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Mean GrrrlIs Avril Lavigne a Heather?

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

(Continued from page 1)

For the first couple of listens, it's hard not to get swept up in all the fun and in the album's lean, lithe sound. (Lavigne's collaborators include studio savant Dr. Luke, one of the mad scientists behind Kelly Clarkson's stupendous "Since U Been Gone.") But if you spend a little extra time with The Best Damn Thing, it begins to take on a more sinister cast. The charm of Lavigne's early hits was the conviction with which she played the underdog: the tomboyish punkette who was deep enough to see the beauty in the "sk8er boi" spurned by the status-conscious popular girl. But on the new album, Avril appears to have become the thing she loathed, barking slogans of prissy entitlement: "I wear the pants/ I'm the one who tells you what to do"; "Don't you question me/ You just do what I say"; "Me, I'm a scene, I'm a drama queen/ I'm the best damn thing that your eyes have ever seen"; and, in "Girlfriend," "I think you know I'm damn precious/ And hell yeah, I'm the motherfuckin' princess," a line that suggests there may be more to the whole cheerleader routine than a cheeky nod to Toni Basil. Has Avril, as critic Carl Wilson wondered in a recent blog post, become a "Heather"?

Judging by the "Girlfriend" video, the answer is yes. In the clip, two Avrils—one a bad-ass rocker chick, the other a preppy redhead with librarian's glasses—square off in a battle for the affections of a dreamy guy. The clothes make it clear whom we're supposed to root for, but the plot complicates things. Our black-clad heroine is a horrible little tyrant who subjects the preppy to all sorts of torments before driving a golf ball into her head at a mini-golf course and leaping triumphantly into a Port-a-Potty with the boy. I may be too many decades removed from high school to really get this revenge fantasy, but the idea that we're supposed to cheer a revolution in which the ruling elite is replaced by creeps who enforce their will with golf-ball beanings seems like a perversion of the punk ideal. Avril's rock 'n' roll high school seems a lot like every other godawful high school, only its evil alpha girls have jet-black hair and wear Ramones T-shirts.

That golf-ball attack underscores what may be the most troubling aspect of The Best Damn Thing: Lavigne has girl issues. She's always been full of unkind words for ne'er-do-well guys, but on the new album, she pours scorn on women. "Girlfriend" is mild compared to "One of Those Girls," a portrait of a gold digger that Snoop Dogg would love. ("She's one of those girls/ They're nothing but trouble. … She'll take you for a ride and you'll be left with nothing/ You'll be broke and she'll be gone/ Off to the next one.") Then there's the galloping "Everything Back but You," a breakup song that climaxes with the cry of "bitch, slut, psychopath." There's already plenty of casually misogynist emo-rock boys spouting that kind of rhetoric—why is Avril Lavigne joining in the chorus when she could be kicking their asses? Heather, heal thyself.