We Need To Talk About Lily Allen

The Internet exploded when iconic British pop star Lily Allen released the music video for her long-awaited comeback single “Hard Out Here”. It is incredibly ambitious and catchy as hell. "Hard Out Here" has Allen referencing everything from the sexual double standard for women to the glass ceiling. It's a feminist pop anthem you can blast at parties.

At first, we find Allen stretched out on an operating table, undergoing liposuction while silently protesting criticism about her wright from her old white manager. “How do people let themselves get like this?” Her gross white middle-aged manager asks. “Um, I've had two babies,” she responds. This aptly captures the pressure woman in the music industry must feel. She aptly instills the idea of female empowerment, cleverly discussing the objectification of women, sexism in the media and the fallacy that sexism no longer exists. She introduces the concept of the glass ceiling and her attempt to expose and break it. This is probably the most effective scene because she liberates herself from the revolting sexism it creates by getting up and singing.

The lyrics aim to ridicule common tropes perpetuated about women in pop music, and are supported in the video by clever references to other music. The repetition of the refrain “hard out here for a bitch,” is a reclamation of “bitch” as a term of power and a reference to Three 6 Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”. This actually contrasts with the ideology that "males are active and females are passive" within media texts.

She also satirizes the standard "Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus" approach to Top 40 by adding an inter-textual reference to Thicke's video "Blurred Lines" and Cyrus' "We Can't Stop" video and performances. As a widely recognized gesture, this became a successful satiric statement. She replicates this to show how insignificant the assertion was to the the actual narrative of his song and making a point of how ridiculous the content of pop videos have gotten and how the 'patriarchal society' allows this.

The only problem with Allen's video though, is that it undermines its own message.

Lily Allen uses a satiric approach to her music video. In trying to make a comments about the sexism and materialism in hip-hop video and pop music, Allen's video was interpreted by many as perpetuating racism The problem was that for satire to have a real effect, mere imitation is not enough. In her attempt to satirize, Allen still manage to alienate.

The video cuts to black women twerking, an obvious parody of the use of black women as props in music videos. While Allen may not have intended to dehumanize and objectify the women of color twerking in her video, she succeeded in many ways. But even when she’s dancing with them, it seems she’s still kind of making fun of them, or at least keeping her distance. We get the message yet the entire video is laden with half-naked ladies twerking. We see women licking various objects as phallic symbols and spraying themselves with champagne; there are gratuitous close-ups that reduce women to jiggly butts and crotch shots. Further to that point, Allen is the only three-dimensional woman in this video yet the dancers never stop playing up the bottle-popping, booty-shaking roles they've been assigned—roles she’s already condemned and rejected. Meanwhile she sings, "No need to shake my ass for you cause I’ve got a brain.” Exacerbating this is Allen demonstrating her own superiority by being a clothed white woman parading amongst semi-naked women of colour.

The biggest issue here isn't that Allen chose to satirize the twerking dancers in hip hop videos, but that she chose to satirize something that doesn't actually affect her, that she could stand apart from and present as a sort of oddity. That's ultimately the problem with Allen's brand of pop feminism, though. In order to empower women just like her, she's had to exclude and make a mockery of countless others.