Santini, Derek
Lily Allen
Issue #31
With an Internet success story under her belt, the potty-mouthed Brit remains loyal to her fans and takes a stand against the NME for women in music
By Jeremy Ohmes
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Crack! Snap! Boom! Fifteen minutes into my phone interview with Lily Allen, her chair breaks and she falls to pieces with it. Midway through answering a question with her characteristic candid aplomb, she was searching for the right word to summarize her thoughts. After volleying words off each other like contestants on $25,000 Pyramid, she finally blurts out, “Individuality!” And then, as if on cue, the chair collapses, and she explodes into uproarious laughter. I’m on the other end, confused, amused, and a bit concerned, and in between her belly laughs and cracked-up apologies, all I hear is Allen yelling, “The whole damn thing just broke!” Totally unscripted, completely spontaneous, and slightly accidental: This is the fresh-faced career of Lily Allen.
The 21-year-old London singer-songwriter’s lightning-fast rise to fame is a now-classic fairytale of MySpace success: Girl meets site. Girl posts songs on site. Girl makes friends. Friends like songs. Major label likes songs. Major label signs girl. All of this happened within the span of two months in late 2005, and since then Allen has been selling out shows in Europe, America, and Japan, debuting singles at number one on the U.K. charts, and pretty much taking over the world with her instantly catchy pop songs and cheeky, off-the-cuff attitude.
But ask Allen about the MySpace phenomenon and the knee-jerk effect it had on her career, and she’ll tell you that it surprised her as much as anyone else. “I started a MySpace page for the same reason I started smoking — because everyone else was doing it,” she says. “I really didn’t know much about it when I set up the page. I certainly didn’t know that it could have the advantages that it had. I don’t think anyone knew at that point really, at least definitely not in the U.K. because no one had seen the benefits like they have with me.” Then with a bemused giggle, she says, “It’s been amazing.”
Though Allen’s ascent to the top of the British music radar could understandably allow her to abandon her MySpace routine — or at least hire someone else to run the page for her — she simply refuses to take it for granted. “I do it every day,” she says. “I was on it this morning, and I’ll be on it again tonight. It’s something that’s really, really important to me, so I have to keep it going. I can’t just say goodbye to it.”
Responding daily to fans and friends and posting amusing blog rants is the devotion and down-to-earth approach that has kept Allen accessible despite the speed of her success. In fact, in a somewhat controversial attack on England’s major music magazine, NME, Allen blogged that the editorial staff were “wankers” for featuring the group Muse on their cover instead of her, Beth Ditto (of the Gossip), and Kate Jackson (of the Long Blondes) like they had promised. Allen received support and appreciation of thousands and thousands of people in the online community. “The editor had written a thing that said women have shown ‘a new energy’ in music, and that’s why he wanted to put us on the cover,” she says. “I found that really insulting in itself. You have people like Ella Fitzgerald, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, and Chrissie Hynde, and there are so many amazing women in rock music and in music in general, so it’s not a new energy at all. And then [NME] went along and said, ‘They’ve proved that women can still rock a crowd when wearing stilettos.’ And that’s the most patronizing thing someone could ever write.”
Her MySpace blog goes on to fume, “Don’t make me sick. [Women] have always been here you arrogant pricks; this was your chance to actually show you meant it. And instead you put Muse on the cover cause you thought that your readers might not buy a magazine with an overweight lesbian and a not particularly attractive-looking me on the front.”
It’s not just her tirades and technological charm that have converted so many people into Lily Allen fans, though. There’s also something universally appealing about her music. An omnivorous mash-up of two-tone ska, Harry Belafonte calypso, Madchester beats, grime-pop inflections, and sunny, easy-to-swallow samples, Allen’s music is as sugary and sticky as a popsicle on a hot, summer day. Set against these eclectic, innocuous melodies, Allen sings, “raps,” and potty-mouths her way across an assortment of taboos like blowjobs, drugs, prostitutes, and STDs, just to name a few. This dichotomy is consistently sending your finger toward the rewind button as you do double takes to her locker-room lyrics. On “Knock ‘Em Out” she snickers a list of excuses to some persistent sleazeball ending with “Nah, I’ve gotta go coz my house is on fire / Ummm, I’ve got herpes, err no I’ve got syphilis” over a jazzy piano line, punchy horns, and a bouncing 2step beat.
When discussing her lyrics and content, Allen is as sensible as she is brazen, knowing that subjects like sex, drugs, sordid relationships, and seedy nightlife should be discussed because audiences — namely younger audiences — are going to find out about them anyway. “I think the more you don’t talk about these issues, the more it becomes a taboo subject, and then young people find it and then they’re more curious about it,” she says. “I think you have to talk to people about these subjects, and then they’ll become more used to it, and it won’t be such a shock when it hits them in the face.”
One thing audiences should definitely get used to is Lily Allen staying on the music map. With her outspoken personality, infectious charisma, and stick-to-your-brain pop songs, her snowballing success is just starting with her first full-length, Alright, Still, which was released in the U.S. in February. No matter how massively popular Allen becomes, though, she’ll always remain grounded — hopefully without breaking any more chairs.
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