While Lily Allen’s new music video Hard Out Here has drawn some criticism I love it. It is cheeky and it has drawn debate. It starts of with Lily having liposuction while her manager and the surgeons wonder how ‘anyone can let themselves get like these’. ‘I’ve had two babies’, she responds.
Lily had to deny claims the video was racist and said she just hired the best dancers.
She said the video, “has nothing to do with race, at all, is meant to be a lighthearted satirical video that deals with objectification of women within modern pop culture … The message is clear.”
She also said said she didn’t request “specific ethnicities” for her dancers; simply hiring the “the best dancers” from the auditions. “I would not only be surprised but deeply saddened if I thought anyone came away from that video feeling taken advantage of, or compromised in any way,” Allen’s “insecurities” stopped her twerking alongside them in her underwear “I actually rehearsed for two weeks trying to perfect my twerk, but failed miserably,” she said. “if I was a little braver, I would have been wearing a bikini too, but I do not and I have chronic cellulite, which nobody wants to see.”
All of Allen’s dancers – Seliza Sebastian, Melissa Freire, Shala EuroAsia, Monique Lawrence, and Temple – stood by Lily and the video, posting links to it and retweeting Allen’s remarks. “Critics will be critics,” Men have been exploiting women in the stereotype Lily sends up in her video for decades. Is she not aloud to point it out because she is of another race?
She also send up Robin Thicke and his rapey ‘Blurred Lines’ video by replacing the ‘Robin Thicke has a big d**k” (more like is) scene with “Lily Allen Has a Baggy Pussy”. It’s rude but amusing.
Lily Allen has gotten a lot of stick, and numerous people are pointing out that her comeback after four years away from music coincides with her vintage store she had with her sister, Lucy in Disguise, going broke, but we need more Lily Allen’s. Not because she is perfect- she sings about women being objectified but has posed topless for GQ– but because she has an opinion, isn’t afraid to share it and proudly calls herself a feminist- something that not all celebrities are brave enough to do. She may not be everyone’s idea of a role model but it is sexist that every women in the public eye has her every move questioned, and is always supposed to be a role model. Men are never held up to the same lofty heights. We need more of her because Lily Allen is a happily married mother-of-two. She works hard and goes for what she wants. Some people call her mouthy but that is only because she is a women, if she was a man she would just have an opinion. Go Lily, we love you.
What do you think?