Lily Allen

Something I wrote about Lily a while back that I still feel strongly about:

I loved how Lily expressed herself through her music while she was growing up. She got signed when she was only 16, and she openly expresses not only through her music but in her interviews that she was, you know, going through extremely lost and hard times without embarrassment at all. I love how direct her lyrics are sometimes to her life experiences, she literally invites her fans in on her life and I think that’s a really hard thing to do when you’re an artist because of all the judgment you may face along the way. Granted, when she was growing up she was a bit of a party animal and she made some direct judgements at other artists and their work, however she expresses how much she has learned from that, again very openly and admittedly throughout her career. She is a wonderful expression of how young women ought to not be afraid of who they are while growing up. (Young) Women especially are all evidently faced with being judged on so many levels: about sex, about appearance, about drugs, about politics, about relationships, about education, the list goes on and on. I feel like Lily gives such a raw and real representation of someone who went through all of these things first hand: she went through sleeping around when she was younger, she went through the struggle of becoming possessed by material objects, she went through good and bad relationships, and she’s not afraid to express these things. She’s not afraid to show anger when shes angry, or sadness when shes sad, or happiness when she’s happy. She’s literally not scared to say “Yeah when I was 15 I held out flyers in a bikini on the street, it was bad,” but she also doesn't turn it into a sob story where she claims be a victim of her choices, and that I respect so much. Yeah, she’s not some virgin saint but she doesn’t really care, because in the end she still keeps a very level-headed, non-judgmental, and humble outlook on life and that’s great. She can still go in front of the camera looking great and confidently talk about her sex life, for instance, or what shes wearing, but not be entirely consumed by these things.

I also love how in her songs she sometimes tackles such serious topics like politics or what have you but then in the background you hear like these cheerful beats to create that sense of irony and contradiction.