The Pop Corporation

In a pop age where everyone is dropping cryptic messages and leaving trails of breadcrumbs and codes for fans to pore over, it’s little wonder the kids are all still mad on ‘Rumours’ for its open messiness and hostilities.

In an age that’s obsessed with the tea and all the various ingredients, it’s refreshing to have an album that just says ‘fuck it’ and lays it all bare. Lily Allen’s ‘West End Girl’ is both righteous in it’s ire, but also willing to admit it isn’t a perfect narrator too. This is her point of view from a dire situation, and to hell with being polite about it.

Catharsis, you might say if you’re being fancy.

There’s always been a truthfulness to Allen’s music, from ‘The Fear’ and it’s disenfranchisement, to the clomping around in your boots, bird flicking “fuck you very much” aimed at all the problematic dicks in the world. However, this one feels very different.

Maybe it’s a problem that the lyrical content might overshadow the music being made here, but it certainly feels like the things Allen is addressing has enough people rapt with attention, and likening their own shitty situations with the things she’s been through. The two are obviously very intertwined, but if the music stinks, then it might all be a bit self indulgent, right?

Well, to us, this sounds very much like a Lily Allen LP. It’s genre-hopping and sounds in places like music being blasted out of car windows as they zoom past, but also, there’s moments of maturity and tenderness – if there was any worry that this was all going to be sensitive navel gazing, then get those worries in the bin.

With ‘Ruminating’, we’ve got a hyper-pop/DnB crossover which is fun enough, and ‘Relapse’ is the UK Garage cousin of the former. However, it’s on ‘Nonmongamummy’ which feels most like the Lily Allen that burst out of MySpace all those years ago, allowing rudeboy reggae to collide with Noughties drum machine pop, and just feels like the kind of music you only get from the smart-arse London kids that keep us all entertained.

‘Madeleine’, which talks of “we had an arrangement” and “there had to be a payment – it had to be a stranger”, is coloured by dramatic Spanish guitar and crunchy rhythms, making the whole woman scorned thing have a sense of urgency and defiance which really gets the song motoring. In ‘Tennis’, we hear the Lily Allen that feels of the same songwriting branch where we find Damon Albarn, with Britpop and alt-pop mingling together to good effect.

By the time we get to ‘Dallas Major’ – maybe the most underrated song on the LP if we can say such a thing at this early juncture – we get a slinky, sophisticated bit of adult pop that once again contains a level of honesty that’s hugely disarming in the modern pop climate.

Presumably about being on The Apps, Lily sings “I’m here for validation and I probably should explain how my marriage has been open since my husband went astray… and I hate it here.”

She continues, with her titular pseudonym: “my name is Dallas Major and I’m coming out to play;
looking for someone to have fun with while my husband walks away. I’m almost nearly forty, I’m just shy of five foot two – I’m a mum to teenage children, does that sound like fun to you?”

It’s a terrible habit we’ve all got into as pop fans, but the fact is, happy marriages and relationships rarely make for great albums. We saw it fleetingly in Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’, when she spat about “Becky with the good hair”, but this feels like a whole other level of frank admissions.

Allen apparently wrote the LP in 10 days, and the time constraints have clearly helped her to be laser focused in her approach, eschewing the need for vagueness and code, instead, sitting at the kitchen table with you and telling you she’s fed up… and actually, I think I’m justified in being angry while I’m at it.

Sure, there’s a load of gasping and gossip about the whole thing, given the celebrity of her now ex-husband – but weirdly, it doesn’t feel like reading some grim tabloid or someone who should keep their mouth shut – this is more like being drunk at an afters and someone oversharing in a way where you’re yelling with them and saying “fuck that guy!”

That’s because this wasn’t allowed to be a mawkish attempt at redemption or any of that stuff. It’s all wit and pretty funny while being resigned and irritated. She may have moved to New York, but we’re not getting any of that cloying therapyspeak that befouls so many people who think they’re the only victim on the planet – no, she’s got some camp in her and instead of crowbarring some sweet, neatly wrapped end scene, she says “it is what it is – you’re a mess, I’m a bitch”, and that’s a far more satisfying outcome than the glossy alternative.

Love and life are messy, and all the best British pop deals with that – be it The Kinks, Squeeze, XTC, Blur… Lily Allen intuitively knows that and has thrown herself whole into this project and, perhaps, she’s made an album that’s caught the zeitgeist as much as she did her debut, and that counts for something.

You wouldn’t want her to go through all this personal turmoil again, just for another record. Maybe stay off the apps and go on holiday with the kids somewhere nice.