The Hot Press Cover Story: Lily Allen

LILY ALLEN HAS A BAGGY PUSSY’. Hardly surprising given that the 28-year-old Londoner pushed her second child out of it earlier this year, but it’s still not the kind of thing that pop stars generally advertise. Let alone spell out with big balloons, as Allen has just done in the hilariously OTT promo video for her new single ‘Hard Out Here’.
Let’s bend down and face it: pop star pussies are supposed to be tight, pink and moist, not stretched, loose and real. Just look at Paris Hilton’s. Or Britney’s. Whic isn’t very hard to do. They’re just one quick Google search away. In recent years, both young ladies made an unfortunate habit of forgetting to put their panties on when hitting the town, thereby allowing their ladybits to be graphically photographed, as they clambered drunkenly (or not) out of limousines. Well, it’s one surefire way to guarantee loads of press.
Still and all, flashing your vagina in public is pretty old news nowadays. Besides, if it’s baggy, such exhibitionist activities might not garner the kind of attention you actually want. Lily Allen, though, is a very different class of pop star anyway. Bolder, brassier and brighter. Also bitchier – in a good way. As she sings in ‘Hard Out Here’, her fi rst new release in three years, “Forget your balls, grow a pair of tits/ It’s hard out here for a bitch.”
‘Bitch’, in the way that Allen means it, isn’t a term of abuse. To be a bitch is to be a forceful, assertive, interesting and unapologetic female. Allen gave a list of those she considered bitches to the Observer magazine recently. “Dolly Parton is a bitch. Adele’s a bitch. Angela Merkel is a bitch. Rihanna’s an inspiring bitch. My mum. Miley’s a bitch, rising. She’s my hero. Kate Middleton is NOT a bitch.”
Allen claims that ‘Hard Out Here’ is her riposte to the Daily Mail, who two years ago ran a graph charting “the ups and downs of her ever-changing fi gure” on their massively popular website. The video opens with her lying on a plastic surgeon’s operating table, with fat being pumped out of her stomach into a glass jar. Her nerdish American manager looks disgustedly at the gunk. “How does a woman let herself get like this?” he bemoans, despairingly. The surgeon looks up and says, “Lack of self-discipline.” “I’ve had two children,” Allen pleads, apologetically, lying under a surgical sheet.
The message is clear. Lily is a real woman. With a real body. And a baggy pussy. Deal with it. It’s not just Lily Allen who has felt the need to have a swipe back at the Daily Mail. Earlier this year, American pop star Amanda Palmer released a song entitled ‘Dear Daily Mail’, written in response to their story about her accidentally exposing a breast during her Glastonbury show (‘Making a Boob of Herself’ was the headline).
Much like Allen’s new single, it’s a witty spit into the leery eye of media misogyny. A YouTube video of her performing it at the Roundhouse in London went viral a couple of months ago. Midway through the song, Palmer slips out of her kimono and sings in the nude: “Dear Daily Mail/ You misogynist pile of twats/ I’m tired of these baby bumps, vadge fl ashes, muffi ntops/ Where are the newsworthy COCKS?/ If Iggy or Jagger or Bowie go topless the news barely causes a ripple/ Blah blah blah feminist blah blah blah gender shit blah blah/ OH MY GOD - NIPPLE!”
It’s powerful stuff.
At the other end of the female star spectrum is 20-year-old Miley Cyrus. The former Disney child actress, who made her name as Hanna Montana, has been making headlines in recent times for rather less feministic reasons. In fact, Lily Allen’s “baggy pussy” spelled out in balloons is a direct response to Robin Thicke’s “Robin Thicke has a big dick” boast in the controversial video for his hit ‘Blurred Lines’ – the song for which Miley joined him on the MTV VMAs. “My video has absolutely nothing to do with Miley Cyrus,” Lily told the press. “It wasn’t a direct response to anything that she’s done… Robin Thicke, however, it was”.
With the promo for 'Hard Out Here' getting over 10.7 million YouTube hits – and rising! – it’s marked Thicke’s card good and proper.
Rewind. At the MTV VMAs, held at Barclay’s Centre in Brooklyn, Cyrus performed ‘Blurred Lines’ live with Thicke. It was the last thing a lot of people expected of the former child star, who jaw-dropped the world when she appeared on stage scantily-clad in nude spandex, simulated masturbation with a giant sponge fi nger, and twerked into Thicke’s groin. Not many people had even heard of “twerking” before that night.
The word – which basically means wriggling your arse – is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Rapey’, a word coined by Tricia Romano of the Daily Beast to describe the video for ‘Blurred Lines’, has also made it. Has one song ever before resulted in the creation of two brand new words?
Cyrus’s onstage antics resulted in Twitter meltdown and newspaper headlines all over the planet. Which was undoubtedly her intention.
Afterwards she tweeted: “Smilers! My VMA performance had 306,000 tweets per minute. That’s more than the blackout or Superbowl! #fact.”
It’s as if the Twitter action it generates is the only measure of the righteousness of anything... The controversy about Miley cavorting to ‘Blurred Lines’ on MTV didn’t end there, however.
Indeed, it was only just beginning. Cyrus had previously spoken in interviews about her admiration for outspoken Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor and how her iconic ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ video had been the inspiration for her own promo for ‘Wrecking Ball’ – though presumably not the bit where she licks a sledgehammer.
When she heard this, O’Connor posted a lengthy, and touchingly maternal, open letter to Cyrus on her website, warning her that she was going down the wrong path.
“The music business doesn’t give a shit about you, or any of us,” she wrote. “They will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think it’s what YOU wanted… and when you end up in rehab as a result of being prostituted, ‘they’ will be sunning themselves on their yachts in Antigua, which they bought by selling your body, and you will fi nd yourself very alone.”
Having been through the music industry mill herself, O’Connor knew what she was talking about: “Real empowerment of yourself as a woman would be to in future refuse to exploit your body or your sexuality in order for men to make money from you. I needn’t even ask the question… I’ve been in the business long enough to know that men are making more money than you are from you getting naked. It’s really not at all cool. And it’s sending dangerous signals to other young women. Please in future say ‘no’ when you are asked to prostitute yourself. Your body is for you and your boyfriend. It isn’t for every spunk-spewing dirtbag on the net, or every greedy record company executive to buy his mistresses diamonds with.”
Cyrus’s response to Sinéad’s advice was less than gracious. In fact, it was downright nasty, the wrong kind of bitchy. She tweeted a screengrab of some tweets that a desperately unhappy O’Connor had posted in the middle of her much publicised nervous breakdown early last year, along with the comment, “Before Amanda Bynes… There was…”
Amanda Bynes is an American actress, who underwent a diffi cult, public meltdown and was ultimately admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Predictably enough, an incensed O’Connor hit the roof and penned another open letter (“Miley… Really? Who the fuck is advising you? Because taking me on is even more fucking stupid than behaving like a prostitute and calling it feminism”). And then another. And then another. The whole thing wound up being immortalised in a memorable episode of South Park. A quick look at the numbers demonstrates how odd a tool Twitter has become. 15.7 million followers witnessed Miley’s spat with Sinéad; Lady Gaga has a whopping 40.7m little monsters hanging on to her every tweet; Rihanna has 33.3m followers; Lily Allen 4.4m and Azealia Banks 362,231, which is still far in excess of her record sales. Meanwhile, Perez Hilton berating Azealia's use of the word ‘faggot’ brought her to the attention, for good or ill, of his 6m followers. No wonder social media is where pop stars do most of their feuding nowadays.
While O’Connor might have been accused of overegging the pudding somewhat, there’s no doubt that many women working in the music industry agree with her original points. And then some...
Ruth-Anne Cunningham is a hugely successful 27-year-old singer-songwriter from Dublin. Currently based in LA, she’s written hit songs for the likes of Britney Spears, Pixie Lott, Westlife and Leona Lewis, and is currently a voice coach on the American version of The X Factor.
“I loved Sinéad’s letter to Miley,” she tells Hot Press. “I totally agree with Sinéad. I think what Miley’s doing is smart, in one way, because she knows how to generate publicity and get people talking about her, which is a lot of what it’s about when you’re a pop star – staying in the media. But I think someone like Miley, who has a great talent and a great voice, doesn’t need to do that.
“My fear is that her legacy will be more about her antics than her music, and I think that she’ll regret that when she’s older. I think everyone working in the music industry would prefer to be known for their music and their talent. At the end of the day, when they’re older and they’ve got kids and they’ve got a family, then the stripping and twerking and smoking joints onstage (Cyrus smoked a joint onstage at the MTV Awards in Amsterdam last month – OT)… she’ll regret all that.
But at the moment, she’s young and I suspect she’s just thinking about what will get her the most press and attention.”
Having said that, Cunningham doesn’t believe that Cyrus is being manipulated.
“She’s not being forced into anything at all,” she reflects. “That’s one thing Sinéad said that I disagree with. I know people who know Miley and she’s very much doing this herself. But the people around her aren’t stopping her; they’re being ‘yes’ people. So I don’t think anyone is forcing her into doing any of this at all. Even when you watch her being interviewed, you can just tell that this is all her. Her people are all saying, ‘yeah, yeah, do that!’ because they know it will make money, but I don’t think she’s a puppet.”
The Italian-Australian star Gabriella Cilmi has been there, done that, sold the T shirt. She first shot to fame five years ago, at the tender age of 16, when her soulful single ‘Sweet About Me’ sold more than two million copies and went Top 10 in 16 countries. She’s set to release her third album, The Sting, early in 2014.
Three years ago, following the release of her sophomore album, Ten, she made a bitch decision. Feeling that she was being pressurised by her management and Island Records to become something she wasn’t, she fired both to go independent. “Yeah, I kind of broke up with my management and my label,” she tells Hot Press. “I was in quite an unhappy place and felt like I had to compromise a lot on my second album, with the sound and the whole way that the album was marketed.”
Her epiphany happened one night when she was performing onstage.
“There was just this one moment,” she recalls, “when I was performing ‘On A Mission’, which was a single from the second album, in a sexy alien spacesuit. I was doing a dance routine and, like, I have three left feet! I have no idea how I ended up doing dance routines. When I think about it now, I have no idea how I got through it. But anyway, I remember before I went on stage that day just feeling kind of really low and forgetting why I even loved music in the first place.”
Cilmi is in no doubt that many young females working in the music industry are being manipulated into being over-sexualised, in order to sell more albums.
“The minute that girls turn 18 in this industry, there’s always somebody on their back going, ‘Oh you’re a woman now, it’s time for you to be really sexy and show off some skin’. I don’t know. At the same time, you still have artists like Florence
and Adele, who do their own thing and don’t get mixed up in trying to over sexualise young women in the industry.”
What was her take on Sinéad O’Connor’s open letter to Miley Cyrus?
“My initial opinion was if you really want to share some advice with someone, motherly advice, you wouldn’t do it by addressing the situation that publicly. You know: write a private letter to her. But the fact of the matter is that the issue is actually quite big. There are young kids who watch videos of Miley Cyrus who want to look like her and want to be like that, you know?
“There’s a certain responsibility that the media has to these young kids,” she reflects. “I initially thought, ‘Oh, maybe that’s harsh to talk to her like that’ – but I think the problem is much bigger than one person’s feelings. There are a lot of people that are affected by that. I think Lily Allen’s video is making a point too with her ‘Hard out there for a bitch’ lyric. The amount of songs out there where women are referred to as bitches and hoes is pretty astonishing. I mean, Lupe Fiasco, he’s got a song called ‘Bitch Bad, Woman Good, Lady Better’. I mean, there needs to be more of these things – so, in the end, Sinéad was right to do what she did. I don’t think that it should overshadow the whole music side of things, but it is topical at the moment and it’s out in the open now – so I guess people can decide what they think is right for themselves.”
Meteor Award-winning Irish pop star Laura Izibor has had plenty of experience of the sexism that seems to be endemic in the industry.
“It happens to men as well, you can’t ignore that,” the 26-year-old Dubliner tells Hot Press. “But I think with women there’s more pressures because it really is like being in school again. It’s about being the cool chick, it’s about being the popular one. If you’re someone who says ‘yes’ a lot in this industry – ‘Yes, I’ll change my hair’; ‘Yes, I’ll do that’; ‘Oh that sells, yes I’ll do that’. It’s a nice feeling you know? People are happy with you. Your record label will tell you ‘yes’. When you say, ‘No, I’m not comfortable, no, actually’, then you’re a diffi cult artist and it becomes challenging. So we all like to feel adored and liked and that people are rooting for us. I think this industry heightens that with different levels.
“So I think that’s why it’s really difficult when you see young artists. You don’t have a clue who you are, and you’re basically being told:
‘This is who we want you to be.’ I’m never really too surprised when I see a Miley Cyrus video and people are like ‘Oh, my God!’ and I’m like, ‘Not really, are you really shocked?’ People don’t really put a spotlight on it.”
What did she make of Cyrus’s twerking at the VMAs?
“I just wanted to turn it off, but my boyfriend was like ‘keep watching!’ I felt so uncomfortable in my skin. I managed to watch it and I still find it hard to fi nd the words now. I, honestly, just feel for the girl. I see a girl completely out of herself, out of her skin. To me, she’s a kid and I mean a real kid, because she’s after growing up under that kind of pressure.
It looks from the outside that these child stars grow up real quick. It looks like that on the outside – but, on the inside, they’re completely stunted because they’ve been deprived of that.
So, to me, I really see a kid. “I mean she looks younger. She looks, to me, as if she’s about 17, 18. It’s shocking the nation and so on, but it’s her journey, really. You go to a nightclub and you’ll see a young girl of 18, 19 with her dress up her arse, sitting on a fella’s lap, fl irting and drinking. It doesn’t mean she’s a bad person.
“Miley, to me, is just a young girl that has to find her way. I remember being 19 and thinking I was the shit. Like reeeeeally. I got a tattoo, I was like, ‘I know it all!’ And I think she’s just like the rest of us were, except she’s on a major scale and she’s trying to prove it to us in this way, again and again and again. It doesn’t look natural to me, it doesn’t look like who she actually is. I think she thinks it is, and she’s just going to have to find her own way.”
Izibor also makes the point that, despite all of their interference and supposed ‘guidance’, many record label executives don’t actually have a clue.
“That’s true,” she laughs. “People don’t know what they’re actually doing. That’s the funny thing about record labels. They have great big plans, but the amount of times I’ve seen them go, ‘We don’t know what to do!’ So they’ll ask you to do this and then you go and change it and they go, ‘Actually, no’. It’s all like school kids.”
Asked who she rates amongst the female pop stars of the moment, Izibor names the likes of Adele, Lorde, Alicia Keyes, Katy Perry and Lily Allen.
“They all seem to be having fun with just being a woman. Beyoncé, eight times out of ten. There have been times with her when I was like, ‘Ooh, that’s a bit full on’. But she’s so fucking amazing she gets away with it. With someone like Miley, though, she can’t keep that up forever. She won’t look the way she does forever. Though, come to think of it, Madonna is still showing her G-string.”
Another young female artist who’s been One of Lily Allen’s many targets in her ace ‘Hard Out Here’ video is Robin Thicke whose ‘Blurred Lines’ caused major consternation in 2013. Is he worthy of Ms. A’s “baggy pussy” scorn? The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop thinks he is…
“It would seem that many young women seem to be very offended by the words in the song and by the video,” she tells Hot Press. “At the DRCC we see the awful devastation that happens to men and women who have been victims of rape and sexual abuse. More recently we have seen an escalation in additional types of violence including threats to kill, physical violence, intimidation and psychological abuse. The constant exposure to these types of images can lead to the lowering of male self-control and higher thresholds in society of acceptable types of attitudes that objectify both the viewer and the actors/singers, especially in young people, whose worldview is still being shaped.
“Rather than give any more energy to Robin Thicke, I would much rather promote ‘Turn Off The Silence’, a very catchy song with a powerful, positive message of life after abuse, composed by Mundy and Danny O’Reilly and sung by the beautiful Roisin O and Mundy. All proceeds go to support the much needed services of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. You can support the DRCC by texting ‘DRCC’ to 50300 to donate €2. You can also download 'Turn Off The Silence'.”
In The Thicke Of It making headlines this year is 22-year-old American rapper Azealia Banks. Championed by Hot Press with a front cover at the beginning of 2012, she’s continued to hog the headlines. Her 2013 got off to a pretty bad start, however, when she got into a public feud with celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, calling him a ‘faggot’ – and thus earning a condemnation from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. It wasn’t good publicity, but it was still publicity. Since then, she has arguably become better known for her Twitter blow-outs than for her music.
Ruth-Anne Cunningham is a fan of Banks’ artistic output, but not her attitude. “I love Azealia’s music,” she proffers. “I really do. I think she’s great for the music industry at the moment. She’s really fresh. But she needs to stop the Twitter feed. Again, all these artists are using the media to get attention. They’re trying to fight with other girls to get attention. To me, it’s just boring at this stage. I think, in some ways, Azealia has a bad attitude. She should just stick to doing her own music because she’s really good at it.”
As Cunningham sees it, too many female artists are relying on headlines rather than hits to stay relevant.
“It’s a strange moment. Everybody’s trying to do the shock value thing,” she says, disgustedly.
“That’s what it’s all about these days. Artists are saying, ‘What can I do to shock more?’ It’s really annoying to me, as a musician and a songwriter. It’s like nobody cares! I just want the songs to be good and the music to be good. What scares me
is that the public are buying into the shock value thing. What’s going be to next? Is somebody going to stab someone in a video or something?
“I mean, a song like ‘Blurred Lines’ didn’t need any of that controversy,” she continues. “It’s a great song anyway, and would have done well without any of that. That stuff really gets on my nerves. Everybody thinks that they need to take off more clothes than the next artist. It’s not a good message to send to anybody. Whatever about being good role models, it’s just not a good message to send. It isn’t about stripping. It should be about the music first. So a lot of the females out there at the moment are really disappointing to me.”
Between twerking, open letters, public stripteases and Twitter feuds, 2013 has certainly been an interesting – if not exactly edifying – year for women in the music industry. Where’s it all going? Well, Lily ‘Baggy Pussy’ Allen – three weeks at No.1 in Ireland with 'Somewhere Only We Know' as we go to press – will be leading the charge in 2014, with the release of her third studio album, Allen. It sounds promising.
“I’m not moaning at the world anymore,” she told The Observer. “Before, I was struggling. Coming out of adolescence and not knowing where I was in the world – now it’s about ownership and empowerment. I’d like to think that my children’s generation won’t feel like this. Like I do. I want them to realise that not everyone can be fucking ‘hot’. Rather than attractiveness being the end prize, it should be as rewarding to be clever or funny, or, you know, have your ‘thing’.”
Now, there’s a thing! To be yourself is the new creed. It might just catch on, you know...

In the Thicke of it
One of Lily Allen’s many targets in her ace ‘Hard Out Here’ video is Robin Thicke whose ‘Blurred Lines’ caused major consternation in 2013. Is he worthy of Ms. A’s “baggy pussy” scorn? The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop thinks he is…
“It would seem that many young women seem to be very offended by the words in the song and by the video,” she tells Hot Press. “At the DRCC we see the awful devastation that happens to men and women who have been victims of rape and sexual abuse. More recently we have seen an escalation in additional types of violence including threats to kill, physical violence, intimidation and psychological abuse. The constant exposure to these types of images can lead to the lowering of male self-control and higher thresholds in society of acceptable types of attitudes that objectify both the viewer and the actors/singers, especially in young people, whose worldview is still being shaped.
“Rather than give any more energy to Robin Thicke, I would much rather promote ‘Turn Off The Silence’, a very catchy song with a powerful, positive message of life after abuse, composed by Mundy and Danny O’Reilly and sung by the beautiful Roisin O and Mundy. All proceeds go to support the much needed services of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. You can support the DRCC by texting ‘DRCC’ to 50300 to donate €2. You can also download 'Turn Off The Silence'.”