Sunday Pages: "West End Girl"
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Lily Allen
12 min read
The article is a deep dive into Allen's new album and artistic evolution. Wikipedia provides her full biography, discography, and the context of her working-class London roots and rise to fame that shaped the 'West End Girl' persona the reviewer discusses.
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Song cycle
15 min read
The reviewer specifically describes West End Girl as 'a song cycle, telling the story of the end of the marriage.' Understanding the classical music tradition of song cycles (Schubert's Winterreise, etc.) illuminates why this framing elevates Allen's work beyond typical pop albums.
Dear Reader,
I first became aware of Lily Allen in 2009 or so.
We had moved north from the city in June of 2005, when our son was six months old, to a sleepy Hudson Valley outpost where we knew not a single soul. Our second child joined us the following summer. And so for about five years, my wife and I were both home with these little kids, operating on very little sleep, isolated from almost everyone we knew, learning on the fly how to be both parents and homeowners.
By 2009, we were sick to death of music written and produced for children. I’m still fond of Yo Gabba Gabba, and the Baby Einstein videos, and some of the tracks from Thomas the Tank Engine, which are way better than a show about anthropomorphic trains deserves, but there’s only so many times you can rest a two-year-old on your knee and watch a grinning Dan Zanes on YouTube. This was the same period of pop-cultural history, it should be noted, where stay-at-home-moms the world over began to lust after Steve from Blue’s Clues—a phenomenon that, to me, is perfectly explicable.
Since leaving college in 1995, I’d successfully abstained from Top 40, missing out on a woebegone decade highlighted by Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Destiny’s Child, and the Jonas Brothers. But by 2009, we were desperate for something—anything—new. So we turned on, and turned up, the radio. And we found, to our pleasant surprise, that it was good!
Twenty oh-nine was hailed as “The Year of the Woman” in pop music. A wave of supremely gifted female twentysomethings—Amy Winehouse (b. 1983), Katy Perry (b. 1984), Lily Allen (b. 1985), Lana Del Rey (b. 1985), and Lady Gaga (b. 1986)—crested like a Top 40 tsunami on the music scene. And we got to ride it! (The video for “Bad Romance”, with its “Bath Haus of GaGa” and creepy bug-like dancers crawling out of coffin-like white pods and sexy hospital orderlies force-feeding the pop star a glass of icky poison and Gaga half naked with what appears to be a bejeweled lampshade on her head crawling towards a gross Pete Hegsethian villain, is probably not the most appropriate clip to show a toddler, but my three-year-old couldn’t get enough of it.)
This was a transitional phase in terms of technology; I had to download individual tracks
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