After a four year hiatus that included two babies and one Keane cover, Lily Allen follows up 2009’s It’s Not Me, It’s You with a combative new single and video for ‘Hard Out Here’ – a scathing auto-tuned take-down of the state of contemporary pop culture and music, including digs at the equally-inflated ego and balloons of Robin Thicke, the racial appropriation and accessorising of Miley Cyrus, twerking in general, music and entertainment industry sexploitation and, apparently, potassium. In a hook:
Sometimes it’s hard to find the words to say/I’ll go ahead and say them anyway/Forget your balls, and grow a pair of tits/It’s hard, it’s hard/It’s hard out here for a bitch.
To quote Allen, “if you can’t detect the sarcasm” in the product placement, the flagrant materialism or everything else compacted into four minutes of straight up musical shade, “you’ve misunderstood.”
