Avril Lavigne Is Extremely Corporate and Generic

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Who is Avril Lavigne?

Basically, she used to be–USED TO BE–the #1 female musical artist of all time for about half a decade before fading from the spotlight, and she was not safe from detractors for a number of reasons. Too bad everyone knows her. If you ask somebody in a second-world country… they’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I know her!” Everybody knows Lavigne, who was nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy Nominee in 2003–wait, what? She got a Grammy for that year? She didn’t even release any new content in 2003!

Please tell how she deserved to win an “Album of the Year” for that. Isn’t it supposed to be somebody who breaks records, breaks minds, breaks hearts, goes “Look at what I did! Look at how crazy this is!” Basically, what Birdhouse, Saosin, If It Kills You, Tale for the Ages and Jimmy Eat World did with their albums will never be done again because they’re amazing. These albums are great!

But apparently, Lavigne was only nominated for making three crap albums called Let Go, Under My Skin and The Best Damn Thing. Good job, Avril Lavigne, you did it. NOT!

Here’s another reward for you, Avril. Just gape it. Keep all the nominations, take ‘em all! The person who was giving her these nominations… personally, I have no idea. However, I did find out that Michael Jackson, during the last six years of his lifetime, attended the 2003 Music Radio Awards. I wouldn’t necessarily blame him for her success, oh no, and he wasn't even the person who introduced her; it was Brooke Burns who introduced Lavigne to the stage. Screw you, Brooke Burns.

Michael Jackson was only there he could muster his own strength, with only six more years to live. He was at least still capable of doing the things he loved to do most until his premature death in 2009.

Now how did Avril receive her Top 40 Radio nominee at the RMAs, you may be asking? And how could Jackson, the person who introduced himself and the All Stars, possibly be ignored and not have a nominee? He wasn’t ignored; he was likely just baffled (in his head) by either the nominee she was awarded or that he didn’t have his own RMAs nominee. He didn’t look excited that his sole job was to introduce the All Stars and perform with them. But at least he knew how well he sang, unlike Lavigne, who sounds like a spoiled, deaf 9-year-old throwing a temper tantrum in front of her parents at Walmart. Her singing is beyond atrocious.

I didn’t even know Avril was still releasing albums, going so far as to release a new one in 2022. It wasn’t even a goddamn important album. I didn’t even know she released a studio album in the past two years.

So how can you possibly ignore the legendary Jackson, right? He was probably just busy on the stage, but he acknowledged every other single person on that stage–kind of like how Barney acknowledges other people with a hug, or a kiss or whatever–but what Avril seemed to do while she was performing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” by Brooke Burns (later made famous by Guns ‘N Roses) was completely ignore him. She apparently didn’t want to talk to him.

Avril, without Michael, music could not have been what it used to be–or is perhaps today–without him. He literally laid the groundwork for (mostly unrelated) bands/artists throughout his 50-year lifetime such as his sister Janet Jackson, Duran Duran, Sade, Robbie Williams, Wham!, 2Pac, Daft Punk, Queen, AC/DC, etc.

Enough with that. Avril Lavigne is so goddamn weak and shallow. Like, too goddamn weak and shallow for her own good. Her fans are among the stroppiest, most humorous, nail-spitting, all-caps swearing, oversensitive and unrelenting people on the planet. I fully understand that this document will succumb to a deluge of downvotes and striking comments, but I thought of that worthwhile to explain how Avril Poseur Lavigne–the epitome of a poseur, false emo and wannabe role model–is so poor and limited as a songwriter. Also not helping this is that she hardly ever writes her own songs and almost all of them are co-written by her with a bunch of professionals.

Before frantically sending messages to your fellow Reddit or TikTok followers, who have happened upon a disgusting FurAffinity article uploaded by a toxic misogynist who hates to see women succeed, please allow me to explain this from a technical/musical perspective.

Music is made up of chords; when chords that work together are played as a group of four or so, this is called a chord progression. The most common of these progressions–the most stale, worn-out and unimaginative–is this chord progression: I–V–vi–IV (or vi–IV–I–V), also known as the post-grunge drone or the Creedian/Nickelbackian progression. It is often used by post-grunge bands such as Nickelback, Alanis Morrisette, Creed, Matchbox Twenty, Staind and Bush, as well as generic pop celebrities. The chords share a lot of notes, and it’s the most obvious progression, requiring the least amount of imagination or effort. Imagine a thousand different shades of color, but you only ever use red, blue, yellow and green. That’s what this chord progression is. Now there’s nothing wrong with musical acts using this once, maybe twice, but Avril Lavigne’s session musicians use it so often that I’ve become worried for the personal safety of these chords. I ought to take out a restraining order on Avril to protect themselves from being harassed by her.

The most infamous examples of this are “Sk8er Boi”, “How You Remind Me” by Nickelback and “Complicated”. The former and latter songs have exactly the same chord progression as Nickelback’s biggest hit (and most popular song) at varying tempos. Let’s be open minded in that Avril Lavigne has had a long, storied career. However, she either uses the same chord progression more than once or the chords are used for twice as long in the same goddamn order. One can easily layer these songs together by slowing them down and/or pitch-shifting them down. So now, a little depressingly, because of Avril Lavigne recycling the same, tired, overused, post-grunge/Nickelbackian chord progression, we can now layer two or three of her songs on top of each other.

And this person was nominated for two awards–one Radio Music Award and one Grammy Award for Best New Artist–despite her lack of creativity and talent.

Unfortunately, after having endured the experience of listening to three or four of her albums, the Avril Lavigne chord progression psycho nightmare just keeps going. And going. And going. You won’t be able to move on with your life.

If anyone you know is suffering the same addiction to using the same chords over and over like Avril Lavigne, you can turn your life around. In the meantime, I think it’s important NOT to use this chord progression, to offer up our thoughts and prayers, to hope that this overused chord progression will find peace and move on from the dreadful harassment by Avril Lavigne.

And yes, she did use it a seventh time, the seventh time being in “Girlfriend”. More like “Man Hater”, if you’d ask me.

Her music appeals only to impressionable young children, teeny boppers, soccer moms, psychotic, 40-year-old ex-girlfriends who like to break stuff, sorority tramps, frat boys, wannabe sensitive men and scene kids–to the point where no genuinely relatable, masculine and admired young person of both genders has ever had Avril Lavigne upon their bedroom wall. In fact, nobody seems to do that anymore, given her status as a 2000s relic and her lack of relevance.

Her songs have only sporadically been played in the background since 2009 or so, due to her decline in popularity, outside of the trendiest circles of young people. No suave young guys have ever lent down their window, lowered their sunglasses and put on “Complicated”. True musical icons have always attracted the best and the coolest of both genders. Avril is not one of them. No gender, age group or demographic is any better than any other, and while Avril may have had mainstream cred back in her day, her non-Asian audience overwhelmingly constitutes just 0.08% of the world population; it always has and it always will. But she wouldn’t have had 24 million monthly listeners on Spotify had she not even had a Japanese fanbase. Estimates show, however, that she had over 35 million monthly listeners (including dedicated fans) at one point in the late 2000s. Also, if your popularity has strongly been focused on/condensed to Southeast Asia for years at this point or if your audience is composed solely of impressionable teenagers, college students and soccer moms, you can never be so much an icon in that you have a universal allure–or that you ever had one to begin with. More of an icon on the sense of being a glorified, very successful pop star. True musical artists have either original songwriting skills, great musicianship or both, which is where the biggest problem with Avril Lavigne resides. Her increasingly niche, outdated appeal which is no longer in fashion, can’t be distinguished between actual talent and her lack of actual talent: the post-grunge templates of her generic pop songs, how they're put together, the mellow production that completely destroys any of her true, genuine grit, what chords are used, the obvious post-grunge/Nickelbackian progressions and the melodies. These are actually really bland, overused and worn out. Even when she sold out in 2007 to make even poppier and more generic music and she stopped having post-grunge sounds, or stopped trying to be “emo”, the chord progressions are still there and so is her punk posturing; in fact, she did it again with her final top 10 hit called “Girlfriend”. It was a horrible song about Lavigne cheating on a girl who already had a boyfriend and trying to steal him from her, not to mention it being a complete rip-off of Toni Basil’s “Mickey”.

The reality is, and I’m sorry to have to burst the bubble of a small army of Avrilites, the music charts and awards shows that you esteem as irrefutable evidence of Avril Lavigne’s cultural status, no one really cares about any of that stuff. Long ago, they ceased to see the Billboard music charts and the Grammys as meaning anything. Least of all is a metric of talent. The Billboard charts have lost all meaning in relevance for decades and are just seen as a.) a shifting repository of thin, vapid, disposable, forgettable pop music for tweens, b.) lame hip-hop or c.) quarterly-stylized Walmart music a la Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan and Jelly Roll. The MTV Music Awards–all of it–nobody who appreciates the history and craft of music cares about it or takes any of it seriously. In fact, the MMAs have come to symbolize everything that’s lame and lacking in music, not as cutting-edge. Avril Lavigne had eight Grammy nominations, and if she has eight Grammy nominations, then it doesn’t really mean much. If you want to call Avril Lavigne an icon, it’s not in the sense of true musical icons like Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Nirvana, Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins, Bjork, Joan Jett, the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Primus, The Arrogant Sons (a ska punk band) or Joni Mitchell. No older people ever look at Avril Lavigne with jealous admiration and lament that they weren’t born later to be part of the exciting times when she was an icon dominating the radio. Most people remember or are familiar with her songs in a general, half-aware kind of way, but most would struggle to actually name three of them. She is a tremendously successful pop singer, or should I say, poseur “punk” whose music used to play in shopping malls, in food courts, at playdates, in supermarkets and during driving lessons–but she was never a timelessly cool icon. Despite Taylor Swift and Kelly Clarkson still receiving lots of love to this day, almost every station never wanted to stick with Avril Lavigne, so she was largely removed from radio playlists after the 2000s due to her declining popularity and stations lacking interest in her. She’s an artist teenagers listen to before they develop a sense of taste in music, before they can explore and understand what rock and indie music are. She’s what teens listen to before they go to college and become more savvy, shrewd or aware of timelessly cool icons.