![]() ![]() She might not have invented her sound, but she irrevocably placed her stamp on it, and on teen pop as a wider concern. ![]() Her dressing up and trying on identities only added to the earnestness what else, after all, does one do in high school? Lavigne might have been punk by virtue of marketing and costume, but none of that had anything to do with the intensity of the tangible adolescent feeling that suffused her music. “There’s nothing but the rain.” The chorus is a gushing swell and Lavigne allows herself to be battered by the downpour: “It’s a damn cold night,” she unleashes. “I’m waiting in the dark,” she says, while the arrangement collapses into gloom around her. Startling again for its directness, the song positions Avril as a teenage runaway, emotionally and physically adrift. The same is true, yet even moreso, for “I’m With You.” The ballad and third single from Let Go might be the best song of the album it is certainly a career highlight. “Complicated” could have been a country song too it proceeds from the style’s fondness for careful emotional study (“I see the way you’re acting like somebody else”) and memorable set pieces (“take off all your preppy clothes”). “Never wore cover up/ Always beat the boys up/ Grew up in a five thousand population town,” she sings in “My World,” one of the songs on her debut that showed more overtly the latent country influence on her sound. Once, in 1999, she appeared on stage with Shania Twain, thanks to a radio contest. She grew up in Greater Napanee, a small community in rural Ontario, and started out singing at country fairs. Lavigne began her career in country music. Manners and social codes are fair ground for frustration. The narrative’s core conflict, of a nice boy who isn’t self-conscious until he’s in company, is indeed complicated. “I like you the way you are/ When we’re driving in your car/ And you’re talking to me one on one,” she sings, the setting echoing “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” by that great avatar of teen miserablism, The Smiths. “We’re not going anywhere.” “Complicated” also steered away from its easy exhortations to stay true to oneself, evincing Lavigne’s knack for disarming honesty. A dark reverberating guitar churn opens Let Go it is a song called “Losing Grip,” and the song’s chorus is a howl. For that matter, apart from the fussy structure of the lyric, not much separated Lavigne’s most pop-punk single “Sk8er Boi” from contemporaries like Sum 41, Good Charlotte, or Simple Plan.īut as machined as Lavigne’s punk stylings were, there was something unexpectedly unmediated about her music. It did not matter, either, that Lavigne was not necessarily that significant a break musically from the broader pop landscape of the time: fellow Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette had trod a similar path in the ‘90s on Jagged Little Pill, and in the interim, Michelle Branch had demonstrated how a young woman could straddle the line between alternative rock guitars and pop songwriting. ![]() They were also forgetting that since its very inception, punk has involved opportunistic commercialism, image-conscious posturing, and deliciously simplistic pop riffing. When critics at the time observed that, really, Lavigne was not punk at all, they were both correct and missing the point - and the fun - entirely. “Sometimes I get so weird, I freak myself out,” Lavigne sings on “Anything But Ordinary,” a track from the same year’s debut LP Let Go that song was originally going to lend its name to the album. In her casual goofiness, she is both one of the boys, and yet more than them, a focal point and a catalyst. When Lavigne and band do “crash the mall” - the scene plays out in the video for ’02 debut single “Complicated” - their shenanigans extend only to toying with a retail worker in a hot dog costume, dressing in wacky outfits, and teasing some mall cops. But Avril Lavigne accentuated her apparent remove from the dominant culture via the trappings of punk - particularly the trappings of punk at a time when the form was exemplified on one hand by the boyish crudities of Blink-182, and on the other by the boyish crudities of MTV’s Jackass. ![]()
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