#17
331 points
Ashlee Simpson – Autobiography
1x70(rnbey)
1x70(AshleeSimpsonFan)
1x22(Haus-Of_Mck)
1x19(Carlton)
1x30(Strangergab)
1x70(KarlosVzla)
1x50(Great Uername)
Favorite song: Pieces of me
Review by rnbey You think you know me/word on the street is that you do/you are my history/what others tell you won’t be true”. So Ashlee Simpson opens her debut album Autobiography, and it is perhaps one of the several testaments to her lyrical wisdom that it proved as prescient and accurate as any opening statement in music history. Acting as a lightning rod in the mid-00s authenticity wars, Ashlee was sacrificed at the altar of “realness” (physical location: the Orange Bowl), branded a fake for the infamous SNL appearance (ridiculously and unfairly – she actually had acid-reflux – it wasn’t like she was scared of the wind on an important day) and the perceived nepotism of her position; hiding in its supreme irony the little known fact that Ashlee actually made the “realest” (as well as best) album of the decade. Realest, not as a sop to boring gate-keeping rockist ****ery but in being the most fleshed out, lived-in, fully-realised multi-dimensional character portrait sketched this century so far.
The story is as old as any: girl grapples with coming of age, dealing with family drama and then boy drama, while finding and defining herself in the process. What makes this different, greater, though is the way that not only does each song tell a story, but each line: poetic, rich and evocative contributing in their own way to an interwoven narrative web. What Ashlee nails are the specifics, providing a robust lyricism that contrasts to the useless and easy vague generalities of the likes of Avril then and Adele now - actually painting a persona, a scene, a mindset - while providing observations so casual and insightful that they feel endlessly and universally relatable. So on “Better Off” (the best pop-rock song ever) Ashlee gets how a coffee stain can reveal a distractable absent-minded personality, nascent independence and its responsibilities, and a cautious optimism about a new relationship and life writ-large all at once. On “Love Me For Me” she gets how toothpaste marks out personal territorial lines and sexual intimacy and thus the discomfort when it feels that a new relationship is starting to infringe on your space and you feel torn – someone can’t just stroll into her life and pluck her from the vine without accepting who she is in all her messed-up and broken (im)perfection too: you can’t push a river or make her fall but you can make her unreachable. That’s from one of the (comparatively) weaker songs on the album – “Unreachable” - and it’s still filled with beautiful forever-quotable lines. Note how in the song she sings how she’s wrapped up so tight, smothered by this relationship only a few songs after “Pieces of Me” when in his arms she felt she could finally breathe (and “La La” is an extended discourse on all the different ways in which she can), yet once the relationship has ended on “Undiscovered” she’s realised she’s not breathing but suffocating without him – details in songs refract and play off each other to add to the story, one where it seems Ashlee doesn’t catch much of a break. Not that she minds, she knows she’ll be okay somehow.
It’s this mindset (list) that I find most inspiring about Ashlee, the quiet optimism, that through all the crap that life throws at her at least things aren’t as bad as they could otherwise be, as bad as they were, because just by the virtue of growing up and knowing who she is more and more things get on average better off every day – her feet are now on the ground even though she’s stuck, and that’s something in itself to feel joyful about. It’s why she’s so resolute that a guy should accept her for all her moody, messy, restless, senseless ways because understanding herself and forging her own identity has been what has given her the resolve that she now has to face life and all its problems. And it’s hasn’t been an easy journey. “Shadow” explains this through detailing her childhood trauma (“I was six years old when my parents went away” is just about the most devastating shade thrown ever and that’s just the opening line), her identity subsumed to the dreams of a sister who her parents always preferred and prioritised. Her days were increasingly worse, losing herself completely, before she started to find herself and “realise it was safe outside to come alive in her identity”. And whether we have a sister like Successica or not it’s a story many of us can relate to, subjugating ourselves to the desires and whims of our family before we really find ourselves and live our lives true to who we are, before we realise that that’s really possible. It explains why Ashlee is so defiant about who she is, despite her flaws, and why she wants so badly to be heard (“so if you’re listening, there’s so much more to me you haven’t seen!”) when she’s been ignored for so long. It’s why then “La La” follows immediately afterwards, a song where Ashlee sings about playing all sorts of hilarious ridiculous sexual roles not just to turn her boyfriend on but because crucially: “I feel safe with you, I can be myself tonight” – in this relationship she gets to fully explore herself, her desires and fantasies, a million potential identities, after having had them suppressed for so long. It’s my favourite sex song in pop music of the past decade: self-aware, tongue in cheek, deeply intimate, and with the sex entirely on her own terms but also for mutual pleasure – role-play not just as self-expression but doing all these at times awkward things because you enjoy watching your partner take pleasure in it and you trust them completely to hold those ridiculous intimate secrets tight. Whenever I listen to “La La” it feels like the high watermark of sex-positive feminism.
It would be too much to talk about all the songs in detail, but suffice to say they are all incredible with great melodies, great charismatic evocative singing, great guitar-playing by co-writer John Shanks and obviously second-to-none songwriting. The album strikes me as the logical and chronological mid-point between Hole and Taylor Swift - the sound of the former (the “Celebrity Skin” riff on “Surrender” most noticeably and all of Ashlee’s vocal Courtney Love-isms) and the rich lyrical detail and insights of the later, even those trademark lyrical inversions at the end of songs (“Pieces of Me”, “Love Makes the World Come Round”, “Nothing New”, “Giving It All Away”) that flip everything completely. In my head that’s one of the all time perfect syntheses of music, and perhaps one reason I love the album so much.
The album reaches its climax on the closing song “Undiscovered”, a slow building, raggedly visceral epic that is as emotionally devastating as it is breathtaking. Partly what impresses me so much about it is its unflinching emotional nakedness, how it embodies Ashlee’s resolve to leave all her totally messy discomforting embarrassing feelings completely out there publicly (here literally to her ex) without care for the embarrassment it might cause and wearing them with almost a sense of pride, as if doing this is what makes her really human. And the central idea posed in the refrain “all the things left undiscovered, leave me empty and left to wonder”, is just so poetic, so mature, so open-heartedly generous in its approach to heartbreak. The very sonic equivalent of Ashlee crawling on the ground, the song navigates the personal debris at the end of a relationship before Ashlee burns up into a self-destructing luminous fireball of emotion – angry, scared, desperate and completely broken, her lines chopped into pure elements of feelings: “I give in/I breathe out/I want you/There’s no doubt/I freak out/I’m left out/Without you/I’m without”. Her voice is really affecting here, deliberately vulgar and ugly, to signify the textural scar tissue now left over this failed relationship, breaking up as she breaks down. And as the camera zooms out she screams out her closing line, as sadly prescient as the album’s opening one: “don’t walk away...” and really it’s one of the greatest of losses of anyone who does, to miss out on this, one of the greatest and most life-affirming albums of all time. I won’t walk away from this though, or her, not now, not ever. Whether on sleepless nights or rainy mornings with this album I’d say I’m better off in every way.
Thanks!
Should've known LEGENDography was the only album compelling enough in this rate to get a review from anyone.
You think you know me/word on the street is that you do/you are my history/what others tell you won’t be true”. So Ashlee Simpson opens her debut album Autobiography, and it is perhaps one of the several testaments to her lyrical wisdom that it proved as prescient and accurate as any opening statement in music history. Acting as a lightning rod in the mid-00s authenticity wars, Ashlee was sacrificed at the altar of “realness” (physical location: the Orange Bowl), branded a fake for the infamous SNL appearance (ridiculously and unfairly – she actually had acid-reflux – it wasn’t like she was scared of the wind on an important day) and the perceived nepotism of her position; hiding in its supreme irony the little known fact that Ashlee actually made the “realest” (as well as best) album of the decade. Realest, not as a sop to boring gate-keeping rockist ****ery but in being the most fleshed out, lived-in, fully-realised multi-dimensional character portrait sketched this century so far.
The story is as old as any: girl grapples with coming of age, dealing with family drama and then boy drama, while finding and defining herself in the process. What makes this different, greater, though is the way that not only does each song tell a story, but each line: poetic, rich and evocative contributing in their own way to an interwoven narrative web. What Ashlee nails are the specifics, providing a robust lyricism that contrasts to the useless and easy vague generalities of the likes of Avril then and Adele now - actually painting a persona, a scene, a mindset - while providing observations so casual and insightful that they feel endlessly and universally relatable. So on “Better Off” (the best pop-rock song ever) Ashlee gets how a coffee stain can reveal a distractable absent-minded personality, nascent independence and its responsibilities, and a cautious optimism about a new relationship and life writ-large all at once. On “Love Me For Me” she gets how toothpaste marks out personal territorial lines and sexual intimacy and thus the discomfort when it feels that a new relationship is starting to infringe on your space and you feel torn – someone can’t just stroll into her life and pluck her from the vine without accepting who she is in all her messed-up and broken (im)perfection too: you can’t push a river or make her fall but you can make her unreachable. That’s from one of the (comparatively) weaker songs on the album – “Unreachable” - and it’s still filled with beautiful forever-quotable lines. Note how in the song she sings how she’s wrapped up so tight, smothered by this relationship only a few songs after “Pieces of Me” when in his arms she felt she could finally breathe (and “La La” is an extended discourse on all the different ways in which she can), yet once the relationship has ended on “Undiscovered” she’s realised she’s not breathing but suffocating without him – details in songs refract and play off each other to add to the story, one where it seems Ashlee doesn’t catch much of a break. Not that she minds, she knows she’ll be okay somehow.
It’s this mindset (list) that I find most inspiring about Ashlee, the quiet optimism, that through all the crap that life throws at her at least things aren’t as bad as they could otherwise be, as bad as they were, because just by the virtue of growing up and knowing who she is more and more things get on average better off every day – her feet are now on the ground even though she’s stuck, and that’s something in itself to feel joyful about. It’s why she’s so resolute that a guy should accept her for all her moody, messy, restless, senseless ways because understanding herself and forging her own identity has been what has given her the resolve that she now has to face life and all its problems. And it’s hasn’t been an easy journey. “Shadow” explains this through detailing her childhood trauma (“I was six years old when my parents went away” is just about the most devastating shade thrown ever and that’s just the opening line), her identity subsumed to the dreams of a sister who her parents always preferred and prioritised. Her days were increasingly worse, losing herself completely, before she started to find herself and “realise it was safe outside to come alive in her identity”. And whether we have a sister like Successica or not it’s a story many of us can relate to, subjugating ourselves to the desires and whims of our family before we really find ourselves and live our lives true to who we are, before we realise that that’s really possible. It explains why Ashlee is so defiant about who she is, despite her flaws, and why she wants so badly to be heard (“so if you’re listening, there’s so much more to me you haven’t seen!”) when she’s been ignored for so long. It’s why then “La La” follows immediately afterwards, a song where Ashlee sings about playing all sorts of hilarious ridiculous sexual roles not just to turn her boyfriend on but because crucially: “I feel safe with you, I can be myself tonight” – in this relationship she gets to fully explore herself, her desires and fantasies, a million potential identities, after having had them suppressed for so long. It’s my favourite sex song in pop music of the past decade: self-aware, tongue in cheek, deeply intimate, and with the sex entirely on her own terms but also for mutual pleasure – role-play not just as self-expression but doing all these at times awkward things because you enjoy watching your partner take pleasure in it and you trust them completely to hold those ridiculous intimate secrets tight. Whenever I listen to “La La” it feels like the high watermark of sex-positive feminism.
It would be too much to talk about all the songs in detail, but suffice to say they are all incredible with great melodies, great charismatic evocative singing, great guitar-playing by co-writer John Shanks and obviously second-to-none songwriting. The album strikes me as the logical and chronological mid-point between Hole and Taylor Swift - the sound of the former (the “Celebrity Skin” riff on “Surrender” most noticeably and all of Ashlee’s vocal Courtney Love-isms) and the rich lyrical detail and insights of the later, even those trademark lyrical inversions at the end of songs (“Pieces of Me”, “Love Makes the World Come Round”, “Nothing New”, “Giving It All Away”) that flip everything completely. In my head that’s one of the all time perfect syntheses of music, and perhaps one reason I love the album so much.
The album reaches its climax on the closing song “Undiscovered”, a slow building, raggedly visceral epic that is as emotionally devastating as it is breathtaking. Partly what impresses me so much about it is its unflinching emotional nakedness, how it embodies Ashlee’s resolve to leave all her totally messy discomforting embarrassing feelings completely out there publicly (here literally to her ex) without care for the embarrassment it might cause and wearing them with almost a sense of pride, as if doing this is what makes her really human. And the central idea posed in the refrain “all the things left undiscovered, leave me empty and left to wonder”, is just so poetic, so mature, so open-heartedly generous in its approach to heartbreak. The very sonic equivalent of Ashlee crawling on the ground, the song navigates the personal debris at the end of a relationship before Ashlee burns up into a self-destructing luminous fireball of emotion – angry, scared, desperate and completely broken, her lines chopped into pure elements of feelings: “I give in/I breathe out/I want you/There’s no doubt/I freak out/I’m left out/Without you/I’m without”. Her voice is really affecting here, deliberately vulgar and ugly, to signify the textural scar tissue now left over this failed relationship, breaking up as she breaks down. And as the camera zooms out she screams out her closing line, as sadly prescient as the album’s opening one: “don’t walk away...” and really it’s one of the greatest of losses of anyone who does, to miss out on this, one of the greatest and most life-affirming albums of all time. I won’t walk away from this though, or her, not now, not ever. Whether on sleepless nights or rainy mornings with this album I’d say I’m better off in every way.
YES YES YES YES YES YES. I'm HOWLING. Ashlee is GOD. Let me reread this a million times as I scream out every lyric to 'Shadow'.
The fact that something like Good Girl Gone Bad can outrank it.
She lives her life in the shadow of Ashlee's God-given talent, knowing she will never be in her league.
but since this is ATRL 
and it's the only Rihanna album that I own. 
Glad some of my albums are getting pretty high positions. 
