“With You” by Jessica Simpson is Heartbreaking
06/17/2023
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As a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with music videos. I would channel-hop from MTV to MTV 2 to VH1 to VH1 Soul to Fuse TV to BET to get my fix, and once we got internet, I was free to watch music videos to my heart’s content.
I was a vivid daydreamer as a kid - and admittedly still am. The music videos of the late ’90s and early 2000s inspired such wonder in me. The glamour, the grandeur, the choreographed dances inside of cheese graters illuminated with ring lights. What a time to be alive…
The early aughts were a time of curiosity about the future and excitement for what was to come. The pace of technological advancement over these last few decades can be compared to a freefall of sorts. The longer it’s been around, the faster it advances.
If modern technology was standing on the ledge in the 80s
and committed to the fall in the ’90s
The early 2000s is when it hit a good pace and started to gain momentum.
This is reflected in the fashion of the time. Shiny metallic finishes, glittery accessories and makeup, bright hair colors, spiked hair do’s, and unconventional textiles like plastic and mesh made their way into everyday fashion. It was indeed a time of possibility. Y2k fashions are coming back in style, particularly for Gen Z. If we used Gen Z naming conventions back then, we might refer to this particular 2000’s aesthetic as something like “future-core.” You could hardly call yourself a music star if you didn’t have at least one music video clad in icy white and chrome.
A lot of the music of the time had a futuristic feel too. Electronic music was massive during this era, and, along with the harpsichord (oddly enough), it permeated just about every genre at the time.
This techno-optimism (Y2k Glitch believers be damned) had a shelf life. Not only do fads come and go, but things in the US changed post 911. Make no mistake - this country was no wonderland in the early aughts (or ever), but there was a sudden shift. That sense of curiosity and wonder was replaced almost immediately with somberness, grief, prejudice, and emboldened, toxic patriotism.
While this, too, is reflected in the music of the time, it is not what I intend to talk about today. I am here to discuss “With You” by Jessica Simpson.
Editors’ note: Not only was 911 the cause of a cultural shift it’s also apparently the reason Nick and Jessica got back together after a breakup.
With You
It was 2003, and I was about 4 hours into watching music videos I’d seen 100 times, and finally - one came on I hadn’t seen before. Jessica Simpson, who I knew only from her reality show Newlyweds at the time, sings to the camera in her giant, gorgeous home while struggling to do the laundry and eating enough chicken wings to feed a college football team. She looks effortlessly beautiful and cozy in her plain white t-shirt. Even at 8 years old, this video spoke to me (yes, I’m a Taurus.)
This was a departure from the flashier music videos that came before it. A stripped-down cozy love song and matching video. Young me would watch this video with absolute longing. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a hairstylist, an astronaut, a doctor, a singer, a lawyer, a whatever-new-career-I-had-just-learned-about-that-sounded-cool. Around 8, I realized that my true dream wasn’t career related. The answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was one I had never heard. I knew even then that when I grew up, I wanted to be safe. I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted to be comfortable. And I wanted to feel loved.
By all accounts, Miss Jessica Simpson was living my dream. She had the big lavish house, the beauty, AND the chicken wings. She had a hot boy-band husband who made her feel like she could be herself.
“I never felt so beautiful
Baby, as I do now
Now that I’m with you””
Another part of why this video spoke to me was the concept of being loved for being oneself. It’s a message that gets driven into us ad nauseam from early childhood. I can tell you right now - people do not mean that shit. As a little black girl growing up undiagnosed autistic, I know better than most that people want you to be anyone but yourself. Growing up not being myself was the price I paid for safety, inclusion, and affection, or in more precise terms, love.
International superstar and heartthrob Jessica Simpson knows a similar pain. She is a symbol, a concept, an idea to the entire world. But in With You, she speaks about the “real” her and how her husband, Nick Lachey, loves her for who she is - even when she is not “on” for the cameras.
It has been a long time since I’ve watched or thought about this video. It wasn’t until recently, upon seeing a photo of Simpson, that I remembered just how much I loved it and decided to watch it for old time’s sake. I’ve been revisiting many things that brought me joy in childhood, so it only felt right. Welp! Sometimes you return to something you once loved and realize it isn’t what you thought it was.
With You is Heartbreaking
It’s 2023. I no longer watch new music videos, but I enjoy watching the ones I grew up with. I see a current photo of Jessica Simpson and remember how much I loved the mv for “With You” and watched it on Youtube.
Jessica Simpson is all alone, singing in her giant, empty house about all the ways she isn’t perfect and her husband is. He cannot be bothered to be in the video, but the camera zooms in on a framed photo of the couple in their living room. In the next frame Jessica sits on her couch with impeccable makeup, a football jersey, and a meticulously styled messy bun. She’s holding a can of “Chicken of the Sea” tuna - a reference to an infamous moment in TV History that earned the singer a reputation as a “dumb blonde.” There are many such moments in the video. She does the dishes but oopsie! She doesn’t know what she’s doing and got soap bubbles everywhere. She tries to do the laundry, but she just doesn’t know how🤷♀️. Even the chicken wings are supposed to represent how “imperfect” she is. She’s so imperfect she eats. Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair - she did think Buffalo wings were made out of real Buffalo but my point remains.
I love a bit of self-deprecating humor, and Jessica took people teasing her about these “ditzy” moments pretty well. Still, the underlying notion of the video feels… icky. One of the things I remember most vividly about the video is Jessica’s smile. Her perfectly straight white teeth were even whiter against her suntan and frosty lipgloss. What I didn’t remember (or rather didn’t notice) was the way her smile didn’t reach her eyes. This woman seemed lonely. The song and video are one giant insistence that she wasn’t, but who was she trying to convince?
“I wanted my marriage to look perfect. I didn’t mind if I looked dumb, but I wanted people to see the fairy tale in Nick. In us”
In her memoir, Open Book, Simpson gets honest about her relationship with Lachey. She speaks candidly about how hard she worked to convince everyone that her relationship, and her man, were perfect.
But perfection is a myth, and things were far from perfect. Simpson details how her lovable carefree persona came to be what her husband resented about her most - along with her burgeoning career.
“My childishness, which seemed so cute and sweet when I was first with him, seems to annoy him. Now, everything I said seems to annoy him.”
Other quotes from Simpson paint a picture of a woman who made herself small to make her husband feel important.
“I didn’t want to outshine him.”
“He wanted somebody who could make him feel like I did when I was 19 years old.”
Simpson was 18 years old when she met 26-year-old Lachey. In the singer’s own words, she went straight from her father, Evangelist pastor Joe Simpson, to her husband. Oof.
She was no longer a teenager. She was a woman. She had grown up, and so had her career. Jessica Simpson was truly blossoming at this time in her life, and this is what he resented. Ick.
Weird pedophilic undertones aside, it’s a pattern I can recognize and (unfortunately) relate to. Many of us can. Being showered in affection at the beginning of a relationship and then being rebuffed for the same qualities that attracted someone in the first place.
Trying so hard to earn that love back by making ourselves smaller than we are. By making lovers and friends who don’t appreciate us bigger than they have any right to be. Taking rejections as opportunities to prove that we are worthy of loving. Starved for affection and jumping for joy for whatever crumbs get brushed our way.
Sometimes it’s your bestie. Sometimes it’s your situationship. And sometimes it’s Nick Lachey of second-rate boy band 98 Degrees.
Maybe she genuinely felt safe and accepted by him - in the beginning. This song may have been written during that time. Perhaps it was written to remind him of the time. But it’s a harsh reality that some safe spaces don’t stay safe forever.
Anyways, she eventually left him, and while I know she’s had her struggles through the years, I hope she’s happier now. Nick Lachey is apparently a host on Love is Blind now, but I wouldn’t exactly say his career is soaring since audiences are literally petitioning to have him replaced. It also sounds like he still isn’t over Jessica. Sucks to suck.
Do you remember this video? Drop a comment below with your thoughts. I’d love to hear what you have to say - thanks for reading!
