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koganbotAshlee 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.
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.
