216. Song Nos. 3,290 & 3,292: “The Fear,” Lily Allen
It’s Not Me, It’s You, 2009

In the months before my husband and I started dating, he acquired some girl’s copy of Alright, Still, Lily Allen’s debut album, a musical anomaly I dug up in his car early in our relationship and immediately recognized as an oddity thanks to its place amid a sea of CDs signifying a musical taste informed by the confluences of metalhead, goth kid and child-of-the-’90s pasts it emerged from.

For all the ways our tastes in music are wildly incongruous, at least I can say that both hubs and I wouldn’t’ve ever given Lily Allen’s delightfully sassy, catchy, genre-defiant/-parodic take on contemporary pop music a chance without a nudge from someone else. My music library is better, more varied and a honestly a little cooler for giving one of the U.K.’s most charmingly cheeky exports a chance and falling for her irresistible brand of self-aware sass.

From a Hyundai Santa Fe my affinity for Lily Allen came, and to a Hyundai Santa Fe it returns, only this time it’s in the form of throwing “The Fear” on a commuting mix I’ll get a good half a year of obsessive repeat plays and cathartic singalongs from when I am at my absolute worst, violently sweariest version of me. Here, with tongue firmly in cheek but also an eerie degree of prophetic accuracy, Allen excoriates consumerism, takes down society’s habit of reducing a woman’s worth to her ever-shrinking waistline, lambastes the inauthenticity of social media, shouts out to our very literally fatal obsession with shiny baubles in the first gottdamn verse, and addresses the emptiness of our most highly valued cultural aspirations, so of course if karaoke is a ever a thing I find myself punishing a room full of people with, I’ll be killing ’em all with my own rendition of this beautifully understated and brilliantly subversive little ditty.

In between each saucily delivered verse ironically celebrating the emotional equivalent of empty carbs our society just goes batshit over with its tendency for confused priorities, the refrain is a sobering interjection, with Allen breaking character just long enough for the existential malaise at the core of “The Fear” to coming shining through and assert itself as the truly dominant thesis here:

I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore
And I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore
And when do you think it will all become clear?
‘Cause I’m being taken over by the fear

It’s so easy to make fun of these people who are so susceptible to meaningless distractions and who throw themselves at meaningless garbage, because shit is deeply fucked and escapism only feels increasingly imperative for survival, or even just holding onto one’s sanity in a world hellbent on beating us all into unthinking obedience. When it comes down to clear-eyed cynicism or insatiable consumption, the latter is definitely paved with the blithe unawareness that makes existing in this hellscape timeline a lot easier to bear, which, in one’s more abjectly dejected moments, makes it easy to wonder who’s really the wiser faction here?