April 5, 2005 Despite odds, Ashlee Simpson is still standing
AGAINST ALL ODDS, Ashlee Simpson has beaten the rap. In January, after a Milli Vanilli-sized humiliation, she seemed as over as Christmas. But these days her career remains among the living.
First Simpson got caught lip-syncing on "Saturday Night Live." Then she got booed off the stage at the Orange Bowl. Shock jock Howard Stern showered her with contempt, "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart expressed pity, and the mavens on "The View" debated whether or not she was a "bad singer."
The listening public got in plenty of licks, too. Search the Internet under Simpson's name and you'll find everything from a fictional "Ashlee Simpson Karaoke Edition iPod" (which "makes lip-syncing to music sheer delight") to actual petitions: "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." Last week, the "Stop Ashlee Simpson" petition had more than 360,000 signatures and ranked in the top three most active at PetitionOnline.com.
This is the sort of bad publicity that can be fatal. Yet Simpson's debut album, "Autobiography" (Geffen Records), is just about where you'd expect it to be at this stage — bouncing around the middle reaches of the Billboard 200 album chart after selling 3 million copies since its release last July.
"At worst, it limited her growth," Sean Ross of Edison Media Research says of Simpson's high-profile troubles. "Or maybe it kept her from developing the sort of legs with adult pop listeners that, say, Avril Lavigne did."
Simpson's concert tour, which received mostly positive reviews by Bay Area media, is also doing improbably well. In its review of her recent New York City show, The New York Times dubbed Simpson "the leading light of reality pop ... young America's favorite singer," reporting that her voice was "largely drowned out by her screaming fans." She has drawn more-than-respectable crowds to large theaters, including a sellout last month at the 5,600-seat Universal Amphitheatre in Southern California.
"That's very decent business, which I find surprising," says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the trade magazine Pollstar. "I had thought this tour would be a disaster. But for her core audience, I guess the 'Saturday Night Live' faux pas and the booing at the Orange Bowl just didn't have that big an impact. She's selling tickets; her record is still selling. There's still an audience for her."
It's difficult to say which is more surprising: the intensity of the backlash against Simpson or the survival of her career.
Simpson herself is partly to blame for the backlash. After her album came out last year, she did an interview with Lucky magazine ("The Magazine About Shopping") in which she was asked about lip-syncing.
"I'm totally against it and offended by it," she replied. "I'm going out to let my real talent show, not to just stand there and dance around. Personally, I'd never lip-sync. It's just not me."
Then her drummer hit the wrong button on "Saturday Night Live," Simpson's prerecorded voice unexpectedly came over the speakers — and she just stood there and danced around before walking off while her band played on. It was the most unfortunate tape-behind-the-curtain revelation since Milli Vanilli was stripped of the best-new-artist Grammy in 1990 for not singing on its own album. Simpson's own Web site quickly came alive with invective.
"Finally, you're exposed for the fraud that you are," one person wrote on her message board. "You should quit the music business because you are now and always will be a complete and utter joke."
Chastened, Simpson blamed acid reflux and promised to do only live vocals onstage. She was clearly singing during her halftime performance of the song "La La" at the Orange Bowl on Jan. 4 — but she was also badly off-key. After the closing line, "You make me want to scream," the crowd let Simpson have it, booing loudly enough for it to look and sound horrible on television.
In the wake of Simpson's dual disasters, one of the few celebrities who came to her defense was "American Idol" judge Simon Cowell, a man not generally known for sensitivity.
"Why should you have to do something substandard just for the sake of being real?" Cowell asked in an interview with the Web site Launch.com. "There's almost a witch-hunt mentality about people miming."
Ashlee Simpson may not be the greatest singer out there, but she's hardly the worst. She doesn't have as pure (or as bland) a voice as older sister Jessica, and her image falls somewhere between Avril Lavigne, Britney Spears and Liz Phair — a combination of feisty attitude and clean-cut come-hither glances.
"Autobiography" isn't bad so much as generic. "Pieces of Me" is an undeniably catchy single with a nice lilt that chugs along. But too many of the album's songs pass by in stock, cookie-cutter "rocker chick" poses with Simpson singing in an unconvincing Courtney Love-style yowl.
Of course, to point out the obviously prefabricated nature of Simpson's music can be viewed as snobbery. A week after Simpson's "Saturday Night Live" catastrophe, New York Times critic Kelefa Sanneh published an essay that blasted criticism of Simpson as "rockism," an aesthetic whose followers are guilty of "idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star ... extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncer."
But Simpson's core audience, which skews younger and female, doesn't much care about any of that. Her fans are more likely to have seen Simpson on the WB's "7th Heaven" or the MTV reality series "The Ashlee Simpson Show" than "Saturday Night Live," or the halftime show of a football game.
"My sense is that she was never really a music performer where credibility mattered," says Jon Coleman of the Triangle-based research firm Coleman. "She was never that credible in the first place, except as a media event. Just a simple little thing like not being able to lip-sync properly was probably not enough to throw off the people who would like her. The people who find lip-syncing outrageous would probably never buy her music in the first place."
If nothing else, Simpson has allowed people of clashing opinions to come together and vent. It's fascinating to compare listener reviews of her album on Amazon.com, most of which are either one-star or five-star. The one-star reviews predictably blast her as a "talentless fraud." But then there are five-star notices such as the one titled "A Kid's Review":
"I wish I could give this album more than five stars, here's why. This album is the best CD in the world to me. No other CD can top this one."
There's no hope either side will change the other's mind. But the big test will come when Simpson makes another record.
"Yeah, 12-year-old girls can do a 180 by the time they're a year older," says Pollstar's Bongiovanni. "And history shows that's what tends to happen. Someone you thought was totally cool one minute, you don't want to even acknowledge the next."
