AVRIL LAVIGNE

PRODIGAL FUN

Avril Lavigne enjoys playing the bad girl on her naughty new album

by Matt Ashare |  
Published November 6, 2013

If Miley Cyrus represents the chaste good girl gone wild, and Katy Perry amounts to a playfully bawdy pin-up fantasy, then Avril Lavigne, the latest of the trio to drop a wannabe blockbuster album in just the last month, is the prodigal mall-rat, the too-cool-for-school beauty with a taste for trouble. At least, that’s what the Ontario native’s been striving for since she first emerged in 2002, a precocious, church-schooled 17-year-old anti-pop prodigy, sporting muscular arena-punk guitars, torn jeans, tomboy tank tops, and an abundance of bad-grrrl attitude. She thumbed her nose at an uptight ballerina in “Sk8er Boi,” and admonished a misguided friend to “Take off all your preppy clothes” in “Complicated,” and was quickly anointed the anti-Brittney Spears. It was a good strategy: “Let Go” may not have won at the Grammys, but it became the best selling album by a female artist in 2002.

         Lavigne has been through some mild complications of her own over the past decade. She tried, with some success, to deal with serious issues like depression on 2004’s somewhat reflective “Under My Skin,” and then, after getting in a few more bubblepunk kicks on 2007’s bristling “The Best Damn Thing,” worked through the break-up of her marriage to Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley on 2011’s almost melancholy “Goodbye Lullaby.”

But, Avril’s the resilient sort, and she’s rebounded rather quickly, hooking up with new hubby, songwriting partner, and fellow Canadian superstar Chad Kroeger of Nickleback fame, and jumping right back on the girls just wanna have fun bandwagon with her self-titled fifth album, “Avril Lavigne.” Indeed, as the disc’s first track, “Rock N Roll,” comes into focus, a defiant Lavigne reaffirms her commitment to all that is brash and bratty, crooning “Let ’em know that we’re still into rock and roll,” as if the slamming drums and surging guitars weren’t enough to make that point.

“I don’t care about my make up,” Lavigne goes on to shout, doing her best to sound like a strident rock warrior, “I like it better with my jeans all ripped up/You say, so what.”

With its platinum-plated production, shout-along “hey-hey” refrain, and proud-to-be-loud chorus, “Rock N Roll” is a tour-de-force of empowered pop clichés. “When it’s you and me, we don’t need no one to tell us who to be,” Lavigne cries with firmly fashioned urgent abandon. “We’ll keep turning up the radio,” she insists, before slyly suggesting, “What if you and I, just put a middle finger to the sky/Let ’em know that we’re still rock and roll.” 

In style, it’s a cross between the buoyant optimism of vintage Cyndi Lauper and the battle-hardened brass of Pat Benatar. But, Lavigne and Kroeger, who helped co-write the song, may have another ’80s icon in mind on “Rock n Roll”: It’s leather-jacketed Joan Jett they seem to be channeling on the second verse, where Lavigne cops a few rebellious lines from the Blackhearts, wrapping her big little voice around amusingly insolent rhymes, ”Call it a bad attitude dude/I ain’t never gonna cover up that tattoo/I might have a couple issues/You say, me too/Don’t care about my reputation/Must be living in the wrong generation/This is your invitation/Let’s get wasted.”

If there’s unwitting irony in those not particularly profound sentiments, it’s that among the various participants in battle of the babes sweepstakes that seems to be shaping up this season, Lavigne doesn’t have much in the way of a bad reputation. Sure, she’s been called a pretend punk, but so have Green Day. And, way back when, she did have a little spat with Britney Spears — basically, she called Ms. “Oops.!. . . I Did It Again” out for showing too much skin, as if that were some kind of major revelation. But, she didn’t allow herself to be baited into commenting on Miley’s twerking escapades earlier this year, and there isn’t a single mention of controversy of her Wikipedia page, which is a rarity for a celeb of her stature and disposition.

Katy Perry, on the other hand, had a couple of early singles (“Ur So Gay” and “I Kissed a Girl”) that raised a few reactionary hackles, and her 2010 cameo with Elmo on “Sesame Street” was cut because she was showing a bit too much cleavage. You can still find the clip on YouTube, and, frankly, there’s probably more breast visible than seems appropriate for Elmo’s demo.

Meanwhile, Miley’s been the subject of all kinds of chatter for conduct unbecoming for the artist formerly known as Hannah Montana. Most recently, you might have heard about her scandalously clumsy performance at MTV’s “Video Music Awards,” in which any booty shaking was overshadowed by a particularly lewd episode involving a large foam finger.

As for Britney. let’s just say that there are entire chapters of her biography devoted to questionable behavior. Incidently, she’s not only gearing up to release her eighth studio album on December 3, but that’s also the same date that her new concocted designer perfume, “Britney Jean,” is schedule to go on sale through her Facebook page. I’m really doing my best to resist the temptation to characterize the scent — it’s perhaps best to leave it to Avril to cast aspersions on Britney, if she’s still into that sort of thing.

What’s funny about all of this is that if you strip away the costumes and make-up, the differences between Lavigne, Cyrus, and Perry are just a matter of degree. For all of Lavigne’s protests to the contrary — in songs from 2002’s “Complicated” right up to the new “Rock N Roll” — she’s a power-pop princess selling yet another romantic version of the tweenage dream. She just happens to be better at it than most, in large part because she doesn’t allow things to get too complicated, and she rarely seems anything less than comfortably unabashed about her simple passions. “Singing Radiohead at the top of our lungs,” she bellows at the start of the aptly titled rocker “Here’s To Never Growing Up,” “With a boombox blarin’ as we’re fallin’ in love/Got a bottle of whatever but it’s gettin’ us drunk/Singin’ here’s to never growing up. . .”

Apparently, Lavigne mostly doesn’t have time to pronounce the letter “g” because, well, she’s obviously too busy bumming out Thom Yorke, who’d be rollin’ over in his grave at her mention of Radiohead if he weren’t still very much alive and kickin’. And, there are practically no lengths she won’t go to in her valiant efforts to romanticize her take on harmless teenage wasteland delinquency. There she is, “Stealing beers out of the trailer park/Flicking lighters just to fight off the dark” in the nostalgic, acoustic guitar-driven sing-along “17,” and painting quaint John Cougar portraits of young love with verses like, “He was working at the record shop/I would kiss him in the parking lot/Tasted like cigarettes and soda pop. . .”

And, let’s not forget the best time of year for free-spirited teens, when school’s out and anything goes, as Lavigne reminds us in “Bitchin’ Summer.” It’s mindless ode to mindless pleasures that begins with the lines, “Everyone is waiting on the bell/In a couple of seconds we’ll be raising hell,” and goes on to detail various transgressions, from “bakin’ in the sun,” to “throwing empty bottles in the fire,” to “steering with my knees,” although the worst thing Lavigne does in the song is a mercifully short rap that takes here just a wee bit out of her comfort zone.

The album is rounded out by ballads, like the wistful “Let Me Go,” a very Nickleback move that does indeed feature a duet with Kroeger, and some Millennial sex talk — “Please tell me I’m your one and only, or lie and say it tonight” Lavigne sings yearningly in “Give You What You Like,” a rather sad snapshot of pillow talk, that has her pleading “Please wrap your drunken arms around me/And I’ll let you call me yours tonight/’Cause slightly broken’s just what I need/And if you give me what I want, then I’ll give you what you like.”

Lavigne may be in her late twenties, but there’s actually something refreshing about the brazenness with which she clings to the fleeting, vaguely naughty joys of youthful abandon. She doesn’t make any excuses for the blatant shallowness of sentiment that permeates “Avril Lavigne”; she revels in it. And, with the exception of “Bad Girl,” a stupidly creepy S&M excursion featuring a played out Marilyn Manson offering stupidly creepy responses to purposely mixed messages like “Choke me because I said so/Stroke me and feed my ego,” the album delivers just what it promises: unadulterated, razor-sharp, pop escapism, accessorized with arena-sized hooks, infectious melodies, and just a touch of rock and roll swagger. If it were as easy to do as it sounds, then all of fall’s pop princesses would be doing it.