Common response: IS SHE SERIOUS?! Well, depends on how you mean it.
It’s certainly serious for Hilary Duff, the obvious target of a pretty scathing attack (“but my album is called…oh”). Despite the widespread assumption that the joke was on Lindsay Lohan, it was a sharp and surprisingly clever dig at Hilary’s weak attempt to muss Britney BFF Lindsay’s now-blond hair on the preachy title track of her very own album (which, luckily for her, is a great song anyway). Should we take Britney seriously when she writes this?
Was she being serious? Seriously, seriousness—not taken seriously enough? I’m serious.
(No, I’m not serious. It was a joke. The joke’s on you.
) Ashlee Simpson comes across as goofy but serious on her 2004 reality show, which I finally tracked down and has made for great indoor/air-conditioned viewing in the heat. So far, I’ve learned that she does write her own songs (quickly!) and that her direct songwriting input is quite demonstrable.
The biggest influence as she was recording her debut album was Courtney Love, whom she channels on occasion and would also like to make out with. (Her response to Geffen head Jordan Schur’s suggestions about possible models for her first album: “Hilary Duff? I do not want to sound like Hilary Duff!
”) Smallest influence was Joe Simpson, a guy so out of it that every time he says anything about his daughter’s music they might as well play canned cricket noises. As a contrarian-seeming rock-crit type, I might be giving Ashlee the benefit of the doubt here, but I’ve spent a very long time with the album she’s creating in the first season, and I have reason to want her to be as involved as she clearly seems to be. So it’s not that difficult for me to hear Ashlee’s music seriously on her terms, which isn’t to say it’s all completely earnest or humorless, either.
In “Love Me for Me,” for instance, Ashlee’s a total schizo mess throwing a temper tantrum until her boyfriend is crawling over broken glass to get to her, and all this after only three days! It makes her squeal. I’ve been listening to constantly; it’s been my standby summertime walk album two years in a row.
There’s so much to figure out in these songs, such striking ambivalence, she puts all the depth right next to the utter banalities and schmaltzy romantic pipe dreams, and sometimes she makes the banal stuff deeper than the deep stuff. She’s the only artist I know who could fixate on a coffee stain but shrug as the sky falls on her—don’t feel great, but at least today is better than yesterday, getting better all the time. And she means it, it’s inconsequential but it’s serious.
And there’s no inflated sense of symbolic importance, because this yesterday isn’t, say, the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” It’s…y’know, yesterday. The Passion of the Clarkson For my Symbolic Pain and Yearning with Capital Letters fix, I can turn to my other summer walk-rock album, Kelly Clarkson’s , though it’s too heavy for a prolonged stroll (try again in December, maybe).
Kelly Clarkson is straining and crawling and practically scourging herself to be taken Very Seriously this time out—and not even with the usual teenpop transitional signifiers of “take me seriously,” what Mike Barthel refers to as “ ” and what I might also call “ Common response: IS SHE SERIOUS?! Well, depends on how you mean it.
News RSS