{"id":152958,"date":"2025-10-30T08:15:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T08:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/152958\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T08:15:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T08:15:08","slug":"no-lily-allen-we-were-never-meant-to-know-this-much-about-one-another-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/152958\/","title":{"rendered":"No, Lily Allen, we were never meant to know this much about one another \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have just finished listening to Lily Allen<\/a>\u2019s annoying new album, West End Girl<\/a>. I put down the record and was struck with a pang of anxiety. I am old enough to remember when we were all wringing our hands about privacy \u2013 the surveillance state, Big Brother Is Watching You, the over-monitoring of social media as a pretext to caution or even imprison private citizens. Did I miss a nuance somewhere, when we decided that Big Tech harvesting and selling our data would presage the demise of the very concept of a private life? <\/p>\n

Apparently so. It seems we are willing to forsake our privacy, entirely on our own terms, and celebrate everyone who does the same. West End Girl is an album about Allen\u2019s open relationship, her divorce, and her boundary-crossing husband \u2013 who we all know to be the American actor David Harbour<\/a>. The centuries-deep tradition of the artist trading in metaphor has been left at the door, as Allen breezily lyricises about her infidelitous husband\u2019s bag of sex toys, the text messages from his mistress, the details of their open relationship \u201carrangement\u201d. Allen looked at the concept of mystery square in the face and said, \u201cNo more!\u201d <\/p>\n

If you will bear with me briefly, I have collected a shortlist of what some reviews are saying about it: \u201cAn album of unvarnished rawness<\/a>\u201d, full of \u201cgory detail\u201d and a \u201cradical level of sharing\u201d; it\u2019s like \u201ca gobsmacking autopsy of marital betrayal<\/a>\u201d, \u201ceavesdropping on a private conversation<\/a>\u201d or as if Allen is \u201copening up [a] bin bag to let you pry inside<\/a>\u201d; this is \u201cunprocessed\u201d, a \u201cblow by blow, into the bloody details\u201d of the romantic collapse and \u2013 most importantly \u2013 it \u201clays bare\u201d (what is it with that cliche?) the inner machinations of the couple\u2019s life. <\/p>\n

Whew. And the most confusing aspect of it all is how the above commentary is not intended as a criticism, but instead is accompanied by rapturous applause. Well, forgive me for thinking that comparing an album to the inner contents of a full bin bag would be a bad thing. I thought we would mourn the death of subtext. <\/p>\n

Wrong. If the tastemakers and critics are any sort of helpful weather vane, I can detect which way the wind is blowing, and it is this: we want to be spoon-fed literal and prying detail, we want to reward the overshare in lieu of literary skill and mystique. <\/p>\n

This is a natural culmination of a media trend started somewhere in the mid-2010s, where the so-called \u201cconfessional essay\u201d overtook the algorithms. Women \u2013 in particular \u2013 looking to make it in a hostile media landscape were encouraged to excavate the goriest details of their private lives, craft it into a serviceable 2,000 words, publish it and pray for inevitable virality and hopefully a lucrative book deal. I am thinking of (and forgive the crassness) works titled My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina and My Former Friend\u2019s Death Was a Blessing. And I remember thinking, as I was coming of age in this media landscape, that this was what journalism was supposed to be; that to sell the intimate details of your life was not just a noble quest, but a sensible commercial route to fame. <\/p>\n

Allen\u2019s album is proof of that concept, and West End Girl is a late-stage symptom, not a cause of the phenomenon. Yes, we were never meant to know this much about one another. And sure, it is a shame to watch the demise in real time of artistic mystery. I firmly believe that the \u201covershare\u201d in musical form is as cringe as the oversharer at a house party. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Lily Allen on working with Martin McDonagh: I would say things that might shock people, and he would be smilingOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

But there is a more troubling byproduct to the end of old-fashioned privacy than a bad album. As ever, we have to look to the phones as the number one culprit. Much is said of the Gen Z<\/a> turn towards isolationism \u2013 how this anxious cohort would rather stay at home and doomscroll than go out and engage in that radical and lost art known as \u201csocialising\u201d. Plenty have tried to work out why, but when you ask them … One answer gets returned with telling regularity: \u201cGen Z are quitting the gym for fear of being recorded\u201d; \u201cGen Z men are so scared of getting filmed they\u2019ve stopped dating\u201d; \u201cGen Z men are too afraid of going viral to date\u201d.<\/p>\n

Who could have predicted that handing everyone a personal recording device, and an incentive to use it, would have landed us here? Private vigilantes are turning on each other, fundamentally altering the basics of quotidian existence. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Lily Allen\u2019s new album is racking up millions of listens and hitting a nerve with women everywhereOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

And so, back to Allen \u2013 her exhibitionism is just another facet of the loss of privacy as a societal virtue, as part of the social contract. Facing a tidal wave of camera phones, internet sleuths with the virality incentive, Big Tech raking through our personal data, and a gossip-industrial-complex that obsesses over the private lives of once-distant celebrities, Allen has simply realised that holding back is a futile exercise. <\/p>\n

I wonder, in fact, whether we are about to dispense with privacy as a useful concept at all. Chilling, perhaps. But at least we will all be able to see how it pans out, blow by blow, from every camera angle. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have just finished listening to Lily Allen\u2019s annoying new album, West End Girl. I put down the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[434,24991,18,117,89648,12650,19,17,85586,1114],"class_list":{"0":"post-152958","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-david-harbour","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-finn-mcredmond","13":"tag-generation-z","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-lily-allen","17":"tag-social-media"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115462126006149905","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}