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Since my last column, I've been pondering music today, and I've decided that the performer in most need of being deported is Avril Lavigne, a girl who sets my teeth on edge like no other. This has nothing to do with her music, which is blandly catchy enough–good enough for background noise. But she totally sucks because she's totally, completely fake. She's an egregious example of marketing gone wrong. I don't really know what her true motives and artistic goals are–in fact, since she's fucking seventeen, I doubt she has either–all I know is, she's singing a bunch of songs she ‘co-wrote' with a group of established songwriters, she puts on her sk8er chick persona about as thickly as can be done without tattooing the words SK8ER CHIK on her forehead while singing jangly pop tunes that have about as much to do with skate punks as Burt Bacharach tunes, and her abuse of mascara must be stopped. She sucks. Avril Lavigne totally sucks. Happily, I doubt I need to do anything about her. She'll coast along for a few years as the anti-Britney, the slightly-less-slutty-but-somehow-more-dangerous Alanis Morrisette for the mall crowd, and eventually she'll fade away when no one buys her as a sk8er chick anymore. Then will come the Playboy spread, the television appearances on sitcoms, the Osbournes-like reality show, drugs, the VH1 Behind the Music, and, eventually, death. She sucks, mainly, because of the fakeness of her persona. Britney Spears is fake, too, in many ways, but she invites you into the joke–she's so obviously fake you know you're watching a show. Avril Lavigne has very obviously been concocted as a way for the younger sisters of Britney's fans–girls who are just now turning 12-14 years old, and who are looking for something to love that will give the proverbial finger to their older siblings. Now they can blast Complicated from their pink bedrooms and dress like punky sk8er chicks themselves and imagine they are making their powderpuff older sisters cringe in fear, clutching their 4-year-old copies of Baby, One More Time before them like protective icons. Four years, as we all know, being an eternity in the life of a teenage girl. With Britney and her copycats (Christina, Jessica, the subversively boring Mandy Moore) entering into the downward portion of their cool cycle, it's inevitable that the Backlash Artists erupt literally out of nowhere, and that they'll be positioned subtly as everything Britney isn't, i.e. they'll be offered up as ‘genuine', ‘real', and ‘honest'. Which is bullshit, of course. Consider, if you can stomach it, Avril's music video now running nearly-continuously on MTV and the like. In it, she and a group of friends invade a mall and basically act like rebellious white-kid brats who have everything handed to them, and therefore have nothing better to do than commit petty vandalism and harassment. Wastes of skin like these kids deserve to be beaten to death and processed into hamburgers to feed the lowing herds of kids just like them that step forward to replace them. Instead, it's offered up as an example of how ‘cool' Avril is. She isn't Britney dancing in some ridiculous outfit. She's Avril, and she's fucking rebellious, so vote for her on TRL and buy her album. Of course, millions of stupid kids will buy her lame album, which will then turn up in bargain-bins across the country for hundreds of years to come as desperate college freshman sell off their embarrassing CDs for beer money. Financial success, of course, has never equaled artistic success or popular permanence, and I know that the wacky sk8er punks in Avril's video will someday soon be ringing up my purchases in WalMart and contemplating suicide with a tender longing for the peace that only death brings as they are harassed by the next generation of asshole rich kids with nothing better to do and parents who are worth shit themselves. Are, the circle of life! It warms me on my colder nights. So I'll say it again: She sucks. Avril Lavigne totally sucks. That is all.
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August 5, 2002