Bored of the Lily Allen album already

Lily Allen's second album - It's Not Me, It's You - is not unleashed on the record buying public until 9 February. If you're in North America, you'll have to wait until 10 February. The Observer Music Monthly proclaimed the album the best new release for February, awarding it five stars out of five. This means that in OMM terms it is at least 20% better than Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion (or 'the new Animal Collective album', if you prefer).
But I'm already tired of it. Why? I'll tell you why...

1) Lily Allen is the proof that we don't live in a meritocracy. Not that Keith Allen barged into EMI and demanded a record contract for his daughter. But she didn't get to be a pop star/TV presenter/fashion designer based solely on her talents.

2) Lily's first album Alright, Still relied heavily on samples. And I mean heavily. Alfie borrowed so much from Sandie Shaw's Puppet On A String that even the video features a puppet. Sampling is not committing creative fraud, but who can still pretend that Lily is a musical genius for singing over Jackie Mittoo? Or pretend that she's a voice-of-a-generation lyrical genius? [Insert obligatory snark about rhyming al fresco with Tesco.]

3) Even if I don't want to listen to it, I'm going to pick it up by osmosis. Whenever I innocently switch on the radio/switch on the TV/walk into a shop/walk into a bar, Lily Allen's album will be there. Going into my ears without my written permission.

4) Some people (like Miranda Sawyer) praise Lily Allen for being outspoken and opinionated. I know plenty of people who will loudly tell you what they're thinking. They are not outspoken or opinionated; they are obnoxious. They are the sort of people you don't want to sit next to in the pub. The ones who claim to have lost their money and demand you lend them a tenner.

5) I've spent enough time thinking about Lily Allen now, so that's it.

Lover, come back to me

My goodness, what a busy week, including a trip to Notting Hill and a wobbly cycle around the Manchester Velodrome. On Friday night, my friend Matt offered up his plus one to watch Julian Cope at the Carling Academy. There was apparently a loose theme to do with Eric's (a long-lost venue of Liverpool legend) to promote a new show at Liverpool Everyman. I was tired, but the lure of a plus one is too great, so I scraped on a layer of mascara and threw on my favourite dress.
The Academy is always dimly lit (they've standardised everything else in all of their venues, is the lighting policy the same?), so I could get away with hiding in a corner like a ghost. A ghost drinking Carling, obviously. Doors opened at 7.30pm and we arrived at 9pm, assuming we'd already missed Pete Burns in the support slot. But, as you can see from the crappy snap at left, we had not.
Pete Burns didn't make it onto the stage until 10pm. A lot of people in the room looked like they were paying babysitters by the hour, and they were getting restless. It was the first time I've been to a gig where the crowd are booing before the band has made it on stage. But this was no mere band. It was glamourpuss Pete Burns. Celebrity Big Brother AND Celebrity Wife Swap alumni Pete Burns. He's not a man who'd be happy with a Subway foot long and bowl of chips before going on stage at 8pm. Oh no. Pete Burns is an exquisite creature who requires fine dining and a chaise longue before performing. Some people might think that three songs is not enough for a set, but when you're Pete Burns and people have paid £20, it's plenty. They should count themselves lucky to be basking in your presence for a mere £20. He introduced 'You Spin Me Round' as 'the song that took me out of Liverpool... thank god'. Yes, that's the attitude Pete! You tell the people of Liverpool that their city is shite, as if it's still the Eighties. He also told the chosen few witnessing his performance that he was 'just going through the motions', and in a glisten of black sequins was gone.
The really frustrating thing? He can sing! He has a certain stage presence! If he weren't such a whinging diva he could have had a proper music career!
Julian Cope soon appeared, topless, wielding an acoustic guitar. The Copeheads in the room seemed very happy to see him, but to me he looked like a man at an open mic night about to launch into a rant against chip and pin or unfair bank charges. I decided to head homewards after a few songs. Sorry, Julian. (Not that he cares.)

Girl Talk

Pittsburgh mixmaster Girl Talk has been floating near the top of The Hype Machine and today was awarded a unit-shifting 8.0 on Pitchfork for Feed The Animals. So when I hit play I hoped for something wondrous, possibly a distillation of the past 50 odd years of pop music. Mr Girl Talk's schtick is mashing up the mash-up by condensing approximately one million poptacular samples into each track. (Well, maybe not a million, but you know what I mean.) There's a Hot Chip with The Cardigans' Lovefool, then a moment of Jay-Z with Paranoid Android. It feels like no moment of sublime pop is untouched, from Ace of Base's All That She Wants to Beastie Boys' Bodymovin'. Busta Rhymes. Metallica. Lil Wayne. Procul Haram. Et-bloody-cetera.
2005 just called. It wants its bastard pop back.
I realise it's supposed to be oh so clever by putting familiar sounds into new contexts, but it's so artless. Oh Pitchfork, what were you thinking? Feed The Animals is an extended megamix dependent on the pop musical genius of other people and the fact that most pop songs stick to a 4/4 beat. And pitch-shifting, lots of pitch-shifting. It's Strawberry Jam for people who find Animal Collective a bit, you know, weird.
It sounds like that daily Jo Whiley competition (The Shuffle?) dragged out for over 50 minutes. People who say they like this are just congratulating themselves because they feel clever for recognising the samples. Er, well done, you've listened to a lot of music.

One is not born a woman

This is Katy Perry (taken from her Flickr account), whose album One Of The Boys is released in the US this week. According to "tastemaker" Perez Hilton, she is the new Lily Allen. So it can't be long before she's heading across the Atlantic for Radio 1 interviews and assorted promotion.

I heard her first single Ur So Gay at the end of 2007 (one of those tentative, limited edition releases) and hoped that would be the end of it. Because that song is so dumb on so many levels that I don't even want to think about it. But if you must know, Katy lambasts an ex-boyfriend for being feminine (in this context, feminine is defined as listening to Mozart, wearing SPF45 etc) because "feminine" = gay and gay = bad. Of course! Didn't you know that? If not, you're probably the sort of person who spells it 'you're'. Chuh!

Anyway, her more recent US single is I Kissed A Girl, another abomination trampling all over Helene Cixous and Lucy Irigaray. It's cute white girl R&B pop with a "rock edge", like Pink or Natasha Bedingfeld. Except that Katy (who released a Christian gospel album in 2001 under her birth moniker, Katy Hudson) is a naughty girl. A very naughty girl who is supposed to make you go "phwoar!" and think zexy zexy thoughts. If you can't guess from the title, it's about Katy kissing a female friend while drunk and discovering "it felt so wrong, it felt so right". Were this simply a tale of discovering an emerging sexuality, perhaps from the mouth of Yelle or similar, I'd be ok. But Katy has to go and add "hope my boyfriend don't mind it". So it's not about a young woman discovering herself, it's about a young woman positioning herself firmly in the male gaze and looking DEAD SEXY.

It's not really fair to direct bile at Katy as she's simply the empty vessel through which this slurry passes. (But it's dead sexy slurry, yeah?) Cathy Dennis has a writing credit. Oh Cathy, you can do better than this. Even Michelle McManus was a step up.