Explaining Lily Allen

Well, the word of Carlo Sands has been questioned.

As readers of this blog know, I staggered out of bed late on New Years Day to award, for the second year running, Lily Allen the 2009 Carlo Sands’ Person of the Year for Services in the Advance of Humanity and General Drunkenness.

It seemed, and I must confess still seems, a perfectly logical choice.

But some punters disagree.

There has been a debate of sorts on Facebook, which is where all debates of any importance happen these days.

(I would, however, encourage all readers of this blog to also take advantage of the comments section provided thoughtfully right here on the blog. Among other advantages, allow me to bring to the reader’s attention the array of highly attractive and very useful “google ads” at the top of the blog.

They are specifically tailored to the tastes of the discerning “Alcoholic’s Guide to Modern Life” reader, generated according to the topics brought up in the hard-hitting polemics and tasteful cultural contributions this blog is world-renowned for.

I raise this not because I crave the cold, hard, cash I may one day eventually earn if enough readers gives the ads a good click or two.

No. I am genuinely excited at some of the products this blog is proud to host. For instance: the many offers of “alcohol treatment”. How great is that? I love being treated with alcohol! And it is all just a click away!)

But I digress. (Did I mention there are google ads at the top you can click that can actually earn me money?)

Controversy

My decision to award Allen this coveted prize has sparked controversy. One comment was “If I was David Hasselhoff, I'd be feeling a little bit ripped off right now.”

This particular person (who may or may not be real, I don’t like to assume these things when it comes to “Facebook friends”) proceeded to submit evidence.

In the interests of fairness, I hereby provide it.

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C

Okay, so we have established pretty clearly that the Hoff is a drunk.

But is that all there is to the question?

Another dissenter said: “What about Charlie Sheen's late bid? And I assume Tiger Woods was always sober.”

No doubt it was only the timing of Mariah Carey’s January 5 wasted award nights speech that prevented her name being thrown into the ring by those who think they know better than Mr Carlo Sands, gentleman and drunk.

And here we get to the heart of the matter. Is the award simply about levels of intoxication in abstract? No.

Is it simply about celebrities, while intoxicated, behaving in ways that the media declare are scandalous and cynically exploit to generate sales, viewers and internet hits?

Again, the answer is no.

That criterion certainly applies to all these names. And, by those standards, Lily Allen does indeed fall behind the Hoff. And Peter Doherty, Amy Winehouse and a large percentage of the rest of those who are named celebrities.

But Ms Allen has won the coveted prize twice for something more than just being publicly wasted. (That’s important, of course. You are highly unlikely to win this award for advocating prohibition and topping it off by putting your principles into practice.)

I am looking for something more.

Attitude

I am looking for an attitude. I am seeking a particular stance in relation to the world and all that is wrong with it.

Lily Allen does not just drink. She almost never seen on a stage without a glass of booze in her hand.



Now she could, of course, drink on stage discreetly. But she makes no attempt to hide it. The glass is always right there in her hand for all to see.

In fact, she gleefully tells the media she wont get on stage without a drink.

Think of this attitude and stance and how it relates to the government and media anti-drinking hysteria.

Have another look at the spat between Allen and Elton John on stage at the 2008 GQ Awards.



Allen stood at that podium, forced to present alongside Elton John. Noticeably tipsy, she slurped champagne on stage and poured some more from the bottle she had conveniently placed behind the podium.

Absolutely no attempt was made by Allen to hide her drinking. And when she announced they were coming to the “most important part of the evening” and Elton John said “What, are you going to have another drink?”, Allen refused to apologise.

She said (and I quote): “Fuck you, Elton”.

Mariah Carey, by contrast, apologised of her own volition half way through her drunken ramble.

Most of the celebrities that go to these things get out of their heads on champagne and a hell of a lot of other stuff. And most of them, if asked, will publicly discourage binge drinking and drug use.

Allen’s attitude and stance is defiantly anti-hypocrisy.

Because the truth is, people drink. People often drink a lot. They do it because it is fun.

Allen won the 2009 award for telling the media she drinks because it is fun and has no intention of not doing so. “Why the hell would I stop?”, she said.

Large numbers of people feel the same. And so they get drunk — at parties, BBQs, dinner parties, pubs, bars, parks, weddings, funerals, sporting events (and I'll declare when I fucking well feel like, Richie), gigs and awards ceremonies.

This is the truth about our society and Allen, a chart-topping singer, says it and makes no attempt to hide it in her own life.

Allen displays disrespect for the official rules of the game, for the standard hypocrisy that goes hand-in-hand with the daily functioning of late monopoly capitalism as it makes its increasingly rapid slide towards barbarism.

Elton John is an officially designated “national treasure” in Britain. He is above reproach after he sung that song for Princess Di. And Allen, on stage at a nationally televised event, told him to fuck off.

Of course, it isn’t just Elton John who gets this treatment. In Fuck You, Allen says exactly the same thing, this time to a catchy melody, to then US president George Bush and all racists and homophobes.



To Elton John, she went on: “I’m 40 years younger than you.”

Allen’s point was, at age 23, she was simply being young. This is what young people do.

Allen makes a good role model. She drinks, smokes, swears, speaks her mind, sings openly about sex, sings songs insisting it is her right to sexual pleasure, sarcastically puts down sexist pigs in her lyrics and generally attacks hypocrisy.

In fact, you really have to wonder why anyone was surprised by her response to Elton John when the chorus to Friday Night goes: “Don’t try and test me coz you’ll get a reaction/Another drink and I’m ready for action/I don’t know who you think you are/But making people scared wont get you very far”.

Let Lily be Liam

Of course, Allen could easily drink, smoke, swear, and screw who she wants without it being controversial providing she did it discreetly behind closed doors.

This lack of hypocrisy unsurprisingly saw the British media turn on her. Especially in the earlier part of her career, she was represented as a trainwreck and a drunken slag — prompting Allen to comment that this sexist treatment made her feel like she was living in the 1950s.

If Allen was a young male singer, she would be hailed as a great lad by all. Allen made this point herself in a December 22 Telegraph article: “I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be like Liam Gallagher just because I was a girl.”

Carlo Sands insists that if anyone wants to be like Liam Gallagher, it is their goddamn right.

The appeal of Allen to young women, especially, is she looks and sounds like them. She does the things they do and doesn’t try to hide it. She represents aspects of their lives in her songs (most notably on her first album Alright Still) with wit and a defiant “fuck you” attitude.

A particular target, in a number of songs, is arrogant men who treat her like shit and think they can walk over her. Her response in Shame For You, a swaggering bluesy number dripping in attitude, is one of the best lines in recent popular music: “Oh my gosh you must be joking me/If you think that you’ll be poking me”.

It should go without stating that a key part of the appeal is the language the line is delivered in.

In the delightful Everything’s Just Wonderful, Allen sings about the drag of life for ordinary people.

She sings of being unable to get a mortgage (“It's very funny coz I got your fucking money/And I'm never gonna get it just coz of my bad credit”) and the pressures on young women to lose weight (“In the magazines they talk about weight lose/If I buy those jeans I could look like Kate Moss”).

The result? “Oh jesus christ almighty/Do I feel alright, no not slightly”.

And really, we don’t in this society. That’s why we have booze. And now the bastards try to attack us when we use that to kill the pain!

Allen’s popularity rests in no small part on delivering these sorts of lines, capturing the lives of ordinary people with wit.

Of course, success brings with it the contradiction that success increasingly removes Allen from these conditions. But that is a real contradiction of the capitalist music industry.

You can already sense it having an impact in her second album It’s Not Me, It’s You. It combines more purely personal songs with some general swipes at society as a whole, which work or don’t to varying degrees.

(The Fear is Allen at her best, letting her ironic wit off the leash in a biting picture of society in the grips of empty consumerism with lines like: “I want lots of clothes and a fuckload of diamonds/I hear people die while they’re trying to find them”. All delivered with a sweetly innocent smile.)

But, on the whole, Allen was better singing about getting drunk at the pub and dealing with unwanted attention by men trying to pick her up (Knock 'Em Out).

And it is for that attitude and stance of unashamed defence of the right to drink and have fun, with no attempt to hide it by someone in a position to be a real role model for our youth, that Lily Allen has been honoured with Carlo Sands’ Person of the Year award for two years running.

As opposed to the Hoff or Charlie Sheen or Tiger Woods. All of whose stance is the exact opposite.




“What the fuck do you know? Just cos you’re old you think your wise. But who the hell are you though? I didn’t even ask for your advice. You wanna keep your mouth shut, you wanna take your thoughts elsewhere. Cos you’re doing in my nut, and do you think I care?” — Lily Allen responds to critics of the decision to award her the 2009 Carlo Sands’ Person of the Year for Services in the Advance of Humanity and General Drunkenness

Orwell belatedly recognised (or the Nobel Peace Prize — just like the Grammys only bloodier)

Well it’s that time of the year again, when the world stops and waits with bated breath to discover who a committee of Norwegian people have decided to honour with the Nobel Peace Prize.

This year, they made a seemingly brave choice.

The distinguished committee has gone for a literary reference — a somewhat unsubtle acknowlegement of the works of George Orwell.

As the panel on literature is left in the safe hands of the Swedes, we can only assume this sideways foray into the field is a swipe at the Norwegians hated Scandinavian rivals — who never saw fit to give Orwell his due in his day.

Of course, the Norwegians fail to realise the Swedes were talkin' Orwell before the author was even born.

War is peace, indeed. It has been the case from the beginning.

The Nobel Peace Prize, after all, is named after Alfred Nobel, the renowned 19th century Swedish arms manufacturer.

In fact, the Norwegians themselves have been making the ironic point for years — without anyone appearing to have gotten the reference. So they keep atryin’.

In 1919, the “peace prize” was won by then-US president Woodrow Wilson — whose thoroughly Orwellian commitment to peace involved him taking a reluctant USA into the pointless, mass slaughter of World War One just two years earlier.

1973 was the year for possibly the greatest acknowledgment to Orwell's celebrated concept of “double-speak” — in which a totalitarian regime insists, in his nightmare novel 1984, that “War is Peace”.

The winner that year was Henry Kissinger.

Then-US secretary of state, Kissinger was one of the truly great war criminals of the 20th Century — a century that featured so many top mass murdering names.

Among his many unpeaceful acts, Kissinger was an architect of the Vietnam War (and the bombing of Cambodia, which helped pave the way for the Khmer Rouge to seize power).

And Kissinger famously helped organise the 1973 Chilean military coup that brought the dictator Pinochet to power.

Kissinger uttered the immortal line about the elected left-wing government he helped bury under the corpses of tens of thousands: “I don't see why we need to stand by and allow a country to go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.

“The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Never, I have always believed with good reason drawn from personal experience, trust a Chilean.

In that, I am entirely with the former US secretary of state, as well as the Bolivians.

But should legitimate mistrust ever be allowed to degenerate into barbaric and unseemly mass slaughter?

I fear I must draw a line.

Kissinger, of course, also gave Indonesian dictator Suharto the green light to invade to invade East Timor in 1975.

Before Indonesian occupation, supported and armed by the West, finally left in 1999, around one third of the population had died.

Suharto had come to power in October 1965 in a military coup coordinated with the US embassy. (That old joke — “Why has there never been a military coup in the US? Because Washington has no US embassy.”)

In the aftermath of the coup, one of the 20th century’s great mass murders occurred. As many as half a million members of the Indonesian Communist Party, suspected members, suspected sympathisers, and general leftists and suspected leftists, were butchered.

The Australian PM of the day, Harold Holt, said with glee about Indonesia in a speech to a dinner party in New York, as the bodies were still being buried: “With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”

It is a truly severe tragedy that Holt disappeared while swimming a little over a year later.

This most unfortunate circumstance no doubt is the sole reason Holt was not, justly, awarded Australia’s first and only Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his humanitarian spirit.

I still, to this day, do not see why the Norwegians could not have granted it to him posthumously.

And here we are in 2009, and the Norwegians are as canny and sharp as ever.

In keeping with an understanding of peace that only a prize named after a man whose fortune was made selling things that explode in order to rip human flesh apart could uphold, this year’s prize has been won by the leader of the nation with the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

A leader of a nation actively using the weapons on civilians in three countries, while happily supplying them for a profit for active use in a number of others.

Yes, US President Barack Obama is the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Some cynics and/or communist agents (just because the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago doesn't mean the Laos People's Democratic Republic does not have its agents working to undermine the Free World) suggest there is something odd in this choice.

It is true that in Obama, the hopes of millions of ordinary people desperate for change and an end to his predecessor’s policies of war are embodied.

It is also true that this is a peace prize handed to a man not just overseeing, but escalating an actual war.

It is a bold choice. Even when they handed Kissinger his award, it was for the Paris peace accords that recognised that, more or less, the US had lost the Vietnam War.

Kissinger was at least being rewarded for losing a war.

Obama, on the other hand, is yet to even be defeated. And, by the looks of Afghanistan, it isn't as if the Norwegians would have had to wait that long.

There is not much peaceful about Afghanistan. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner has sent more US troops that his predecessor.

There is increasingly little peaceful about Pakistan either, to which Obama, in a stroke of military genius akin to Kissinger’s brainwave that the way to win Vietnam was to invade Cambodia, has decided to extend the Afghan war.

It makes perfect sense. The Afghan war is being lost, the solution is to start more war next door in a nation more populous.

I try this technique all the time. Horribly drunk after far too many beers, I solve the problem by following each further beer with whiskey chasers.

The results for me are about the same as for the US Empire — pain, tears and stained carpets.

It may well be true, as Spinoza said, that peace is more than the absence of war.

But it is usually considered that an absence of war is, at the very least, a precondition for peace.

Life is more than breathing oxygen, but try it without the fucking stuff and sees how you go.

Drunkeness is more than one beer too, but you can’t reach the nirvana state with only iced water.

The US-led occupation forces was, presumably, working for peace when the US Airforce, as it has repeatedly throughout the war now in its ninth year, bombed a gathering of civilians killing more than 100 in September. And in May. And this month.

Such stories actually occur week in and week out.

No doubt Obama is working for peace when pilotless drones, controlled from a bunker thousands of kilometres way, bomb a Pakistani village that the Taliban have long fled.

No doubt the Obama administration is also working for peace in Honduras. Certainly no one can doubt that, in endless state department press releases, the administration is claiming it is.

In Honduras, the elected president Manuel Zelaya annoyed the hell out of US corporations by raising the minimum wage by 60%.

Not long after, he was kidnapped in his pyjamas, bundled into a place and exiled to Costa Rica.

This act being carried out by a military in which every officer is trained by the US School of the Americas.

The head of the military (and coup) is so keen he graduated from the SOA twice.

Zelaya was flown out of the country from the US military base in Tegucigalpaa.

Despite a public response of, “Hey! Guys! C’mon that’s not nice”, the US continues to train Honduran military officers.

And, claims by state department press releases notwithstanding, has still not cut off the large majority of its aid to the regime.

The military Obama refuses to cut ties with is right now killing and torturing unarmed civilians demanding the president they elected be returned.

In case Latin America didn't get the hint, straight after the coup occurred, it was announced that there would be five new US military bases in Colombia.

Colombia is the third largest recipient of US military aid, which it uses to further world peace by killing civilians pretending they are guerrillas.

It also is home to the highest rate of assassination of trade unionists each year of any other nation. In fact, some 60% of the world total occurs in Colombia.

Of course, the biggest recipient of US military aid is Israel, of which Obama is such an outspoken supporter.

Standard rhetoric about the need for a peace deal, contained in the same state department press releases circulated for the last 15 years, notwithstanding, this continues under Obama without any risk.

Enabling, of course, Israel to commit crimes against humanity.

Whatever the intention of those inscrutable Scandinavians, it does appear that, to win a Nobel Peace Prize, no actual talent in the field of peace is required. The very opposite seems rewarded.

Not unlike the Grammys really.

And, if we look it at it, we must admit: the Obama administration’s contribution to world peace is not really all that different to multi-Grammy winner Mariah Carey’s contribution to music.

Their effects on their respective fields are, in fact, strikingly similar.

And I do find listening to Mariah Carey enables me to feel, in a small way, something of what it must be like to be a prisoner held indefinitely without charge in the US-run Bagrahm prison in Afghanistan.

Those lucky enough to have trialled the services available to a prisoner in both Bagrahm and Guantanamo say they prefer Guantanamo.

Obama made the high-profile pledge to close Guantanamo. Bagrahm, continues unhindered in its torture policy.

And Orwell is at last rewarded with a belated Nobel Prize.




“When you left I lost a part of me, it's still so hard to believe. Come back baby,
'cause we belong together”. This Grammy-winning song’s contribution to the field of music is similar to Barack Obama’s to world peace.