In their MySpace "friends comments," Allen's female supporters have praised her rebelliousness (she says she shared her demos on the site despite her label's concerns); her accessibility (she maintains her own page and often e-mails fans); and her regular-girl problems (she is not as skinny as Kate Moss).
Catchy and timelessly summery, Alright, Still lacks the voice-of-a-generation heft of the Arctic Monkeys' Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, another recent British smash built on MySpace buzz. She offers a milquetoast social critique on the calypso track LDN (text-message shorthand for "London"): In her hometown, "Everything seems nice/ But if you look twice/ It's all lies."
But Allen does capture a sense of universal teenage angst with her cinematic tales of bad breakups, club spats and backstabbing friends. She symbolizes a new blogging-age, middle-class girl: cockily ambitious, skeptical yet enthusiastic, technically savvy, musically open, obsessed with public expression and ready to fight back.
"She appeals to so many different people," said Malik Meer, an editor at NME, the British music weekly, which recently featured her on its cover. "She's young and female, a bit urban and street, but also fashiony. She's very now."
Allen's revenge-crazed front would grow insufferable if it were not relieved by her lost-girl sadness. Songs like the sarcastic swinging 1960s romp Everything's Just Wonderful relay a sense that darkness lurks below every cheery surface. Allen has alluded to a chaotic childhood in interviews, which might explain her hellfire response to rejection. "Everything was quite comfortable, but everyone was mental," she told a British newspaper.
She is the daughter of a film-producer mother and a comedian father (Keith Allen, a scenester friend to many rock stars). They split when she was 4. She has said that she changed schools more than a dozen times, became a raver, dropped out and ended up selling Ecstasy in Ibiza when she was 15. On the island she met an A&R representative who introduced her to the duo Future Cut, who later helped write and produced half of her debut.
This past November, while signed to the Regal/Parlophone label, she started her MySpace page and uploaded some demo tracks and party-ready mix tapes (one seamlessly incorporates Ol' Dirty Bastard, Rod Stewart and yodeling). She says that she did not have a grand strategy, that she was mostly impatient for people to hear her music.
"I knew who Arctic Monkeys were and that they had grown a following through the Internet, but I didn't know it was on MySpace," Allen said. "I didn't even really know what it was."
The response was so immediately overwhelming that the label moved up her album release date. Now Allen is too busy even to update her blog. "My page is in a really bad state at the moment," she said with a sigh. "There are 15,000 people waiting to be approved as friends. It's just too much."
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