As the “hot takes” on Lily Allen’s West End Girl keep coming, among the most frequent “revelations” from the internet is that the album is like “Lemonade for white women.” Apart from how comparing the two records only heightens the irony of how Allen’s comments about Beyoncé on her Miss Me? podcast (which she’s since abandoned) after the release of Cowboy Carter were lambasted, it also just goes to show that Beyoncé really is overly deified. In this case because, well, to be frank, Lemonade has nothing on West End Girl. Indeed, it sounds practically “purring” when held up against Allen’s latest (even if Allen’s tone itself is more “purring” than Beyoncé’s [this also done as Allen actually says at one point, “I was the cat that got the cream”]). And yet, being that whenever the public decides to tack on “for white women” to something, it’s meant to be derisive, condescending and ultimately downgrading of the work in question, comparing West End Girl to Lemonade, in this case, is hardly “flattering” or “complimentary.” No, instead, it’s meant to say, “Nice try, Allen, but Bey already ‘went there’ and did it more hardcore.”
The truth of the matter, though, is that Beyoncé wasn’t (and couldn’t be) nearly as unflinching as Allen in her own “autopsy of marital betrayal” (as The Guardian called it). This, of course, is because Beyoncé had already decided she was going to stay with her betrayer: Jay-Z. (À la Hillary with Bill.) Not only that, but she was going to make him a part of the narrative, include him in the “autofiction” of her life, her sense of feeling backstabbed by the one person who was supposed to treat her with the utmost respect. This much evidenced by Jay-Z even participating in the visual album (particularly during “Sandcastles” and, then, via the home video-type footage played during “All Night”). Indeed, after “working through their issues” (i.e., how Jay-Z cheated on her, prompting Solange to attack him in elevator of The Standard Hotel in May of 2014 as Beyoncé stood by and let the bodyguard deal with “holding a bitch back”), both started collaborating on music together, with Jay-Z later commenting, “We were using our art almost like a therapy session. And we started making music together. And then the music she was making at that time was further along. So, her album came out as opposed to the joint album that we were working on” (that would instead come later, in the form of “The Carters’” Everything Is Love, released in 2018).
Maybe if David Harbour, too, had been a musician instead of an actor, things could have taken a similar mode of “healing” for him and Allen. Instead, Harbour was more threatened by the fact that Allen was “impinging” on his acting domain soon after they got married by agreeing to star in the 2021 West End play, 2:22 A Ghost Story (something she remarks on during the opening and title track with the lyrics, “I said, ‘I got some good news/I got the lead in a play’/That’s when your demeanor started to change/You said I’d have to audition/I said, ‘You’re deranged’/And I thought/I thought that was quite strange”). Indeed, among other “laden-with-retroactive-meaning” finds that the internet has revisited after hearing West End Girl is an eerie “good luck” note attached to the flowers Harbour sent before her stage debut that read, “My ambitious wife, these are bad luck flowers ‘cause if you get reviewed well in this play, you will get all kinds of awards and I will be miserable. Your loving husband.”
There’s no doubt Jay-Z experienced a similar streak of jealousy after watching Beyoncé rise through the ranks of the music industry, easily outshining him. And while he might not have written down his passive-aggressive rage about that in a “documented way,” it did emerge in the same form that Harbour’s resentment did: cheating. Worse still, Harbour decided to cheat in spite of Allen conceding to allow their marriage to “open up,” albeit with some essential ground rules. Rules that, as “Madeline” details, were broken. Namely, “Be discreet and don’t be blatant/There had to be payment/It had to be with strangers.” Harbour flouted such rules, further damaging Allen’s trust.
Beyoncé, of course, would never have even bothered attempting “nonmonogamy,” she with her “Christian” values. And yet, a cornerstone among such values is forgiveness, which is perhaps how she managed to arrive at the conclusion that staying with Jay-Z was worth more to her than “punishing” him for his sins. Something she decided to do via the Lemonade album in lieu of divorcing his ass. Though, in “Sandcastles,” she alludes heavily to nearly coming to that “solution” by singing, “What is it about you that I can’t erase, baby?/When every promise don’t work out that way, no, no, babe…/And your heart is broken ‘cause I walked away/Show me your scars and I won’t walk away/Oh, and I know I promised that I couldn’t stay, baby/Every promise don’t work out that way.”
As for both women expressing that they would stay so long as their significant other displayed an effusive desire for them to do so, Allen does it with much more desperation on “Beg For Me,” pleading, “I wanna feel held, I wanna be told/I’m special and I’m unusual/I want your desire, I wanna be spoiled, I wanna be told I’m beautiful/Why won’t you beg, beg, beg for me?” The sadness-turned-to-anger sentiments that Allen expresses, however, never give way to forgiveness on the record. So much as a resigned, “It is what it is/You’re a mess/I’m a bitch,” along with the same assessment she came up as the title for her sophomore album: “It’s not me, it’s you.” Here, too, this is something Beyoncé would only think, rather than dare say aloud, making her “peace” with Jay-Z stepping out in other, far more obsequious ways, like, “Can’t you see there’s no other man above you?/What a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you.”
Granted, it’s evident that, by still suppressing so much of what she felt, her lingering resentment would still tend to crop up on subsequent records, with Beyoncé returning to this period in her life most glaringly by covering “Jolene” (one of the songs that Allen specifically commented on when she got into trouble for daring to comment on Beyoncé at all). A track that, in her hands, feels slightly more ridiculous since, as Azealia Banks put it, “Stop looking at Jay-Z as if anyone wants to fuck him” and “Who is this imaginary adversary that she thinks still wants to be involved with Jay-Z in 2024? She needs to change the subject. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, finds him attractive…”
Though, to be fair, the same might be said of David Harbour…were it not for his “Daddy” energy. The kind that Allen refers to when she sings such lyrics as, “Now I’m looking at houses with four or five floors/And you’ve found us a brownstone/Said, ‘You want it? It’s yours’” (on “West End Girl”) and “I’m just a little girl/Looking for a daddy” (on “Fruityloop”). Hence, their ten-year age gap. Beyoncé, too, appeared to be looking for a daddy of her own when she went for a man eleven years older than her. And a daddy she got, what with Jay-Z being a billionaire now (no match for Beyoncé’s mere millionaire status). To be sure, it seems their shared love of money and “amassing” in general is what has made them stay bonded more than anything else.
For Allen and Harbour, such a common bond didn’t seem to be in the cards (try as they might to have made it so with their Carroll Gardens townhouse). Which turned out to be all the better for Allen in terms of being able to deliver an unvarnished truth throughout the narrative of her album (and yes, it is told like chapters in a larger story even far more overtly than Lemonade). One that dared to go into the kind of details and emotions that Beyoncé, frankly, would never have the cojones to go into. Of course, there are those who would argue it’s because Beyoncé has “class” and Allen doesn’t (even if that argument quickly goes out the window just by looking at “Queen” Bey in this iteration).
But the larger truth is that Beyoncé wasn’t as willing to give up what it meant to be the “other half” of a power couple like theirs. Besides that, she grew up with a mother who repeatedly forgave her own father for his blatant infidelities (though Tina Knowles eventually divorced Mathew Knowles in 2011, the final straw being the news that one of his affairs resulted in a child). As for Allen’s own parents, well, they divorced by the time she was five, with her father, Keith, walking out on the family in favor of “carrying on” with various women (having already strayed while married to Alison Owen). So it is that Allen’s need for someone more “reliable” has led her, as it appears, to not tolerate being cheated on. At least not for very long. And not without digging the knife into the one who has done her wrong (in this case, Harbour). Even if, as she insisted to Interview, “It’s not a cruel album. I don’t feel like I’m being mean. It was just the feelings I was processing at the time.” Harbour might disagree, but, then again, he should have thought about that before cheating on a person known for writing autobiographical songs (or, as Lorde would put it, “Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark”).
Beyoncé, in contrast, was far more measured, more “calculated” (the word, incidentally, that Allen used to describe her) in her own “processing,” waiting until after the freshness of the revelations passed to filter them far more…curatedly. And to, in the end, give Jay-Z what amounted to “a pass.” To the point where, on “LoveHappy,” the final track of “The Carters’” Everything Is Love, the duo assures listeners, “We came, and we saw, and we conquered it all/We came, and we conquered, now we’re happy in love.” Allen, based on her Britishness alone, would never arrive at such a soppy finale (this also includes “All Night” on Lemonade’s visual accompaniment, since “Formation” is really the “post-credits” track). And if she actually did arrive at it in real life, it seems unlikely she would feel compelled to write about it, having also told Interview, “Heartbreak is a fucking gift.” Beyoncé might tend to agree, though she’s really of the Taylor Swift school of thought on the matter in thinking it’s a fucking gift for moneymaking, more than creative and emotional release.
