By emily

GRADE: F

Oh, it seems like I’ve been dying to rest my head on something real – too bad ‘realness’ is barely a concept anymore. It’s been replaced by ‘reality,’ which is scary precisely because it pretends to be realness, but isn’t. For example, Ashlee Simpson’s scary fake-realness. Here’s a girl who’s been marketed as the ‘gritty,’ ‘edgy’ ‘punky,’ (and other stripped-of-meaning words) alternative to her prissy, shiny sister Jessica. As everyone over fifteen deduced long ago, Ashlee’s rock realness exists on a purely follicular level – basically, she is Jessica, just with a bad black dye job. But this facile repackaging of the blonde pop ideal was enough to push Ashlee to the top of the charts – and to get her insidiously catchy single loads of insidious airplay. Then, this weekend, she pulled a literal Milli Vanilli, blatanly getting caught lip-synching on Saturday Night Live. She then compounded the heinousness of this embarrassing moment by issuing a bratty ‘apology’ during the traditional SNL all-cast hug-and-laugh closer, in which she blamed her band for starting the wrong song (yeah, blaming your band is so punk rock). Oh, wait, did I mention that she also did a stupid jig? All in all, it was a real catastrofee, as Ashlee’s parents would probably spell it.

There are two scenarios which could play out in the next few days/weeks for Ashlee’s career. One takes place in the land of ‘realness,’ and it goes like this: Ashlee’s integrity-free performance is correctly decried far and wide in the mainstream (read: non-online) media, and her one-hit-wonder days are over. But in ‘reality’—and remember, this is the ‘extreme makeover’ variety of reality we’re talking about here – Ashlee’s sad-face apology will garner sympathy and articles of the ‘I make mistakes – see, I’m so relatable!’ variety in all your fave magazines.

Sigh. Something real . . . I like the way that feels.