Lennon
5:30 Saturday Morning
Arista
“I don’t care what people have to say,” she whines in front of odd electronic bleeps and hard guitars that seem a little misplaced in the midst of the Little Bo Peep voice (on “Goatfucker”). Miss Lennon, when you get out of high school, you can take a psychology class and learn that the more someone says they “don’t care” (which is in just about every single one of your songs at some point), the more they really do care, but yet for some reason, she cannot admit to that. The music, the writing, and the vocalization all seem like the dark side of “Naughty Girl” Willa Ford on a bad hair day, with a cigarette addiction and an “I stayed out too late last night” screaming kind of twangy sweet voice. She seems like a good enough artist, because let’s face it, the girl actually plays musical instruments, which seems to be becoming a lost art unless you’re over 40, but I think that the sex she’s overtly selling is going to turn away a lot of possible female fans• unless, of course, that’s the whole point. My advice to Lennon: lose the ultimate gutter slut look. You’re a pretty girl and could really shine if you polished your look a little bit so that listeners could concentrate more on the music than your black eye shadow; nothing preppy, just not so “$3 an hour.” The sexier-than-thou attitude is fakeable, but in that department, there’s not much that separates her from, let’s say• Jessica Simpson (except, of course, everything else). She’s the patron saint of positive lyrics like “I’m gonna fuck up my own life/I’m gonna do it right.” It won’t be surprising if she ends up on Ozzfest next summer, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing, because “success” could even out the edges of trying too hard to be too bad. I hope someone tells her that phony works both ways, unless, of course she is really a down on her luck nineteen-year-old who has a past so big she can actually call it a lifetime. In that case, her music fills a niche that has only been truly filled up until this point by groups such as L7 and Kittie.
Arista Records, 6 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019; http://www.arista.com, http://www.streetteam.net, http://www.lennononline.com
