#237 — Ashlee Simpson — Autobiography (2004)
The past is a foreign country.
Very few artists, especially musical artists, manage to define themselves so uniquely that they are peerless. Ashlee Simpson is not one of those few artists, I’m afraid.
Ashlee Simpson is a younger sister. Her older sister Jessica was a pop starlet whose life with her husband, a similarly blank pop star called Nick Lachey, became a smash-hit reality TV show in the early 2000’s.
Jessica is blonde, Ashlee is brown haired (she dyed it to be different). Ashlee also has a reality TV show, all about recording this album and ran on MTV as the album was released. The opening track is the theme to the TV show. You get how this works.
It’s hard to remember that reality tv was once something fresh and different in the media landscape, rather than the seemingly all-encompassing slop which has turned people into brands and talents into commercial opportunity.
Tuning into a parade of people with that slightly too desperate look in their eyes that hints that maybe this will turn into a comfortable lifestyle of brand endorsements and multi-level marketing — but it won’t. And you know they know that too.
None of this is Ashlee Simpson’s fault. She’s made an album of pop-rock, emphasis on the pop. There’s guitars, there’s a stab at a raunchy track, but it’s neutered by American white middle-class sensibility which explains why it topped the album charts in the US on release.
This is an album with a strong single in Pieces Of Me, and then some non-confrontational and inoffensive material. This album feels like a something that crystallised on the edges of a female pop world dominated by Britney, Christina, Madonna. But equally, by 2004 things weren’t quite over but it was the beginning of the end for that era.
The context here is that by attempting to define herself as different from Jessica, but not going as far as similar solo female pop-rock artists like P!nk or Avril Lavigne, this album ends up doing well but not doing anything differently enough to make it more than what it is.
Ashlee Simpson — Autobiography — 2004
Best Track: I’m not going to try to be clever it’s Pieces of Me. The other singles off this album aren’t very good.
Underrated Banger: Autobiography, as it soundtracked her TV show titles.
YouTube here, the 2004 aesthetic is hurting my head:https://www.youtube.com/@AshleeSimpsonVEVO
