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Boneheads Rants

Please sign the STOP ASHLEE SIMPSON PETITION

A brilliant 18 year old disgruntled Ashlee Simpson fan has created a petition to make her stop. It’s up to close to 200,000 signatures as of this post. My signature is #171427. The site is very slow, surely due to the huge amount of bandwidth of thousands of people signing it, so be patient. If you can’t get through, try it later.

DO US ALL A FAVOR: SIGN THIS PETITION

To: Geffen/DGC Records & JT Simpson Entertainment

We, the undersigned, are disgusted with Ashlee Simpson’s horrible singing and hereby ask her to stop. Stop recording, touring, modeling and performing. We do not wish to see her again.

She cannot match the sound of her voice that can be found on her CDs, when she sings live. She simply yells the words (sometimes the wrong ones) into the mic.

We are so sickened by her “performing” that we are taking this opportunity to demand that she stop.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

One reply on “Please sign the STOP ASHLEE SIMPSON PETITION”

You know, I almost feel sorry for Ashlee. My sense is that she is basically a kid who simply wanted (and was doubtless urged by her parents) to do the same things her big sister did. Had Jessica Simpson been (for example) a college cheerleader, Miss {fill in state of choice}, or an actress on Beverly Hills 90210, Ashlee would most likely have followed a similar path, as well. The fact that she has gone as far as she has is arguably more the result of a record industry and buying public (mostly pre-pubescent girls, in Ashlee’s case) which is unwilling (or unable) to distinguish between manufactured image and musical talent, than it is due to Ashlee’s own ambition and efforts.

But then I think about brilliant, but struggling, female artists like Jonatha Brooke, Aimee Mann, Jill Sobule, etc. They are not Ashlee’s competition in terms of the age group who listens to each, but they are arguably part of her competition in terms of marketing & distribution dollars, concert promotion, etc. (this is particularly true when the industry still tends to view women artists as being interchangeable; the Britneys, Avrils, etc. of the world have erased many of the lessons taught by the Lilith Fair). These are artists who may once have had some brush with mainstream popularity (e.g. “I Kissed a Girl”, by Sobule, got some MTV airtime, way back in ’95; and, of course, Aimee Mann had a few MTV-friendly years in ‘Til Tuesday), but who are now scraping by to get their albums released and distributed to the listeners. (For better or worse, an artist like Ani DiFranco, who is able to generate her own marketing and promotional buzz, not just by being talented, but also by being willing to tour 10 months a year, and investing each performance with her prodigious charisma and energy, doesn’t come along that often. I would argue that there are many artists of similar talent, who simply don’t have the same reserves of energy and charisma; that doesn’t make their music any less deserving of attention or respect.)

I’m under no illusion that, were Ashlee Simpson to drop out of the picture, her record label would go out of its way to put their marketing and promotion muscle (and money) behind a truly deserving artist; after all (the record label would undoubtedly argue), what do 10-year-old girls know of musical talent? Further (they would argue), is it the popular music industry’s responsibility to educate those same 10-year-old girls on the subject?

Maybe it’s not the industry’s responsibility to seek out and promote real talent; nonetheless, it needs to wake up to the fact that it is in its long-term best interests to do so. As long as the big labels are content to develop and push disposable music, “made” by interchangeable artists, that music and those artists will be discarded at an increasingly rapid pace, by a jaded public.

Marketing is ephemeral; talent lasts. Whether Ashlee steps out of the spotlight by choice today, or that spotlight simply moves on to someone else tomorrow, she will almost certainly disappear from the public eye soon enough.

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