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Psycho
Location: Ouuuterrrr Spaaaaacccceeee
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Dr. David Thorpe (from SA) Defends Avril Lavigne
"Dr." David Thorpe, the guy who usually tears apart popular music on Something Awful had this to say about Avril Lavigne. I found it to be pretty intersting.
Quote:
Uttering the name “Avril Lavigne” in most elitist music-snob circles will provoke a response not unlike that which might result from saying the name “George W. Bush” on the quad of a liberal arts college. All conversation will fall silent. The eyes of those in attendance will fix on you, trying to work out whether you mentioned the name with a tone of spite or, heaven forbid, with a tone of approval. If the slightest barely-perceptible indicator betrays that you have anything but pure righteous hatred of the person named and all that he or she stands for, you’ll be bitterly (and at great length) harangued about, depending on the circumstances, the co-optation of “punk” imagery by the mainstream or dead Iraqi babies. The Bush-Lavigne analogy falls apart when one considers the actual reasoning behind the hatred. Young liberals hate George W. Bush due to what they see as a clear history of quantifiable villainy, but musical elitists hate Avril Lavigne for a far more selfish reason: they hate her for what they think she’s taken away from them.
Just what do they think she’s taken away? Well, first of all, they can’t wear ties anymore, obviously. To a hipster, it would be an unrecoverable loss of face if a total stranger silently and fleetingly assumed that their dandy wardrobe was inspired by a teenaged Canadian pop-star instead of by Paul Weller. What hipsters don’t realize is that the average stranger sees the tie as nothing more than an easy way to file the hipster’s image under the “preening jackasses who are trying to impress someone” section of their mental rolodex. She’s taken many elements of the indie/punk style of dress and made them more accessible to fourteen-year-old girls than ever before. Business is booming at Hot Topic, and it’s not just for goths anymore. Some hipsters might even have become wary of slathering on ridiculous amounts of eyeliner, which has long been a staple of the female (and in many cases, male) hipster look. I think even most hipsters will be fair enough to agree, however, that Avril’s eyeliner use is not so much a theft of their stylistic ground as it is her way of preventing herself from looking exactly like Axl Rose (I’m not saying that as a dig on Avril; it is absolutely and irrefutably true).
It goes deeper than ties and white belts, though. To thousands of people, hearing the name “Avril Lavigne” mentioned in the same breath as the word “punk” is like being slapped in the face with the bloated corpse of their counterculture. Typing those two terms into Google, in fact, will yield countless sites dissecting her connection to that term. She’s hailed as a “punk princess” by some sites and derided as a reprehensible poseur by many more. The truth of the matter is she has more in common with Marilyn Manson than Sid Vicious, in a strange way. Why on earth would I make such a ridiculous statement? It’s simple: she is the whipping-boy for an imaginary moral decline. Much as the Christian right deemed Marilyn Manson a dangerous puppy-smashing psychopath responsible for turning thousands of misfit teenagers against The Lord, the music snobs of the world have deemed Avril Lavigne a manufactured fake responsible for spoon-feeding direly un-hip pop music to thousands of preteens under the false banner of punk. However, any sane person can see that the notion that Avril could possibly contribute anything to the destruction of punk simply by her fairly ridiculous association with it is as laughable as thinking Marilyn Manson ever had any hope of making a lasting impact on anything other than the world’s supply of assless vinyl unitards. The word “punk” has been dragged through the mud for decades by such notorious mainstream faux-punk hacks as Billy Idol and Blink 182. Thousands are concerned that Avril Lavigne has taken something away from the credibility of punk, but perhaps they fail to see that punk has been greedily digesting itself since the moment it began.
So what are the “real” punks worried about? Is their connection on coolness so tenuous that Avril Lavigne actually poses a threat to it? Why should they care about the tastes of a demographic that’s using punk rebellion via Avril to wean them off the Olsen Twins? Their major problem, as I see it, is jealousy. Whether they like it or not, whether it’s authentic or not, Avril Lavigne has done more to invigorate the concepts of punk style and punk music than any of their “real” bands have done in years. She’s put the word “punk” on the tongues of more young people than Jello Biafra ever did. She may be nothing more than a vapid teenager to them, but they hate her for one reason more than any other: she won.
It’s time for the snobs of the world to face the fact that Avril is the future and “authentic” punk is the past. Punk has never been more accessible, what with The Buzzcocks playing in car commercials and Johnny Rotten appearing on reality television. Despite anyone’s best efforts to prevent it, younger and younger kids are going to get curious about punk; since it’s already entered the mainstream in manifold ways, it’s ridiculous to blame Avril or her fans for trying to get in on the coolness bandwagon. She provides an accessible alternative to punk’s fragmented and, in many cases, quite befuddling extremes. Almost every person who considers him or herself a punk has a totally different idea of what punk is; some will tell you that the real punk was only made by angry, sweaty Californian ne’er-do-wells in the 80s, some will tell you that it was made by squealing art-school dropouts in the UK in 1977, and some will probably try to sell you on some hideous hardcore bullshit. To deny Avril Lavigne her place in the lineage of punk music would be short-sighted and ridiculous.
Avril Lavigne, in her own way, is trying to express her alienation in modern society. Sure, she might not have the vitriol of Johnny or the cynicism of Jello, but she is expressing her situation in her own words, and doing so on her own terms. Take “My World,” a track from her debut album as an example:
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 a friggin' day,
There's nothin' else better to do anyway.
Now, if you will, compare it to the Dead Kennedys’ classic “Too Drunk To Fuck.”
Went to a party
I danced all night
I drank 16 beers
And I started up a fight
But now I am jaded
You're out of luck
I'm rolling down the stairs
Too drunk to fuck
What’s the difference? Both of them offer lucid commentary on the lives of the writers. Jello wouldn’t relate to Avril’s lyrics, but Avril certainly wouldn’t relate to Jello’s. Why would one of them begrudge the other the freedom to express the meaningful circumstances of their existence? To stifle or deride such an expression, obviously, wouldn’t be very “punk.”
Is the social confusion and bewilderment of a teenage girl somehow not an important part of the cultural conversation? How is touring malls, as Ms. Lavigne did earlier this year, any less of a comment on consumer-driven society than playing dingy clubs? Why not just quit complaining and let the kids have their fun? Why deny that these very same kids represent the future of punk? The answers that a “real” punk might give to these questions would all point back to the same thing: snobbish, closed-minded elitism. So I ask of you, you hipsters, punk-snobs, and Avril-haters: “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?”
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Link: http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2160 |