By Hana Sakurai Wernham, Second Year English
If you’re unlucky enough to have been gifted by God a pair of eyes and an internet connection, you’ve undoubtedly seen the shock, scandal and intrigue left in the blazing trail of Lily Allen’s new album, ‘West End Girl’.
Less of a relationship retrospective than a forensic examination of all that went wrong, Allen spares none of the gory specifics in dissecting her now ex-husband’s elaborate sexcapades for all the world to see. The album is replete with nuggets of real life – spliced phone calls, times, dates, names. In a cultural landscape obsessed with playing parasocial detective, the internet and media have relished in connecting the dots with red string to real people, real mistresses, real hurt.
I won’t pretend I’m entirely above this impulse; watching David Harbour and Allen’s Architectural Digest episode showcasing their stupidly massive townhouse, then hearing Allen sing of discovering his collection of ‘sex toys, butt plugs, lube’ definitely gave me the glee of a schoolgirl hearing an especially exciting playground rumour.
While Allen sings with all the same common parlance and feigned glottal stops as she did on her debut of 2006 ‘Alright, Still’, the subject of her new songs have taken a pointed, hyper specific turn. The charm of that debut draws from its honest but anonymising depiction of fairly universal truths like being approached by unwanted men on nights out: ‘Alright, so this is a song about anyone, it could be anyone’, Allen prefaces in mockney in ‘Knock ‘Em Out’.
The subject of ‘West End Girl’ remains men of the pathetic variety, but Allen leaves a trail of breadcrumbs, or rather entire loaves, that forfeit anonymous relatability for the delicious allure of real life. Allen knew, I’m sure, that scoop-hungry tabloids and the insatiable pulsating mass of the internet would absorb each breaded clue like steam rollers. I don’t mean to suggest that Allen like a puffer coat clad oligarch wrote her album for pure profit-incentive, though I’m sure the label money will be an immense help in purchasing her next Architecturally Digestible house.
Clearly, she made some smart business decisions; the masses love what they (we, I’m guilty too) perceive as authenticity. Not because we treasure honesty as integrity, but because we love the rawness of truth, its griminess, its dirtiness. We can’t pry our eyes away from a car wreck on the motorway; when we hear our neighbours arguing we go out the front to water our recycling bin and take out the plants. There is a stomach-dropping glee in overhearing something you realise you really should not have heard. The sex stuff helps too – how taboo, how intimate, how filthy!
Allen’s album positions its listeners as peering spectators, onlookers to the car crash of her public divorce. But we haven’t overheard something we shouldn’t have – Allen has invited us in. There is an illusion of vulnerability and realness. But this isn’t neighbourly speculation about the divorce you think you heard through the wall, this is the Dolby-Atmos mixed, compressed audio repackaging of a celebrity breakup. Of course, the hurt, anger, and paranoia Allen channels through her music are real feelings. For all its fine details, though, an album is not a diary, despite what the Ed Sheerans and Gracie Abramses of the world profess.
The singer-songwriter industrial complex claims that songs are vehicles for truth and radical self-expression. But if you’ve ever tried to write a song, you’ll know that they rarely come out in streams of therapeutic truth. Affixing each word and syllable to its own note takes effort that compromises emotional immediacy. Lyrics and situations are undeniably contrived; the writer of a song is a speaker of a poem that has in mind a specific project. This isn’t bad, there is no ulterior motive or secret agenda, but the poetics of a song wouldn’t flourish without a little embellishment.
Allen said it herself best in an interview with Vogue: ‘There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel.’ Spoken in vague passive terms, like a true poet (or someone who has spent lots of money on divorce lawyers).
Featured image: UnsplashDo you think music always needs to be 'true' to be interesting?
