Avril, She’s Complicated.
By Laurie Roark
It’s 2004. I’m five years old and sitting in the bedroom of my best friend’s teenage sister. Her walls are covered in posters, and she has a stack of CDs as tall as I am. My friend picks her favorite from the stack and puts it in the CD player. Avril Lavigne’s heartbroken voice sings out to us: Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?
Lavigne turned 34 on Sept. 27, 2018. She’s released four albums since the teenage melodrama of her breakout single “Complicated” on Let Go in 2002. Two years later, with Under my Skin (2004), Lavigne fully developed the grunge persona for which she is so well known. In “My Happy Ending,” she sings of lost love with the same raw teenage emotion of “Complicated,” clear electric guitar resounding behind her emotional vocals. From the outset of her career, Lavigne was defined by her look: wide skate pants, a tank top, and a necktie. While Lavigne’s music strayed little from the other pop of the period, her fashion choices defined her as a member of the counterculture. Lavigne was a grunge, punk, skater, and sometimes goth, girl with wide musical appeal. Lavigne was the female counterpart to Blink-182. She was the anti-Britney Spears. She was pop-punk.
When Lavigne released The Best Damn Thing in 2007, she altered her look and sound sharply, donning pink highlighted hair and an upbeat pop sound. In “Girlfriend,” Lavigne’s inflection shifts from the somber tones of “Complicated” to upbeat confidence. This shift in Lavigne’s public persona and musical style is so stark that fans developed a conspiracy theory around it. These fans believe that Lavigne, depressed under the intense pressure of fame, committed suicide in 2003. To continue profiting off their pop-punk princess, Arista Records allegedly replaced her with a body double named Melissa, a doppelgänger in all but personality. While the Melissa theory is wildly unlikely, it does beg the question: Who is Avril Lavigne? Is she really the sensitive and confident songwriter of the impassioned lyrics of songs like “I’m with You” from Let Go: “Isn’t anyone tryin’ to find me? / Won’t somebody come take me home?” Or is she the enthusiastic popstar calling, “Let me hear you say hey, hey, hey!” in The Best Damn Thing’s self-titled track?
In both Goodbye Lullaby (2011) and her self-titled LP (2013), Lavigne asserted triumphant party pop as her new songwriting style, releasing upbeat pop tracks including, “What the Hell” and “Here’s to Never Growing Up.” Lavigne’s artistic development does not follow the maturity we might expect from artists as they age. She’s turned from intimate, lyrical rock ballads to upbeat, impersonal dance songs. Perhaps Lavigne is responding to trends in pop music. Maybe she was never as punk as she led us to believe in her early days as an artist. But when I listen to Avril Lavigne’s “Hello Kitty,” I can’t help but miss the old Avril—authentic or fabricated.
In September 2018, Lavigne broke a release hiatus of over five years. Three years prior, she was diagnosed with lyme disease, and her new single “Head Above Water” is an emotionally-charged comeback. She sings of her struggle with recovery: “I can’t swim the ocean like this forever / And I can’t breathe.” While “Head Above Water” nods to Lavigne’s emotional early work, Lavigne no longer has the signature pop-punk whine of a teenager but, rather, the clear and headstrong voice of a woman trying to survive. “Head Above Water” sounds more country than pop-punk, piano replacing guitars and drums, and if I had not known it was Lavigne singing, I wouldn’t have recognized her heavily-autotuned voice. What “Head Above Water” represents is Lavigne’s lack of steady growth through her career; instead of developing as a songwriter, she seems to have jumped between styles. But while I’m not a fan of her new style, “Head Above Water”’s emotional comeback story is bound to make it a popular hit, just as “Complicated” was, and that’s the true power of our Canadian pop-punk princess. She knows how to make a hit, and she doesn’t have to wear a tank top and tie to do it.
Initially published in the September 28, 2018 edition of the Yale Herald.