Lily Allen Knocks ‘Em Out!

Whether American audiences think Alright, Still is “really good” is still to be determined. Thanks to lots of blog-love, Allen has amassed a large Internet following (she immediately sold out her first U.S. show at NYC’s Hiro Ballroom back in October 2006), but will her music break the American Top Forty? Hopefully, it will. The disk, produced in New York by Mark Ronson, is damn catchy, with her lite-style rapping, her girlish voice, and all the ska, hip-hop, and calypso influences. The album definitely has the potential to get your head bopping, and has songs that can stick in your mind for hours. But it’s not just the infectious melodies that are worth noting. Allen’s lyrics, though at times juvenile and irreverent, can also be frank, honest, cutting, and funny—oftentimes attacking ex-lovers and bitchy girls. 

On her lead single, “Smile,” about a cheating ex-boyfriend, Allen sings, “When you first left me I was wanting more/But you were f---ing that girl next door, what ya do that for?”  She then adds a bit of schadenfreude in the chorus with, “At first when I see you cry/Yeah it makes me smile, yeah it make me smile/At worst I feel bad for a while/But then I just smile, I go ahead and smile.” What scorned woman hasn’t felt that way about an ex?

“Knock ‘Em Out” is a hysterical, frenetic rap about the anxiety women endure while trying to avoid undesirable, “last call” hook-ups and the desperate lines they make up. “You’re just doing your own thing/And someone comes out the blue/They’re like, ‘alright.’/He’s saying, ‘Yeah can I take your digits?’/And you’re like, ‘No, not in a million years. You’re nasty. Please leave me alone.’” Excuses a girl might like to use if she had the nerve, are comically thrown into the mix: “No, you can’t have my number/Because I’ve lost my phone,” “Oh yeah, actually, yeah, I’m pregnant/Having a baby in like six months, so yeah, yeah…” “I’ve got to go cos my house is on fire,” “I’ve got herpes.”

On a perfect, summer-day soundtrack, “LDN” (the text message shortcut for “London”), Allen bicycles around the city because “the filth took away my license,” but “it doesn’t get me down… cause the sights that I’m seeing are priceless.” The sights include a pimp and his crack whore and a teen mugging an old lady. “When you look with your eyes/Everything seems nice/But if you look twice/You can see it’s all lies.” Despite the seedy undercurrents, Allen stays positive, because “Sun is in the sky, oh why, oh why/Would I wanna be anywhere else?”