Campaign 2008

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Bach on Top
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Bigger Than Elvis
Why the haters are wrong about Mariah Carey.
Jody Rosen
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music box: Pop, jazz, and classical.

Mean GrrrlIs Avril Lavigne a Heather?

By Jody Rosen
Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2007, at 5:16 PM ET

"Girlfriend," the lead single from Avril Lavigne's new album, is a song that speaks entirely in the imperative, with a lyric sheet full of exclamation points and music to match: shout-along vocals, power chords, hand claps amplified to sound like an army on the march. The song seems custom-built to bully the world's radio programmers into submission, but Lavigne took no chances, recording the chorus in seven languages. Do a little fancy Googling, and you can hear Lavigne bellow the phrase "Hey! Hey! You! You!/ I don't like your girlfriend!/ No way! No way!/ I think you need a new one" in Mandarin. The song is a smash, a top-10 hit in 14 countries, including the United States, where it was her first Billboard No. 1. As for the album, The Best Damn Thing, it's been No. 1 for two consecutive weeks, and, impressively, nearly all of its songs are as big and brash and catchy as "Girlfriend."

Lavigne's latest success is a reminder that she's one of the most influential pop singers of the decade. We first met her in 2002, when she rolled into view atop a battered skateboard in the video for her debut single, "Complicated." She was the female answer to all those mall-rat punk-pop bands—proof that a 17-year-old girl could whine and snarl just like the boys and look just as silly in a pair of pants five sizes too big. But her main innovation was sonic, forsaking traditional girly teenpop (syrupy ballads, dance beats) for huge choruses that crested over loud guitars. Almost immediately, the style became de rigueur, with everyone from Ashlee Simpson to Hilary Duff to Kelly Clarkson deploying distortion pedals and black mascara. Even Liz Phair fell under Avril's sway, ditching shaggy indie rock to work with Lavigne's producers, the Matrix.

Phair got a lot of grief for "going Avril," but it actually made a kind of sense, for Avril was already meeting Phair halfway. A defining feature of post-Lavigne teenpop is its adult pretensions: The drift from pop into rock signals both attitude and "seriousness," and the songs, accordingly, are full of psychobabble such as, "You fall and you crawl and you break and you take what you get and you turn it into honesty"—a teenager's version of mature relationship talk. Lavigne's second album, Under My Skin (2004), went further, dispensing with the sprightly punk-pop for midtempo songs about romantic disillusionment. While indie rockers are busy fetishizing teenybopper music old and new, today's real live teenagers are spending most of their time, as kids will, trying to sound like grown-ups.

Which makes The Best Damn Thing something of a shift. The album is gleefully, raucously, broadly bubblegum—a high-school musical delivered with a big wink. The album opens with the thumping pep-rally beat of "Girlfriend," a sound that recurs throughout. The title track's refrain finds Avril spelling out her own name cheer-style. ("Give me an A/ Always give me what I want/ Give me a V/ Be very, very good to me.") Now 22, Lavigne is old enough to play the same game as indie rockers, gazing back at teenpop—and teenagerdom—with affection and amusement, while throwing up the big musical scare quotes of cheerleader chants and breakneck punk-pop tempos.