Ashley Tisdale’s Hot Mess Confuses Me To No End

noah | September 19, 2007 5:10 am
Today’s episode of TRL featured the MTV premiere of the above video, which is apparently High School Musical alumna Ashley Tisdale’s attempt to break into the “grown-ups” market without having to subsequently send out apologies to her current fans. The video itself, while being visually boring, was actually pretty riveting TV, but for all the wrong reasons.

I know that lately I’ve been coming across a lot of articles on “why music sounds bad now,” but this song pretty much encapsulates in four minutes just how awful pop music can sound these days. I got this same feeling when listening to Sam’s Town a year ago, but please tell me if, when you listen to “He Said, She Said”–whether on the TV or in YouTube’d form-its sloppily cut-and-pasted together elements (Tisdale rapping, the demo track from a souped-up Casio keyboard of recent vintage, a cathedral-organ effect that sounds straight out of a bad Dracula movie) don’t result in a sensation that feels not unlike your ears being filled with a piping-hot dish of spaghetti Bolognese that had been topped with shaved chocolate, a mango lassi, and some of CJ’s broccolini from last week’s Top Chef right before it was aurally served to you. The old saying when it comes to music has been “if it’s too loud, you’re too old,” but more songs like this (and the latest offering from that other Ashlee) and I think we might need to change the operative word in that statement from “loud” to “incoherent.”

Ashley Tisdale – He Said, She Said (Official Music Video) [YouTube]