I have just finished listening to Lily Allen’s annoying new album, West End Girl. 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 – 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?
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’s open relationship, her divorce, and her boundary-crossing husband – who we all know to be the American actor David Harbour. The centuries-deep tradition of the artist trading in metaphor has been left at the door, as Allen breezily lyricises about her infidelitous husband’s bag of sex toys, the text messages from his mistress, the details of their open relationship “arrangement”. Allen looked at the concept of mystery square in the face and said, “No more!”
If you will bear with me briefly, I have collected a shortlist of what some reviews are saying about it: “An album of unvarnished rawness”, full of “gory detail” and a “radical level of sharing”; it’s like “a gobsmacking autopsy of marital betrayal”, “eavesdropping on a private conversation” or as if Allen is “opening up [a] bin bag to let you pry inside”; this is “unprocessed”, a “blow by blow, into the bloody details” of the romantic collapse and – most importantly – it “lays bare” (what is it with that cliche?) the inner machinations of the couple’s life.
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.
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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.
This is a natural culmination of a media trend started somewhere in the mid-2010s, where the so-called “confessional essay” overtook the algorithms. Women – in particular – 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’s 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.
Allen’s 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 “overshare” in musical form is as cringe as the oversharer at a house party.
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 turn towards isolationism – how this anxious cohort would rather stay at home and doomscroll than go out and engage in that radical and lost art known as “socialising”. Plenty have tried to work out why, but when you ask them ... One answer gets returned with telling regularity: “Gen Z are quitting the gym for fear of being recorded”; “Gen Z men are so scared of getting filmed they’ve stopped dating”; “Gen Z men are too afraid of going viral to date”.
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.
And so, back to Allen – 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.
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.
