The Fear: How Lily Allen Took Down the Pop Machine From the Inside I New British Canon

Always crazy to look back to the early 2000s beauty standards and realise that Rene Zellweger and Lily Allen were considered overweight. What a poisonous culture the newspapers and gossip magazines created.

Oh this makes me so happy. Lily doesn't usually get the appreciation she deserves.

'The Fear' completely foreshadowed the rise of the Tik Tok and Instagram era of hyper-superficiality.

So glad The Fear ended up being the song you covered. It still sticks with me to this day. Lily deserves recognition.

I'm really glad to see this. Lily Allen was done SO dirty at the time. The indie scene she was part of was a boys-with-guitars club, and it was quite horrible to women. They refused flat out to take her seriously as a musician. They questioned whether she'd really written all of the lyrics herself, they questioned whether her influences were really her own and not whispers from Mark Ronson (later on), and when that didn't stop anything, they dismissed her poppiness because there were no guitars. Her MySpace was a sign of her superficiality, while Arctic Monkeys were genious. The NME zoomed in on her every word and ignored her music. And then the red tops... Girls, in that scene, were groupies, not musicians, and when questioned on that everybody pointed at Karen O, "But there is her!". In the meantime her songs and lyrics meant a lot to the women in those audiences, because the was on. Point. Recognizable. Her covers, too, were awesome: Oh My God was almost better than the original, and Naive DEFINITELY was. 'A weapon of massive consumption' alone is a GREAT lyric. Yeah, Lily is important.

I'm American and when I was 12 our family took a trip to the UK and Ireland and one of my most distinctive memories is sitting in the hotel restaurant watching the video for Smile on the tv. I was immediately enamored with it and started my journey of following the UK charts and how much more creative it felt than the overproduced American stuff. Lily was the gateway for me to discover all the other amazing female pop stars that came out in the 2000's. So glad you covered her! One artist that I think should have been mentioned at the end is Marina (formerly Marina + The Diamonds). Her lyricism on her first album in particular reminds me of Lily.

To overanalyse things greatly, The Fear is a great song to also explain Guy Debord's work "the Society of the Spectacle" the idea that capitalism has become sodeeply entwined in what it means to exist that its impossible to escape, to do things that you may believe are somewhow subversive or attack it simply doesnt do anything other than contribute further to the spectacle of it all, that its constructed the world around us to the degree that we can no longer reasonably think outside of it. I absolutely adore Lily, she's amazing

There is something incredibly dark and disturbing about 'The Fear', I think. It always makes me feel tearful for some strange reason. It's something about the inevitability of knowing that most of us are on the wrong path or in the wrong place or just plain lost and empty - and everything is going to turn to shit sooner or later and we can't do anything to stop the ride and we can't get off. It's Fight Club for teenage girls.

I find Lily to be a great story-teller. She is direct with her words in a way someone on twitter would be but she also pokes fun at the listener at the same time. Her witty, care-free and ironic approach to music is what makes her stand out and appeal to me so much.

Lily was so important to me and my friends in our American middle school in 2007. I watched The Fear music video over and over again. I got bangs because of her (big mistake). I learned how to do an English accent from her music! My friends and I would recite her lyrics to each other wherever we went (annoying!). Her art transported me. Thanks for shining a light on Lily!

Thank you! Lily's lyrics are what made her music a guilty pleasure for this old metalhead. Like The Streets, she sounds very English, uses English imagery and southern slang, but her messages are universal.

Needless to say I’m spending the balance of the week revisiting Allen’s discography…

Finally someone gives Lily all the credit she deserves. It's a bit sad though that she lost her momentum after the first two albums.

shes easily one of the prettiest brittish popstars of that era

I never took Lilly Allen seriously, I had no idea just how wrong I was. Thank you for this ear opening video!

I always liked Lily. I think she's hilarious and down-to-earth and the mischief she gets in is petty enough to wonder if it's even worth writing about. She was a kid when she got huge and she didn't realize that when you're famous, everyone is watching you. I felt bad for her because it can't be easy to be scrutinized. And regardless of what she thought about her own appearance, I always thought she was super pretty.

She literally changed the entire way of how I thought about myself at the time, and somehow taught me to be confident with who I am. I will always thank her for that. I will never forget the first time I heard her in my Dad’s car driving throughout the city. She made my childhood and till this day my life really happy. 🦋

I always thought she was making great pop music and that she never deserved the bad rap from the press. This video makes me love her even more.

Lily is my favorite person. I wear sneakers with dress, apply eyeliner and have bangs ALL MY LIFE because of her. I love you Lily. And thank you

Lily feeling she doesn't have a place because of talents like Amy, Adele and Duffy is a shame because everyone has a place. As long as people enjoy your music and you enjoy making it, that's all that matters.