Lily Allen - LDN Analysis

Edited to Higher Standard - 28/01/10


The song LDN, or London, is from Lily’s debut album ‘Alright, Still’ and is held within the pop genre. An overview of the video shows us that it follows a linear narrative of Lily travelling through 2 distinctive worlds. One being the usual pop sensation of everything is bright and vibrantly perfect while the other is a darker reality challenging the traditional pop video mise-en-scene of paradise.

When you look with your eyes
Everything seems nice
But if you look twice
you can see it's all lies

As you can see the lyrics support the 2 different views of the world. This connotation is that even though everything may look perfect on the surface it may not be in you look deeper. The music video even seems to challenge the audience to have a second look at Lily herself. This is when you notice even though she is wearing a strongly feminine dress she is also wearing trainers further pushing this idea that everything and everyone has layers to them.

Furthermore throughout the entire video even though everyone else changes from being a handsome knight into a man being chucked out or a nice youth to being a mugger, Lily stays the same as though her upbeat personality can change your view of the world. This connotes the usual pop genre cliché of the singer being beautiful and pure, a stereotypical representation.

However at the very end of the music video when Lily’s happiness is crushed she loses her brightness yet stays in her dress and even has a strop by kicking a rubbish bin. This challenges the usual representation of the female gender by having her being aggressive at dismissal from meeting her friend rather than upset or hopeless like a feminine fatale.
Once again the lyrics ‘But if you look twice’ come into the limelight, by having Lily in her dress in both versions of the world she presents another stereotype of celebrities such as herself are always perfect looking regardless of their surroundings.

The audience are most likely expected to enjoy seeing the perfect world and the amusement of its child-like entity yet also know that the dark image is more akin to reality. This would make the target audience more than likely to be young females however Lily Allen herself is portrayed as a woman with her long flowing dress to draw in the male audience. While not a heavy laying of curves is displayed Lily Allen’s unique attractiveness is brought forward, especially the quirkiness of wearing trainers in a dress. So while the audience would mainly be dominated by the female audience of around 15-25 a large number of males in a similar age group have been targeted as well.

Touching on the editing techniques used you can see quite an impressive overlaying affect by having 2 very different shots showed on the screen at the same time. The blurred halo affect further adds to the fact that Lily is in a bubble of her personality, which can lighten up the world, strongly sticking to the generic pop “the world is perfect” persona. Other editing includes the quick succession of shots to the musical beat during her travels through London to the destination to meet, who we presume to be, her friend.

To conclude the music video holds many traditional aspects of the pop genre such as the perfect world, pure singer and large amounts of bright vibrant colours. However it also contains many challenges such as the darker version of the world, the lyrics containing aggressive references as well as Lily being almost normal in having a strop when she’s stood up. A strong video that employs unique editing technique to make a simple narrative of walking to meet a friend amusing and questioning with its lyrics ringing in your ears in the end.

“When you look with your eyes everything seems nice but if you look twice you can see it's all lies”