Ashlee is a trip and a half (and Timbo goes bubble metal?)

[koganbot]

Ashlee B-side on new "Outta My Head" EP:

Ashlee Simpson "Rule Breaker"

She's a fucking trip and a half: the intro, Ashlee playing dazed and drunk, at the end petulantly whining "Who turned off the music?" The "color outside the lines" bit is quite pretty, the rest not-bad funny bubble metal. It's not up there with "Outta My Head," but to my surprise, I'm now totally with where she's going artistically: heading for catchy and engaging while still pouring in her ongoing theme of "how do I work out what it is to be Ashlee?" (with all these voices in her head). So she's returning to her inner Gwen and merging it with her inner Courtney - though Ashlee's astonishingly naive if she doesn't realize there is a world of creeps who'll mocked her for calling herself a rule breaker. ("Who is Ashlee 'Corporate Puppet' Simpson to call herself a rule breaker?") Maybe she does know she'll be mocked and doesn't care, is actually aiming this at her own issues and her own friends (the ones who call her a brat and complain she gets away with murder) and isn't particularly looking or caring beyond that.

The lyrics set up a nice tension between being daddy's nicey-nicey little girl and being chaotic Miss Little Rulebreaker, except she's also implying that she doesn't want to grow up (to be the nice girl she was slated for)/doesn't want to leave the party. Also, though the themes are good, the lyrics lack her former eloquence, so maybe are further evidence that Kara and John and Shelly made her more articulate; but she made them more articulate too, and if we go by the hypothesis that John never had much to do with the lyrics (I don't know if this hypothesis is right, but nothing of the little I've read particularly emphasizes his relationship to lyrics), then it was Ashlee who came up with "I'm the one who's crawling on the ground/When you say 'love makes the world go 'round.'" And if she can do that, she can do anything.

Comments

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Just snuck a single listen to it at work, so I'm sure I'll have more to say later, but:

I'm going to float the theory that she's not really aiming this at anyone in her life -- even though she's backed off the Vicky Valentine idea, this is definitely not pure Ashlee. I don't think she's going for her former eloquence, either. She's going for the serious un-seriousness of Fall Out Boy and especially Gym Class Heroes (this reminds me a lot of "The Queen and I," she's delivering her vocals like she's Travis McCoy) -- she's as prickly and demanding as ever, but it doesn't really matter. As much as she said she didn't care and she didn't need you, on Autobiography and to a lesser extent I Am Me, she was fighting for you to understand the real Ashlee, to love Ashlee for Ashlee. This time around, she really doesn't care. Prickly and demanding is as much a persona as anything else, she's just playing with you. (This song is funny: "We like to break rules / both got tattoos." "Better keep quiet if you want your teeth.")

And I don't know why she backed off the Vicky Valentine idea, because it's a great one, and it's obvious that she's pulling from Chicago the same way she's pulling from the Heroes. "Murder" is totally "Cell Block Tango," and I'm not sure what it is about "Rulebreaker," "Boys," and "Outta My Head" that read all-that-jazz for me, but there's something -- the tough-girl calls and responses, the theatrical choirs piping up behind her, maybe something in the beat? The un-seriousness, definitely, comes from Chicago too. She's basically re-writing Velma Kelly as a 21st-century Hollywood club-hopper, which is a movie I definitely want to see.

[koganbot]

This makes sense (though bear in mind that I've seen neither Chicago nor All That Jazz). But if she wants the persona to really live in the grooves, eloquence wouldn't hurt, as well as a sense of what's going on in the character's head. And she can plumb her own Ashlee-ness to do so. A wild party-girl alter ego might still ruminate on whether the broken in her drives people away. And especially if that character isn't totally her, Ashlee can channel the facet of the character that wonders if its really getting it's due from Ashlee herself.

There was this TRL appearance in December, Ashlee was totally boring for almost all of it: she's insecure, still a cute little sister, he throws softballs, she says right things, hides behind giggles; then when it's almost over, 4:00 minutes in, she's suddenly talking about whether or not she's someone who gets away with murder, and she's animated and interrupts and is suddenly her lovable hyperactive self and you feel there's actual behavior of hers in her actual life that's problematic and at issue, how one gets along with people, though of course she tells us nothing about it. "Oh right, but [the song 'Murder'] is not that serious, you know the thing is, like, [makes quote marks with hands] 'I get away with murder' but, you know, [sotto voce] I really don't... There's definitely a part of me would like to think I do... I get caught red-handed with a red face, like, 'I did it.'"

I saw on MySpace that there's already a singer called Vicky Valentine, so that might be why Ashlee backed off (i.e., had to back off the name but didn't necessarily jettison the persona), but she probably also decided that she didn't want to make Vicky the whole album.