The Night Of The Previous Couplet

[koganbot]

OK, for my record third post in one day, here's a stream of the new Ashlee Simpson single, "Little Miss Obsessive."

I love it, love the singing (very warm, reminds me of "Fall In Love With Me"), a slow lead melody but a lot of movement and crosscurrents from the percussion, so an r&b feel on a pop-rock song, and I also love the way the words follow around her variously divided feelings, she being the one who shuns long goodbyes but who doesn't want to close out this affair. And the chorus going "I guess we're really over, so come over, I'm not over it" - I like the three "overs" saying successively different things. That's very skillful. And she's going for a specificity that was missing from "Outta My Head," the guy tossing in bed, her arguing with herself the next morning, and so on.

That said, the lyrics don't quite reach the specificity that she's after, don't achieve the sense of a populated world with a lot going on, in the way that "Better Off" and "Love Me For Me" did, with their coffee and toothpaste and stained shirts; she's taking longer to create her world and she doesn't create it with her earlier vividness, though it's an interesting world nonetheless.

I'm assuming that Kara DioGuardi and John Shanks (and Shelly Peiken) had something to do with that earlier vividness, but I wouldn't say they often get to the vividness when not working with Ashlee any more than she gets to it without them. I'm still going on too little information here, not knowing who wrote which lines in which songs.

Since we've been doing opening lines let's look: "Am I the reason why you toss and turn last night?/Everything's such a _____, it didn't come out right." I'm kind of a shrug on this one. It gives the situation, might give it better if I could make out the missing word (could be "lie," but that doesn't seem right [EDIT: maybe it's "blur," though I'm not really hearing a "b" in it]); it doesn't waste words, but I think it could have said more in the same space with better words. Next it goes, "All of a sudden it's cold and we're falling apart/No this can't be, please don't leave me in the dark." I don't know. I like that desperately emphatic "No this can't be," and I know what she's saying, but "cold" and "falling apart" don't particularly enrich each other, and "leave me in the dark" recalls the night of the previous couplet but still is just standard shorthand that a thousand other songwriters use, doesn't hit me in the way that, "Sunday morning blues always about you" did on the previous album when she was still working with Kara and John - "blues" being even more of a standard shorthand than "dark" is, but "blues" ramming right into "always about you" makes the sad color permeate, or makes "you" permeate, bringing the blues with you. I do think Ashlee is capable of having written "Sunday morning blues always about you" herself, just as she's probably the one who wrote "I'm the one who's crawling on the ground/When you say love makes the world go 'round" - it's just that with John and Kara around she was more consistently evocative like that.

The warmth of the singing and the lilting half melancholy of the tune and those full beats more than make up for what the words don't bring. Anyway, this deserves to be a hit, is probably more normal and less out of its head than the wonderful "Outta My Head" is, therefore MAYBE the stations that weren't willing to play that one will find this one more accessible; or possibly the station managers simply believe there's just no way that listeners are willing to listen to Ashlee Simpson. ("Outta My Head" did scrape into the top 20 on Tucson's top 40 station, and is getting some airplay in McAllen Texas and in New Orleans, but is basically not even on the map as far as most radio is concerned.)

So the opening couplet gets a 6, the song as a whole gets a 9.

Comments

[koganbot]

Oh, and the guy she's singing with is Tom Higgenson of the Plain White T's. I don't see what he adds to the song at all, though I don't think he gets in the way so much as to harm it seriously.

[koganbot]

Jeez, I'm really hard on her lyrics, aren't I? It's a good thing when I reviewed I Am Me very favorably* back in '05 that I hadn't really figured out how good she was, or I might have given it less praise, focusing too much on how it fell short of what she's capable of (a fate that befell the Platinum Weird album when I reviewed it in mid '06).

*I wouldn't say that that review really got what Ashlee's about, however.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Very strange to read that review again. It might have been the first thing of yours I ever consciously read (I'd seen some stuff here and there, but hadn't read anything in Real Punks, for instance) and I remember it being a kind of turning point in my own thinking on "stuff like" Ashlee...but not really. There's something strange about it -- it's granting a legitimacy to Ashlee that engages with a lot of the unfair wider audience baggage and not really digging into what she's about. And I think because there's a seeming need to grant that legitimacy at all, the Platinum Weird disappointment very well might not have been as "easy" on the lyrics anyway, since professional songwriters don't need the legitimacy that Ashlee needed then (and probably needs even more now since even her original audience seems to have jumped ship).

I wonder if the Ashlee convo has (necessarily?) gotten more insular because the people who kept talking about it after that initial period of re-evaluation (since it's sort of important to remember that critically, Autobiography wasn't a total failure or anything, just that no one really cared about it very much, tried to figure it out -- "this is OK for this sorta thing")...I dunno, this group just gave up on that whole legitimacy-granting impulse. It got old -- I think it was helpful for me, but at a certain point (after I'd gotten to know her first album better), I just couldn't help but wonder how, when someone listened to it, they could fail to notice there was something going on here.

And I think there are obvious answers (they aren't paying attention to the lyrics, the music plays as mere teen-rock signifiers and doesn't make them want to try again) but I get sick of them. Why should I have to keep convincing people (and not just on the internet) that Ashlee's worth a shot at all, and that it has nothing to do with the fact that you should really try to listen to everything fairly and if you're fair and you still don't like it well that's just your opinion and blah blah blah? Fuck fairness, y'all's loss.

[koganbot]

Well, the review did get what was going on in the title song, where she hit the Courtney thing on the nose. Some of the taking-on of the haters I'd originally cut, but then Xhuxk and I decided the review was boring without it, so I reincorporated it. I still like the kicker I came up with, though I don't know how many readers caught the "Sk8er Boi" ref: "He was a punk, she did ballet, now he's an indie boy and her day outpunks his year." Also, though I didn't know Autobiography beyond the singles, my noticing the mix of styles on I Am Me foreshadowed my realization that she was starting to play with a mix of personas (which foreshadows Vicky Valentine).

In defense of, say, Carl's wanting to give Celine a fair shot, when everyone in your peer group is reviling something, that is a pretty good reason to say, "Hey, let's put more thought into what's going on with this music." But I must say, that reason hasn't gotten me yet to listen to, e.g., Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, though I'll get to it, not only for the reviled-by-people-around-me issue but because there are people I like who like it, as do a few critics I respect (such as James Hunter), and I remember being intrigued by what Xgau once said in grudging acknowledgement of the band's talent (though I don't remember what it is that Bob said, just that it was intriguing).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I have Yankee Hotel Foxtrot if you want to hear it. It's...y'know, nice. Don't think I've listened more than twice. But I wouldn't say it's "your loss" if you never happened to hear it. It's the antithesis of urgency (I just can't imagine anyone pointing to Wilco and saying "no one does ____ like this," and then filling in the blank with something I'd give a shit about), whereas I really do think someone who might be interested in twentysomething-worldview-music (let's call it) would be missing out BIG TIME for not trying to understand Ashlee Simpson. (This is somewhat in reference to something pot80 wrote a while back about wanting to understand the goings-on of his peer group and younger in songwriting.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm also being unfair to fairness. I just don't want to classify what I do over at Bedbugs, say, as "giving a fair shot," even if I am doing that and recognize the need to sometimes say "I am putting thought into this and _____ is not." But I'm also making a more substantial claim of value, or was at certain points with certain artists, and arguing that this is the best stuff around.

[koganbot]

Oh yeah, I see that. People project that shit onto us.

Marc Hogan said something really dumb on his blog, "she's hated by critics (except the ones who are even contrarian about GOOD stuff)," and I was tired and grumpy and called him on it, and he immediately retracted and said he was reacting to a drunken convo he'd had with a friend, and he apologized for making dumb, indefensible statements. So, he's a good guy, but still, you and I aren't going around even drunkenly calling people contrarians for not hating Wilco - though a couple of decades ago Luc said I was being deliberately provocative for extolling the movies of Sidney Lumet; ah, those were the days. Oh yeah, and about 15 years prior to that, Dave Marsh and crew were told "You guys are such contrarians" for liking old girl group and soul and garage rock and bubblegum and new boogie-thud bands and the like rather than the psychedelic and progressive masters who were generally praised by critics. Except they weren't told "You guys are such contrarians" but "you guys are such punks," and so a genre name was born. (I hope Lex reads this thread. Lex, you realize that people like you and me and Dave are the punks of 2008.)

As for Wilco, my friend Nathan, whom that crackpot K-Punk says doesn't exist, has been moved to tears by them.

[koganbot]

The "she" in that Marc Hogan quote is Celine Dion, not Ashlee.