A Chick With Edge
I noticed at every show we've had, some of the girls
have been wearing tank tops and ties like me... :)
...so I now have "avril" ties in my merchandise.
— Avril Lavigne, online journal, 5 June 2002
Her celebrity doesn't seem to have hit yet, but what
has struck is the teenage blues. And she has to contend
with them in that pressure cooker known as pop stardom.
— Shanda Deziel, "Avril's Edge," Maclean's 13 January 2003
I knew that was going to happen. I knew I was
going to pronounce someone's name wrong.
— Avril Lavigne, AP, 8 January 2003
Avril Lavigne gets it coming and going. When she's not being touted as the Anti-Britney or the savior of girly pop-rock, she's being chided for not knowing the Sex Pistols or how to pronounce David Bowie's name. Where has this girl been all her life, anyway?
Over the past weekend in fact (24 January 2003), she won multiple awards at the second annual MTV Asia Awards: Favorite Female Artist, Favorite Breakthrough Artist, and the Style Award. And what's not to love about her style? In her signature cargo pants and black chucks, she's dedicated to resisting frilly, hypersexual femminess, and to celebrating her adolescence. Ingeniously, this look appears simultaneously "real" and reproducible, a sign of protest and conformity. Anyone can copy it; hence, all the tank tops and ties at Avril's shows. Along with style, she brings talent beyond the average Star Search contestant's. She's a promoter's dream, self-inventing, self-asserting, and super-popular.
And how did she come to be, this most original and most appropriable girl? And how is she being marketed, used, and strategized, to whose benefit? The most frequently repeated version of Lavigne's origin myth has her emerging fully formed from the skull of Napanee, Ontario, population 5,000. As a child in a solid middle-class family, she didn't actually need to rebel, she wasn't into punk, and she didn't learn to skateboard until the 10th grade. Still, she would stand on her bed and sing, "visualizing thousands of people surrounding me." In "My World," she recalls her emerging sense of self-performance: "I never spend less than an hour, / Washin' my hair in the shower, / It always takes five hours to make it straight, / So I'll braid it in a zillion braids, / Though it may take all friggin' day, / There's nothin' else better to do anyway."
Her supportive dad helped her find something better to do. He bought drums, a keyboard, and a guitar, and set her up in the basement. After some local prep, like singing solo at a Christmas pageant at age 10 and winning a 1999 contest to sing with Shania Twain in Ottawa, she was spotted by L.A. Reid in New York City in November 2000. (He says of his "special" find: "She's anything but typical. She just looks like a typical teen.") He signed her to a $1 million-plus, two-album deal with Arista. She was 16 at the time.
The lore goes on. Avril had such a solid sense of herself that she rejected Arista's initial packaging ideas. Someone apparently suggested that she sing pre-fab Celiney ballads or Shania-type tunes and wear tight little skirts. Maybe even learn to dance a few steps. Instead, our girl had the audacity to insist on writing her own songs and wear her own clothes -- cutoffs and t-shirts. As her poetically inclined website biographers have it, she's "a true wild child."
Now, at 18, Avril is a superstar, entirely not typical. She begins the European leg of the "Try To Shut Me Up Tour 2003" in March (and who would even think of trying to shut her up?). She's stormed TRL with repeated countdown-worthy videos, for "Sk8er Boi" (one of Simon Cowell's favorites), "Complicated," and (at the moment) "I'm With You." She's performed live on Leno, Letterman, Kilborn, and the VMAs. Her live gigs somehow sustain a sense of urgency and freshness -- no lipsyncing for this girl.
As to the most tedious aspect of music promotion, she's gone ahead and appeared on recent covers of the requisite fashion mags, like Seventeen, ym, Twist, and Teen People. Her favorite pose for such publications is the ostensible Punk Yell, mouth open, kohled eyes piercing, sort of roar-ish. Her hair hangs neatly, perfectly styled to look unstyled-straight, her spiked wristbands indicate her just-tough-enough-chickness, and her trademark ties display her willingness to flaunt and so, create, fashion trends. (She's recently stopped wearing the ties, because, you know, everyone else is wearing them.)
Lavigne tells Twist, "It's very important for me to be myself. I don't want to be fake... I'm gonna dress what's me, I'm gonna act what's me, I'm gonna sing what's me." The magazine uses her as a model for what "you" should do when facing stress: "express your feelings as often as possible." As ym puts it: "Guys love her, girls love her. What's her secret?" Inside the magazine, she names herself, not punk, not pop, but a "chick with edge." Just because she wears plaid, she insists, she can't be classified. As she sings in "Anything But Ordinary," "Sometimes I get so weird / I even freak myself out." Just like a lot of kids, but Avril Lavigne's expressed it in a way that appeals to millions. And that makes her extraordinary, like she says. It also makes her seem ordinary, like her fans appreciate.
The process -- marketing, labeling, conceiving, repeating -- appears unstoppable. If it's not Arista's squad of popstar-makers (a.k.a. The Matrix) it's the press, the fans, the folks who organize the merchandise. Retaliation against tags has become another formula, as "pioneered" (at least in the last few months) by former popgirl Pink, when she bucked the system for her sophomore record and hooked up with Linda Perry to write and produce last year's Missundaztood. Following her success, even producers and marketers can agree: girls "rocking out" look good, as do playing the guitar and omitting the backup dancers.
"There's absolute starving for a genuineness in music right now," says Chart Magazine's Aaron Brophy. Still, "genuineness" needs a little help; the industry demands categories, so the anti-category becomes a category. Teenbeat approaches the Avril-definitional question by way of a comparison, posing the apparently crucial question as its cover caption: "Is she bigger that Britney?" It's a question that dogs Avril. And she's taken to answering it in two ways: Last year she told MTV's Suchin Pak, "I won't wear skanky clothes that show my booty, my belly or my boobs. I have a great body. I could be Britney. I could be better than Britney."
More recently, she's stepped back. That is, now she sees through the framing, doesn't take the bait. "I'm not made up," she told Jane Pauley on Dateline, "And I'm not being told what to say and how to act. So they have to call me the anti-Britney, which I'm not. I think that's very rude and very mean. I think it's a dumb game. It's just the media putting up, like, those labels" (14 January 2003). Like, yeah. Nothing impresses an executive type like a pithy comparative note: she's not like Mandy Moore or Jessica Simpson. She's more like Alanis Morissette, with whom she shares an unmistakable vocal generosity, a willingness to explore, and of course, that part-yodelly, part-big-belty sound. As Lavigne tells dotmusic, "I think I get compared to her just cos she's Canadian and she's not some pop chick, she's a rocker and I'm not a pop chick and I'm a rocker" (3 September 2002).
When Pauley reminds her that she's a product to be sold, Lavigne bristles. "Yeah, see, that's what I don't like. I don't want to feel like a thing, and I don't want to feel like a product, and that's why -- that's what comes with pop music." Or again (you see the pattern here), she tells Newsweek's Lorraine Ali, "I hate sex-object music" (2 January 2003). So do her fans, all dressing up like her to fight the system.
"Take me by the hand, take me somewhere new," sings Lavigne in "I'm With You." What would "new" mean here? Really, originality is overrated. Art and commerce have long since stopped being opposite terms in popular music (not to mention every other industry where cashing in on trends is business as usual). And really, "being yourself" can only mean performing an idea of yourself. Once the idea of you is out there, fans expect it again. The trick is what you make of that ritual, how the repetition comes to wear on, recreate, or define you.
Consider the careers and personas identified by "awards." The sheer number of venues and categories, as delightful and/or stressful as such measures may be, suggests that such labels only generate recognizable meaning when reiterated into oblivion. Lavigne, in her first year of promotional heck, is not only the winner of the Asia awards, but is also currently up for two Brit Awards, for Best International Female and Best Breakthrough Artist (to be given out on 20 February). Two weeks ago, she was nominated for five Grammys (to be awarded 23 February), including Best New Artist, Best Female Rock Vocal Performance and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, a doubling up that suggests at once the instability of these categories and/or the range of the artist. She prefers the "rock" category.
Her first couple of singles off Let Go, "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi," don't quite show off this range. They're pop tunes, cute and catchy, and the videos for them establish her look and attitude. On stage, for "Complicated," she's "spanking new" (as the MTV video label has it). Her hair's flying, she's not impressed by the would-be beau who fronts. "Why do you have to go and make things so complicated? / I see the way you're / Acting like you're somebody else gets me frustrated." Be yourself, the message seems to be. Whatever that is.
Off stage, for "Sk8er Boi," Lavigne has a visibly pleasant and youthfully energetic relationship to her band guys -- guitarists Jesse Colburn and Evan Taubenfield, bassist Mark Spicoluk, drummer Matt Brann (they were put together by the label, but/and she asked for musicians close to her age, not a crew of older session players). In the vid, She and the boys hit the mall together, ride bikes on stairways, make faces, play games, and laugh together. They're like friends. She sings about a boy in whom she sees admirable intensity, past his skater pose: "Too bad that you couldn't see, / See the man that boy could be / There is more that meets the eye / I see the soul that is inside." That he becomes a rock star is cool. He's like her.
Seeing beneath facades is important to kids Lavigne's age (for whom the distinction between surface and depth yet holds). As the Hamilton Spectator observes, "She speaks teens' feelings" (8 January 2003). Because, you know, all teens have the same feelings, and if only these feelings might be spoken and tapped, teens will consume them as their own. Lavigne's ability to articulate such feelings is, ironically, phenomenal, from sadness and loneliness to exultation and defiance, to the rare peace to be found with reliable companions.
In "I'm With You," Avril delves into the seeming levels of feeling allowed by the ballad. "Is anybody here I know? / 'Cause nothing's going right, / And everything's a mess. / And no one likes to be alone." In the video, she and fellow partiers move in slow motion, pulsing. She doesn't dance, though. Instead, she makes her way through and out of the crowd, to the street, underlining the point Marc Weisblott makes in his article, "Gamma Gamma Hey": "Lavigne is extolling the virtues of being out with the out crowd. It's the kind of conceit that cheerleaders just don't understand, and sufficient reassurance for Gamma Girls to stay the course" (Village Voice 19-25 June 2002).
Understanding "Gamma Girls" as the recently applied label for self-confident, self-creating girls, it's worth noting that Avril Lavigne (like and unlike fellow Gammas Branch and Vanessa Carlton) yet expresses a very "typical" desire for connection. Being Gamma sells records. Being an adolescent girl in the midst of all too familiar expectations still sucks. In the video, Lavigne puts on her parka and plunges into the snowy street, singing, "Isn't anyone trying to find me? / Won't somebody come take me home? / It's a damn cold night, / Trying to figure out this life." Her voice is thrilling, pure and raw. Even in the perfection of studio production, she seems imperfect and so, more perfect, more like the model girl that she refuses to be and can't help but being.
Lavigne looks like the real deal. Her refusal to be a product makes her a wholly stunning product. Shaped and reshaped by Arista's remarkably expert machine, she remains patient with interviewers who ask the same questions repeatedly, explaining herself -- some projected version of herself -- again and again. And somewhere, the Anti-Avril is inventing herself in her bedroom.
— 29 January 2003
