I’ve been loving Lily Allen’s new album, West End Girl, in which she documents the life and death of her marriage to David Harbor. In the album, she goes from being the cat who caught the cream to being encouraged to have an open marriage with certain negotiated rules to watching her husband break the rules and eventually living as a single man and walking away from the marriage. The writing is simple and powerful and the songs are catchy and affecting.
I recently saw a post on Substack dragging Lily’s writing, particularly in 4Chan Stan. In this track, Lily suspects her husband is breaking the rules of their modern marriage, so she starts snooping and skewers the evidence of his double life as “giving 4Chan Stan.” The essayist writes off this phrase as nonsense. I think the lyrics make sense to a lot of women. Lily’s husband has manipulated her to a place where he can use his power and status as husband to Lily Allen to brazenly date other women. Its deranged and entitled and linking it to sexist online culture is genius.