What do we do about the little brothers and sisters of teen stars?
On one hand, that’s barely a serious question. We don’t do anything with them, their parents just try and repeat whatever process made them rich the first time. They’re sent off to the entertainment industry, found a niche, and usually wind up as a mildly embarrassing footnote with a short Wikipedia entry and a wealthy husband in their 20s. In many ways it’s the luckiest track to follow in a famous family.
Obviously not everyone is like this, but in the rare exceptions, like Solange Knowles, they separate themselves early and show a natural talent separate from their sibling. Joaquin Phoenix was a child star alongside his brother River Phoenix. Joan Fontaine’s name was changed at her sister’s request to keep their careers separate, which allowed her to build her own reputation without stepping into those expectations.
This was not the case for Ashlee Simpson.
I want to take you back to 2004. Jessica Simpson, on year 5 of her pop career, is seeing more success in her music than she ever had before with a rerelease of her third studio album In This Skin (2003), which 7 months prior had debuted with 64,000 copies sold. This second go around sells 160,000 in a single week. Furthermore, she’s a certified reality starlet, dazzling the world with her inability to understand that the tuna in her can isn’t chicken.
This is not to mock her. Jessica Simpson is undoubtably the most successful of her generation of teen pop stars if measured in sheer wealth alone. She’s a businesswoman who built her empire on a foundation that is littered with small pop culture snippets that may have been momentarily embarrassing, but ultimately forgotten. To look upon her situation with empathy is to see a woman who made the best out of a terrible hand of cards.
But what I want to emphasise is that, in 2004, Jessica Simpson was at her peak in terms of musical success. She would never have an album sell as well as In This Skin did in that week of 2004. After half a decade on the scene, she had “made it”.
Ashlee Simpson’s debut album, Autobiography, sold 398,000 copies in its first week three months later.
I feel like we have all forgotten just how successful Ashlee Simpson was for such a short period of time. Her debut album had a top five hit song and sold nearly three million copies in that same year. Her second album debuted at number one as well, with 220,000 copies sold, and spawned a Top 20 and a Top 40 hit. By the third album, she was selling under 50,000 copies and only had one song scrape the bottom of the Hot 100.
Part of this is obviously the infamous SNL fiasco. Allegedly facing acid reflux, the younger Simpson sister managed to make her way through Pieces of Me, but when a second song was interrupted by the backing track of Pieces of Me again, she stumbled in embarrassment, did a jig, and walked off stage. It might genuinely be one of the greatest moments of failure seen on live television. She was boo’d of the stage at the Orange Bowl 3 months later, performing the album’s third single, La La.
But while pop culture tends to pretend this killed her career, it’s a little more complicated than that. As I said, she sold more on in the first week of her sophomore album than her sister did in any one week of her career. Singers had embarrassing moments on stage all the time that didn’t destroy their careers. Britney Spears struggling with the Stronger note at an awards show comes to mind (actually a fairly great performance). More recently in 2013, Selena Gomez forgot she was lip-syncing with little to no actual fallout (about a minute in). These moments were really no big deal, and even with her walk off, Simpson clearly had more fuel in the tank. So why did it all sputter out so quickly?
I think Ashlee Simpson betrayed all the jealous younger sisters in the world.
Now, it should be acknowledged that Ashlee Simpson is not and never was an ugly woman. But she certainly was spoken of and perceived that way at the time. Look up “Ashlee Simpson ugly” and you’ll find the corpses of message boards and forums dissecting her looks both in comparison to her sister and in her own right. Moreover, that perceived jealousy was the backbone to most parodies of her that were not direct SNL jokes.
If Jessica Simpson had her career built around a Britney Spears archetype, Ashlee was her Avril Lavigne. Her black hair dye was edgy, her racoon eyes were cool. Jessica had her daisy dukes, but her sister had graphic tees and swoopy bangs. She wasn’t the all-American girl her sister was, and that was the appeal. Lavigne was the pop punk princess, but Simpson was at least a pleasant visitor on the scene.
When she got a nose job in April of 2006, it shifted her public persona and she became disconnected from her fans. At least, that’s my theory. The steep commercial decline from album two to three, the lack of interest in subsequent singles, the mass rejection of the woman in general in pop culture, it all seems to stem from around 2006. She was always pretty, but it could be argued, like Jennifer Grey before her, that changing her nose fundamentally broke her connection to an audience that, on some level, found her relatable.
To be fair to her, part of this might just have been a changing taste. While Simpson pushed herself poppier, she did a poorer impression of Gwen Stefani than she did Lavigne, who herself pushed poppier in an attempt to stave off irrelevancy. She also lost the sister comparisons, with Jessica Simpson herself having phased out of pop music by the late 2000s.
To give her the credit she deserves, when the music was succeeding, it was at least partially due to quality. Despite the hype and cultural legacy of songs like Irresistible, Jessica Simpson never managed to capture the type of pulsating energy that the best of Ashlee’s work holds. The music feels incredibly authentic to where she seems to have been emotionally, and maybe that’s why she managed to reach such a high peak of success.
This article began by asking what we should do with the siblings of teen stars, but I think the answer is that we should do nothing. By forcing celebrity onto children who not only are as vulnerable as their siblings, but (usually) significantly less talented, we’re setting them up for failure. Success means the same abuse as their siblings, failure can mean humiliation and cruel comparison. Regardless, it’s unfair.
Ashlee Simpson gave us her pieces. We should just put them together, I guess.
Extra Credit
I know it’s already known about, but I do really want to say that Jessica Simpson’s memoir ‘Open Book’ is extremely good. - link