Song 96: Jessica

Remembering this song has given me pause for thought.

It's by Adam Green, who was one half of Moldy Peaches. It's a crooned, scornful ballad about the TV star Jessica Simpson. I rather liked it for a while.

I remember playing it once to Juliette and she said "that's a really cruel horrible song", and it is. I'd had a bit of a blindspot to its cruelty.

I was generally quite good on post-millennial cruelty, whether it was The X Factor or the tabloid treatment of Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse. Obvious, mainstream, punch-down cruelty, I was pretty good at disdaining and steering clear of.

This seemed like indie, impersonal, cruelty. An irony-laden critique on the vacuity of celebrity. So I was ok with it, I guess. But the words are pretty horrible really. And it turns out Jessica Simpson was one of the many early 2000s female celebrities who, just below the surface, was having a pretty horrendous time of it.

Nowadays, Adam Green would be vilified on the twitter for the cruelty of a song like this. And the circle would keep turning.

Twitter is funny for the cruelty. Obviously, there are the many many vindictive shitheads and the poisonous mobs etc, but there's a real brand of good guy cruelty too, which can trip you up, where people who seem generally funny, good-natured and well-intentioned will direct their banter at someone who isn't necessarily a lord of a darkness, but maybe just a quite annoying person, and it will escalate and escalate and you'll suddenly think "god, this is all just cruelty" and that's how maybe I feel about the Jessica Simpson song, but also, in a weird way, maybe it's just ok to be cruel in an impersonal way after all. Maybe Adam Green no more thought, nor was required to think, about Jessica Simpson as an actual human being than the funny tweeters do about the target of their satire, and really that's fine, and it's better to treat the world as if it's not connected at all rather than completely connected, otherwise most of our actions and utterances are carelessly cruel.