee explains to us that she'd been a ballet student from ages 3 to 13 (and apparently had been dead serious about it; in an interview she gave to Cosmopolitan a year later she described a six-month period at ballet school where she'd basically stopped eating, she was so worried about how she'd look in tights). And here she and her friend have their hands on that ballet bar-thing, and are doing the ballet moves as the leader calls out instructions, and Ashlee keeps getting these giggle fits. She's moving OK, while the friend seems to be screwing up. But they're laughing and it's like, what is this that we're doing? So they hightail it out of there, trying to keep their hysteria down to low volumes, Ashlee whispering that it was like the guy was speaking another language. Well, guess I'll have to find a different form of exercise! More giggles.
Anyway, here's something, this laughing energy that she can surround a situation with, but the laughter also giving her a way out, if necessary. I think you get this a little bit on record, in "Love Me For Me" and "La La" and "Burning Up," but I wonder if there's a way they (she and her collaborators) can turn it up a notch, give it a twist of wildness. (I'm thinking of that moment in "Kill Me" where Eminem suddenly shifts to a commentator voice and goes, "Oh now he's raping his own mother, abusing a whore, snorting coke, and we gave him a Rolling Stone cover?")
Um, my moments of identifying with Ashlee. Episode three. In just a couple of hours she and John Shanks have knocked out what she thinks is a great song, "Surrender" (my least favorite on the album, by the way, but I do think it's strong), and now she's hearing through one of the A&R guys that Jordan Schur, the guy in charge of the album at Geffen, isn't satisfied. So we watch Ashlee in all these different conversations, crying on the phone, they want me to be little Hilary Duff, this is like what they did to my sister, tried to turn her into Britney, and they're trying to turn me into Jessica, but I don't like that kind of pop music, I never have, I turned down two movies to make this but I'm not going to make the album if it's a pop album. (Great moment. The A&R guy telling her that Jordan says it sounds like Garbage. I mean, not like garbage but like the band Garbage.) So, Ashlee finally meets with Jordan, turns out he likes the song, has no objections to the sound at all, which reminds him of Hole's "Celebrity Skin." But he thinks they need to rework the song's form, something needs to come through in the chorus that isn't in it yet.
On some thread somewhere Nia said that Ashlee was being petulant. But I don't read Ashlee that way at all. But then, I identify here with Ashlee 100 percent. It's not petulance, it's terror, a built-in script that says she's never going to be accepted for who she is, and - maybe I'm projecting this - but a terror that she doesn't have it inside to stand up for who she is, or doesn't even have it in herself to be who she is. So what we're watching is Ashlee fighting battles in advance, creating backup, rehearsing arguments.
I remember back in 1991 I submitted my Corina piece to Joe Levy at the Voice; Joe liked it but told me he was so swamped he didn't have time to do a line edit over the phone with me, but he only was going to change a couple of words, they wouldn't be significant, would I trust him? Sure, I said. Then the piece comes out, it's full of all these changes, the life has been drained out, it's dead on the page. I'm racked with pain. Then I look back at what I'd originally submitted and - whaddya know - Joe'd done exactly what he said he'd do, had made only a couple of changes, insignificant, the rest was exactly as I'd written it. So any deadness in the prose was my own. (The piece is actually pretty strong.) This is by no means an isolated incident.
The show (her MTV reality show from 2004) is concerned with something else, of course [something other than exploring the creative process of how a record is made]: getting this wildly energetic, girly, appealing, half-scatterbrained, sweet, emotional personality on camera. Which is no problem since she's not the least bit camera-shy - she seeks cameras, she used the camera as a gimmick and a prop for getting a new boyfriend, she'll let you see her moods and her goof-ups and she'll show the entire snit-fit and mini-tempest she pulled when she expected Ryan to sing a song for her at his Valentine's Day show but he didn't. There's something very spontaneous about all this - immediacy works on camera - Ashlee instigating and Ashlee reacting. But you don't know how much the personality is a vehicle for the person and how much it conceals the person. And you don't know how much it conceals of the artist. (And of course you don't know what was left on the cutting room floor, or who was making the decisions; her dad's the executive producer, but I'm guessing MTV had a lot of say.) In any event you get moods but you don't get musings. You get the present but no discussion of the reach of the past (except bits where she's worried the record company will try to turn her into her sister).
Which is to say that a whole bunch that makes it onto record is missing from the show, lots of admirable agony and analysis. And you can say, "But of course. It's her job to make good powerful music, not to match show personality to record personality, and the agony and the analysis don't have to have real-life correlatives anyway." Which in principle I'm fine with, but I do think that part of what makes an album like this work aesthetically and emotionally (not to mention commercially) is that it does claim a connection to her life, that the musings and analyses are hers especially, not to mention the social markers and the musical...
That's where I got interrupted. Not altogether right about the show containing no musings. There's one point, at the end of episode four, where she's explaining that she'd blown the Valentine's Day thing way out of proportion (a puzzled Ryan had explained to her afterwards that he couldn't have sung the song yet, as he hadn't finished writing it). And she tells us that, you know, she's nineteen, she still needs to grow. Interesting for me, at age 53 watching this, because despite the basic differences between me and her in style (I didn't have any sisters, and my brother's kids are both boys, so the whole girly-girl thing is another world to me), there are a couple of things I identify with extraordinarily. If you actually see the incident, Ashlee's reaction makes perfect sense. It's not yet clear to her just what's going to happen with her and Ryan, but she's telling all her girls that Ryan had sung her a song he'd written for her and we're all going to see him do it when he plays the Knitting Factory on Valentine's Day. And there they are sitting in the front row, and Ryan onstage gives this introduction to a song, saying how it's about what seems to be the beginning of something, where you might be falling in love, and in the audience Ashlee is all primed, and he starts singing, and Ashlee all of a sudden is saying, but it's not the song, it's not for me. I can just imagine whoever was watching the rushes going "holy fuck; this is dynamite."
So far I think the show doesn't go nearly as deep as the record, but it does capture this lunatic mischievous energy of hers that I wish the record had more of (and remember, this is my favorite album of the '00s). Back in episode three Ryan'd asked her to play the girl in the video for his next single. At the shoot she's warning the director that she's going to do something not in the script. So the scene has them walking down the sidewalk, and then all of a sudden she pushes him against the wall and starts tongue-kissing him. And I certainly got the impression from the show that this was something that had yet to happen in real life. Ryan had been a friend for over a year - lived in the same building, I think - but this shoot is where Ashlee seizes her opportunity. (And then that night a friend of hers remarks that Ashlee and Ryan have been making out all evening.)
In episode four Ashlee decides that she needs to tone up for her own video, so she and a girl friend go to a ballet class, a form of exercise. Ashlee explains to us that she'd been a ballet student from ages 3 to 13 (and apparently had been dead serious about it; in an interview she gave to Cosmopolitan a year later she described a six-month period at ballet school where she'd basically stopped eating, she was so worried about how she'd look in tights). And here she and her friend have their hands on that ballet bar-thing, and are doing the ballet moves as the leader calls out instructions, and Ashlee keeps getting these giggle fits. She's moving OK, while the friend seems to be screwing up. But they're laughing and it's like, what is this that we're doing? So they hightail it out of there, trying to keep their hysteria down to low volumes, Ashlee whispering that it was like the guy was speaking another language. Well, guess I'll have to find a different form of exercise! More giggles.
Anyway, here's something, this laughing energy that she can surround a situation with, but the laughter also giving her a way out, if necessary. I think you get this a little bit on record, in "Love Me For Me" and "La La" and "Burning Up," but I wonder if there's a way they (she and her collaborators) can turn it up a notch, give it a twist of wildness. (I'm thinking of that moment in "Kill Me" where Eminem suddenly shifts to a commentator voice and goes, "Oh now he's raping his own mother, abusing a whore, snorting coke, and we gave him a Rolling Stone cover?")
Um, my moments of identifying with Ashlee. Episode three. In just a couple of hours she and John Shanks have knocked out what she thinks is a great song, "Surrender" (my least favorite on the album, by the way, but I do think it's strong), and now she's hearing through one of the A&R guys that Jordan Schur, the guy in charge of the album at Geffen, isn't satisfied. So we watch Ashlee in all these different conversations, crying on the phone, they want me to be little Hilary Duff, this is like what they did to my sister, tried to turn her into Britney, and they're trying to turn me into Jessica, but I don't like that kind of pop music, I never have, I turned down two movies to make this but I'm not going to make the album if it's a pop album. (Great moment. The A&R guy telling her that Jordan says it sounds like Garbage. I mean, not like garbage but like the band Garbage.) So, Ashlee finally meets with Jordan, turns out he likes the song, has no objections to the sound at all, which reminds him of Hole's "Celebrity Skin." But he thinks they need to rework the song's form, something needs to come through in the chorus that isn't in it yet.
On some thread somewhere Nia said that Ashlee was being petulant. But I don't read Ashlee that way at all. But then, I identify here with Ashlee 100 percent. It's not petulance, it's terror, a built-in script that says she's never going to be accepted for who she is, and - maybe I'm projecting this - but a terror that she doesn't have it inside to stand up for who she is, or doesn't even have it in herself to be who she is. So what we're watching is Ashlee fighting battles in advance, creating backup, rehearsing arguments.
I remember back in 1991 I submitted my Corina piece to Joe Levy at the Voice; Joe liked it but told me he was so swamped he didn't have time to do a line edit over the phone with me, but he only was going to change a couple of words, they wouldn't be significant, would I trust him? Sure, I said. Then the piece comes out, it's full of all these changes, the life has been drained out, it's dead on the page. I'm racked with pain. Then I look back at what I'd originally submitted and - whaddya know - Joe'd done exactly what he said he'd do, had made only a couple of changes, insignificant, the rest was exactly as I'd written it. So any deadness in the prose was my own. (The piece is actually pretty strong.) This is by no means an isolated incident.
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-10 09:11 pm (UTC)"Eyes Wide Open" was a much better song when I projected the Orange Bowl incident onto the lyrics instead of knowing it was about a ghost. I imagined her standing there, in those few moments before the crowd showed teeth, just feeling the wind, waiting for something to happen.
I think the groundwork's already been done for Ashlee reconfiguration in quasi-bohemia, but (1) I don't think it will happen with enough force to make a difference (i.e. unless she makes a major comeback, it'll just be one of those of-its-time things that people look back on with guarded nostalgia, a la every VH1 show ever), (2) I don't think quasi-bohemia rockcritdom has anything to offer Ashlee (she sounds savviest, I think, in season 2 discussing the SNL fall-out (paraphrasing from memory): "The interviews and TV shows don't matter. TRL is important; that's where my fans are." I think Ashlee has a lot to offer rockcritdom, but rockcritics by and large aren't looking for the kind of everyday profundity Ashlee has to offer them (because most will find it in indie music, where mundanity just is; it's built into the aesthetic -- bring in a friggin' string section and you're "orchestral," while I didn't even NOTICE the strings all that consciously in "Shadow" until I saw them record the strings -- Ashlee yawning in the studio -- for the album on her reality show two years later!!!). But indie usually doesn't have as much to tell me about small-L life -- the production of the music is small-L already, so no one has to risk naivete or embarrassment to wring small-L life out of the music; mostly you get preciousness or cleverness or competence (twee, indie pop, bread-n-butter indie rock stuff). But for a guy like me (relatively sheltered, reasonably brainy, adventurous in my head but cautious in the street), embarrassment is absolutely crucial to connection; it's how I gain trust (going back a bit to what Kat was saying the other day). Something has to be on the line.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-10 09:51 pm (UTC)You want the music to make you blush.
"Eyes Wide Open" might have been about the film, which I've never seen. By the way, I think the lyrics work well on that song; it isn't really about anything except that you've seen something and it makes you afraid. Very effective, strong voice but a surrounding mood that threatens to crush it. But it doesn't give me a human story in the way that everything on the first album does. So it doesn't make me fall in love with her. (Not that she's required to do this on every song.)
My guess is that SNL effectively closed the door on her getting a wider pop audience, going beyond her MTV TRL fan base. (I wonder if all those magazine covers she got in late 2005/early 2006 got her anything: Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Elle, Jane, Marie Claire, Teen Vogue.)