Daily Music Feud: LDN by Lily Allen
Jul 3rd, 2008 by Waffles
I love Lily Allen. She’s so… so… so BRITISH. Not the old stodgy British like the first Doctor and Jo and Ian and Barbara (Barbara? Barbara! Barbara… Barbara?), but new-wave British, like Rose and the tenth Doctor and all of their lot.
Lily Allen comes from this new line of Brit pop singers — bad girls who adopt a sort of old-fashioned beat and melody. She’s in this group along with Amy Winehouse (although Amy seems to have self-destructed her way out of the singing world.) and Kate Nash (who Katie just found the other day!).
After Katie and I first saw Lily Allen perform on SNL a couple of years ago, we’ve loved her. There is a definite dichotomy between her saccharin-sweet demeanor, with the prom dresses and the girlish skip-hop she adopts as she walks down the street, and the content of her songs, which often has to do with getting into cat fights at the club, and crack-whores and whatnot. She’s a little bit like Lindsay Lohan, but WAY more interesting.
The trouble is, all of her songs, at least on the album Alright, Still, are equally as fun and quirky. I knew I wanted her on this list, but which song?
I think the one I have to go with is “LDN,” which is the abbreviation for “London.” The song has this REALLY awesome trumpet riff (do you call it a riff on a trumpet?) that sort of hearkens back to the big band days. Then she launches into the song with her sweet voice:
Riding through the city on my bike all day
Cause the filth took away my license
Haha, this lovely girl calls the police “the filth”? It just keeps getting better:
Everything seems to look as it should
But I wonder what goes on behind doors
A fella looking dapper, but he’s sitting with a slapper
Then I see it’s a pimp and his crack whore
Here’s the music video for this song:
See what I mean? She’s just so goshdarn British; I love it!
There is another great song, which is made even greater by the amazing video that goes along with it, with Muppets!
Yes, I’m a little in love with Lily Allen. But who wouldn’t be?
I love it! It’s so fun and decrepit! Win!
Sir! I must protest!
In the wipe to the Dark World the adorable dancing Scarlet Macaw turns into a pigeon! The viewer is thus to infer that flapper:crack whore::Macaw:pigeon. This defamation of the Columbiformes must cease! It is a relic of a less ecologically intelligent era. Pigeons are sensitive and intelligent creatures that bring a connection to the natural world to our urban areas. Their lack of adorable rainbow plumage is a consequence of evolutionary circumstances far beyond their control. Unflattering and biased portrayals fail to recognize not only their ecological role but also the service they have rendered mankind as messengers, especially in wartime. Some, as you should know, have been decorated for wounds sustained in action against the enemy. To be repaid by being used as a visual icon of a slum is a grave injustice based on faulty knowledge, sir!
Hmm… I saw it a bit differently. The “Dark World” obviously represents the city, since the song is about city life (which can be inferred from the oft-repeated lyrics, “yeah, that’s city life”), and the macaw morphing into a pigeon is not necessarily going from “good bird” to “bad bird.” I see it as more of a “unusual/exotic bird” to “common city bird.” And, as much as one likes pigeons, one must admit they are a common site in cities.
This analogy can be taken further in the song where we see a couple carefree sailors morphed into a construction worker. By your logic, this means that construction workers are bad, while sailors aren’t. Quite the opposite, perhaps — construction workers are vital to maintaining a city’s infrastructure and safe operation. It’s just that construction workers pushing wheelbarrows are a more common urban phenomenon than 1940s era sailors (you of all people should know that, Mr. Dolan) goofing around.
In closing, I’d just like to say this:
PIGEONS SUCK BIG PARROT D**K!
Ha ha! I thought there might be some positive comments / votes here, but there is nothing but squabble about pigeons! Because of one K.E., I’m totally set to win this little war. Not that I think I should, but I can’t vote for your choices, so….FAIL.
(I guess we still have tomorrow.)
I see what you did there! I’m assuming you know that a squab is a juvenile pigeon. (It can also mean pigeon meat, whose popularity as cheap slave food, incidentally, contributed to the wholesale slaughter of the American passenger pigeons.) Interestingly, it appears that this sense of squab and the verb squabble, as in “argue pettily”, aren’t etymologically related, with the former arising from a Scandinavian word for “a fat mass” (and earlier from Proto-Germanic *(s)kwab-) and the latter, despite also arising in Scandinavia, being onomatopoetic.