This was supposed to be a comment on the latest entry of Clap Clap (read first for context, along with this interview I never knew existed). But I got ahead of myself and now I guess he's gotta come over to my house. I haven't been getting out much lately. (What if I actually found the cure for bedbugs? Where would I hang out?)
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Yer onto something here. But Lindsay's an easy way out of some of the issues you're getting at, because SHE has a (relatively) easy way out, a kind of escape hatch. She's a cross-platform artist, so her trajectory has this padding around it; she can deny the validity of either of her albums ("it was nice to do something other than shouting for a change," she says, referencing her second album -- the one she admits in the interview she had some input in, more than some, I'd guess, but whatever) without it cancelling out her career. Which is exactly what Mandy Moore is doing, unless she's sure that her new stuff is THAT GOOD. Which (so far) it really really isn't. (Better idea: write the song that's as good as "Candy" that also apologizes for being "Candy," but then she'd be Melissa Lefton! Then again I think several teenpop artists have essentially been doing this lately. And I think Avril might be doing it in her new single, but I'm not sure yet. Aly and AJ deal with feeling like phonies, too, but they think they're phony because everything they write comes out not meaning what they mean it to mean, if you know what they mean, and maybe they don't know what they mean. Also, bullies are mean. But they don't think they're phonies because of the type of music they play, or because of whom they play it to, because they know that would be a really stupid phony thing to say, and they probably wouldn't mean it.)
What won't happen, which is the bigger shame, is that no one is going to let the dust settle on the trainwreck that is Lindsay 05 to (hopefully just) 07 and then look back and say, hey, this music is actually pretty good! Turns out "I Live for the Day" is a song I could carry with me to the grave, huh. Whereas with Mandy Moore, [whose claim to fame in the first place was that she made a pop classic but was never really considered much of an in-it-for-the-long-haul artist *ed. forgot to write this part the first time around!] she's just grasping at straws, and poorly. She knows she doesn't get another teenpop hit AND gain cred, but she also doesn't have very much to offer otherwise (PS her new stuff is slowly being released on her Myspace page). So she calculates where the favorable respectable public opinion might lie and goes all in. More interesting (of an escape hatch case study) is Xtina, who didn't have to drastically change the sound (only the image). But everyone assumed the "soul singer" was in there, somewhere, waiting to "break free."
Likewise, Lindsay the Artist is "in there somewhere," no matter how far off the rails she goes. The real problem, or at least the one I'm interested in, is that LtA is also out there already, on her albums, maybe in a couple of her films (but I think her music career has been more successful on its own terms than her film career, where she usually has to bring something to the proceedings that stands out as a unique spark). She's obviously bright enough to acknolwedge an existing public image, fair or unfair, and test the boundaries of it, but I don't know if she's bright enough to juggle the contradictions of her current image without dropping anything, and music will be the first one to go. (But that's because "bright" doesn't necessarily enter into that part.)
Soooo, what's more difficult for me is not finding and arguing for the proximity of Lindsay to Devendra or vice versa, but between Ashlee and EVERYONE that could be listening to and enjoying her music! Takes herself and career seriously, makes seriously good music, but can still be described as self-evidently dismissable in the same breath as Pam Anderson and Tyra Banks. Lindsay "gets" a public failure to "get" Lindsay the Musician, to the extent that she can laugh it off, even though she's just gotta know some of her stuff is incredible. Ashlee doesn't have that (or really any other) escape hatch and probably never will (even if she does do a cred grab next go-round, though what would that even entail at this point -- Kylie dance spectacle? Writing/recording with Robert Smith? Plunk her down in a basement with an acoustic guitar and a four-track and I bet people will scoff on principle). But why not?
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