But you’re awesome just the same. I first checked out Lily Allen when she appeared on Saturday Night live. I thought her band was amazing, seriously amazing. They are decked out like a 60′s ska band, and playing some vicious hybrid of serious roots ska and hip hop. But Ms. Allen was bouffanted up with a big puffy dress and just stood there like she was the hostess of the party, singing more or less in a monotone. I didn’t get it. I wasn’t listening.
For me, the genius of Lily Allen comes out when you pay careful attention to what she’s actually saying. Once you hear that this mild, pleasant, somewhat emotionless voice is singing about her grandmother’s baffling habit of clipping out coupons for tampons she’s never going to use you begin to realize that not only is she snide and rude, but she’s also making an excellent joke about her ordinary experience.
This is ska at it’s most precise, like the Specials in the late 70s using the sound of the sixties in and combining it with the voice of the punk movement, Lily Allen is taking from the finest of ska, and mixing it up with the Brixton experience of today. Hip hop, attitude, street talk, and the common experience. Generally this is something an American might be fascinated with, because it’s not our experience, and not our language, but not relate to.
I’ll bypass the lack of American identification with the working class, and what’s culturally wrong with that, and just say that Lilly Allen is a proletariat heroine with enough style to rise above her roots, and more than enough snotty youth to kick you in the nuts.
C’mon!
Lily Allen Nan you’re a window shopper
[song removed to make room for new music]
7 Comments
her roots are actually quite middle class – but she does sing about all experiences.
Wait, so she’s fronting?
My assumption is that the expression of “working class” and “middle class” for the UK is as convoluted as it is for the US, but the connotations are different. I suppose I might have said “ordinary” rather than used class as the reference point.
i suppose lots of people think she is fronting.
just for the fact that she’s had a rather priveleged background.
perhaps not a happy one, but she didn’t grow up on a council estate in soufeast london, innit?
ftr, i love her lyrics but don’t really feel like she is the voice of anything out of the streets, especially in reference to the specials or ska, of london today. she’s really bubblegum. but then i look around and see most – haha – young people, with no edge to them at all, taken captive by the latest hairstyle and topshop buy.
kate moss is even styling the boys.
i don’t believe people are fronting when they identify with something outside of their ‘norm’ and how people percieve their norm to be. so i don’t consider her a poser at all.
how do you see the connotations as different?
Well, generally in America everyone is middle class. From dock workers to the filthy rich. I’d say that largely that’s the key difference.
Also, on Lily, what’s bubblegum, or cheese in the UK will get a lot more laditude here in the states because our brand of cheese can’t include the likes of Lily Allen. At least not until she does a ballad about love, or has so many young kids roaring behind her that the machines turn, slip a ska cap on and say “Oh my yes, we’ve loved her the whole time!”
So the lobsters in a bucket effect is a lot more dramatic in the UK than here in the states.
I see now that I might have said “ordinary” rather than break this out as an issue of class, or even representation.
There are many miles between us, the atlantic is a huge ocean.
our brand of cheese can’t include the likes of Lily Allen
and how! she must seem so alien, rough even.
there is still a visible, and audible, divide between the classes in the uk. and although londoners accents and bank balances are all heading in and around the same place, it’s mostly pretty clear where someone belongs. their very identity still relies on class.
so strange to me, and hard to fight against.
i just noticed your quote link – whoops!
I totally agree with you about the lingering class divide in the UK Susan. It’s very difficult to adjust coming from a republic where there is at least the premice that everyone is born equal. In Ireland there’s always been rich and poor but never any sense that ‘never the twain shall meet’. (although I’ve not lived there for 10 years and when I visit now I see signs of an emerging middle class)