For all the bitch posturing, Allen’s never pro-active, always reactive, always the victim and it’s always his fault. Or she’s just an irreparable whiner, no better than your 19-year-old Park Ave “the rest of you exist for my entertainment” stereotype. This sort of class-consciousness (the bad kind) comes tough in her summery Caribbean bop “LDN,” as she bikes around London and recounts the “priceless sights”: a pimp and his crack whore, an old lady struggling with her bags, a young man pretending to offer the lady a hand but then mugging her. A few Allen fans with long pens admire the song’s appearance-versus-reality theme (“When you look with your eyes/Everything seems nice/But if you look twice/You can see it’s all lies”), comparing it with Antonioni’s Blow-Up or Joyce’s Ulysses (because, you know, acute observations plus cities equals “Joycean”). I say, why doesn’t she get off the bike and help the old lady? Instead she remains passive, powerless, all snark — no wonder bloggers love her.
The music doesn’t hold up after she loses her luster. Those footloose-and-fancy-free backdrops and one-liners and cutting scenarios — Radio 6 fare, amped-up dub with lots of horns, twinkly piano fills, big wallops of bass — aren’t much more than white-girl karaoke, are they. And it’s funny how much “Smile” sounds like that other reggae-tinged radio hit, Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind.” The two singers’ lyrics couldn’t differ more, Hilton singing, “I don’t mind spending some time/Just hanging here with you/Cause I don’t find too many guys/That treat me like you do/Those other guys/All wanna take me for a ride/But when I walk, they talk of suicide.”
I don’t think “Stars Are Blind” is anywhere as catchy as “Smile,” but given Hilton’s lyrics, here’s a thought: Hilton’s an all-walk celebrity with somebody’s camera on her at all times, yet she spends her song pining for ordinary guys, trying to get away from Hollywood’s deceit and social strata and back to whatever emotional core she has left. Allen’s the reverse: she has all-talk celebrity attitudes, but she’s merely ordinary — as weak as the ordinaries she can’t stop slagging on. For once, an actual tragic flaw. Her ordinariness drives the superbly ordinary indie-rock crowd into her throes, even superbly ordinary indie-rock Web sites to pass off a breathless “she’s going to be a big star” as actual critical analysis. Her rise to success infatuates just enough to make them take the music seriously, and suddenly the authenticity debate doubles back on itself. Between two rich white girls doing rich-white-girl karaoke, the better act is, inexplicably, the bigger sham.
“That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” Allen might reply. She is what she is, people screw who they screw, credit-card debt keeps some of us from mortgages, “That’s city life.” Tom Breihan at the Voice even called me out on calling Allen out, with similar logic. “Anyone willing to give Cam’ron a pass doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to dismissing songwriters for coming off like assholes,” he wrote. But the problem with Allen is bigger than coming off like an asshole. It’s how she comes off like an asshole — lazily, too quickly satisfied, ultimately unjustified. I listen to plenty of asshole music, but the skill exonerates the content, and “It’s how she says it” counts only for some.
