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Let me begin by saying, I fucking HATE you, Avril. Personally. I don't give a shit if I haven't met you. For all I know, you’re a perfectly pleasant young woman with strong core values, good hygiene and an impressive collection of limited-edition sneakers. As a represenative of crossover pop rock, I feel like it's my generation duty—nay, my civic responsibility—to express some concerns. After all, I lived through the real punk era, back when safety pins weren't fashion accessories and "DIY" meant you actually did it yourself instead of hiring an MTV executive to explain why your eyeliner is "a metaphor for systemic collapse".

Now, where to start? Oh, right—her music. Or rather, the thing she claims is music. I listened to her debut single "Complicated" because, like a fool, I clicked the link my wife sent me with the caption, "This is literally my soul. I am a very complicated woman." Great. My taxes are paying for school systems that teach grammar, and she thinks "literally" means "kind of, but with more feeling". I digress. My wife force-fed me "Stupid Girl" by Garbage as well a few years earlier, or perhaps it came on while I was watching VH1 out of nowhere.

Women shouldn't have feelings, not to mention my shitty wife who always wants to meet up with someone whenever I want her to spend time with me.

WHAT?! THE?! FUCK?!

"But darling, my friends seem to think that I don't want anything to do with them anymore."

Well, if I let you spend time with your friends, you'll probably see another man and start flirting with him. I know what you bitches are like. You are no exception, Mary. We went Christmas shopping at Kmart one time in the '90s, and you started talking to some random guy in the clothes store and getting really friendly with him while our son at I were at Olan Mills Portrait Studio.

And don't you dare speak to me about your cousin. He's still a manly man; even if he's your cousin or not, you are still forbidden to speak to any other men except for me. I'm the only man in your life now. No friends for you. I'm all you need in your life right now.

"Complicated" began with... well, actually, it began with scratching combined with twangy country rock guitars, most likely a delibarate production choice. She had a group of producers, doing scratches, in a pop rock song. I don't know if either she or her producers are aware, but scratching is a hallmark of hip-hop, not punk. And because the song contains at least three scratches, as well as hip-hop-adjacent beats and saccharine melodies characterized by stepwise motion and narrow melodic leaps, it is automatically garbage. Not raw. Not rebellious. Not born from the Bronx or from a gritty street in the UK. Scratching doesn't belong in a song called "Complicated", unless you're trying to say emotional distress is best expressed through turntable acrobatics. Honestly, I can't rule it out. Today's youth do communicate through interpretive vinyl spinning, for all I know.

But there Avril was, with The Matrix or whatever the hell her production team at the time was called—and what were their real names? Did they know? They were slicing and dicing the beat like they were auditioning for a Step Up sequel, while Lavigne whined about "feeling nothing since 2002". Again, scratching. In pop rock. It's not innovative—it's an affront to culinary (and musical) decency.

And let's talk about her aesthetic. I saw the music video. Shot in what I can only assume is a storage unit repurposed as a skate park with fog machines, neon duct tape and Avril just standing there with a guitar as her bandmates play the most generic music imaginable. She wore sleeved armwarmers over a tank top, paired with cargo pants that had pockets full of what I can only assume were expired energy drink coupons and existential dread. And her hair—good grief, her hair. It looked like a raccoon died in a wind tunnel. All I know is that David Lee Roth would weep at the audacity.

Now, don't get me wrong—I appreciate rebellion. I was there when The Ramones ripped through CBGB with ripped jeans and sneers that could curdle milk. I saw The Clash take on Thatcherism with guitars blazing and righteous fury. Hell, I even defended Green Day when they sold out and played the Super Bowl, because at least they'd earned the right to disappoint us. But Avril Lavigne is rebelling against what, exactly? Homework? The emotional labor expected of her in her relationship with her emotionally unavailable ice cream? The crushing realization that avocado toast won’t fund your retirement?

I bet she doesn't even eat or rebel against sugary foods like a real man should. Breyer's ice cream isn't punk; eating an entire cow for dinner or two large Blizzards for dessert is. If she wants to be punk, she must eat something other than Breyer's--and the more loaded and extreme, the better. Who the hell only eats ice cream or weeps into it? That's not punk. Avril Lavigne probably stuffs her ice cream with fruit like bananas, mixed berries, chocolate sauce and only God knows what else before weeping into it like a womanchild.

Elvis Presley may have died of a heart attack in 1977, but was a real man who only played the manlinest rock and roll (or '50s pop, just not the kind only nagging wifes listen to) and ate only butter and fried items--fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, mashed potatoes, gravy, meatloaf, bacon-wrapped meatballs and jelly-filled doughnuts. He liked his sandwiches big. He liked them bigger than a steak. He talked about how he liked these foods. He liked them the best. If he ate fried chicken, it was probably a greasy, fast-food quality leg. If he ate pancakes, he ate gigantic stacks of them like I did in the '60s, and pancakes are even better when they're deep-fried or loaded with peanut butter and whipped cream.

All Lavigne can even think about is eating a meal with salad, vegetables and fruit. She doesn't ever think about meat or nuts. She thinks that if you don't eat a lot of food, you won't be hungry anymore.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, fucking WRONG!!!!!

If real men or real punks are going to eat food like Elvis, it has to be something that'll turn them into real human beings and suffer from a heart attack. Gigantic servings of rocky road ice cream, freakshakes, Backyard Bacon Ranch Triple Burgers, Chicken McNuggets, a bucket of Original Recipe chicken, Chicken Strip Baskets, Big Macs, oversized McFlurries, Texas Toast... hell, maybe even an EXTREME peanut butter sundae with tons of Resee's cups and peanut butter than usual. And whenever I don't feel like cooking or grilling anything, I make my pathetic little whore of a bitch wife who refuses to let me get laid do it. Whenever her ass refuses (which is quite often, to say the least), I make the whole family live off of leftovers, meatloaf, pizza mixes, dump-and-bake meals, fast food, Chinese takeout, breakfast for dinner, grilled cheese and deli sandwiches.

I remember eating from the old USDA Dietary Guidelines back in 1978, and I ate at least four servings of fruit (because only pussies eat two cups of fruit or less per day), four whole slices of Wonder bread and and over two tablespoons of butter daily, man! You hear me? Daily! From 1955 (I was about six years old) all the fucking way until 1990! Anyone who's never eaten like me is a goddamn poseur like Avril Lavigne!

And the lyrics. Oh, the lyrics. "Chill out, what'cha yellin' for?" That is a cry for a therapist, which is fully covered under her parents' insurance. "Lay back, it's all been done before." Congrats, you've single-handedly solved the energy crisis through saline output. Avril, that's not a chorus—that's a first draft of a community college poetry assignment titled "Emotional Vulnerability as Weather Metaphor". Take your ass back to 1967, when women actually allowed a man to be a man and could do everything to make his boner explode, hippies included.

This song has over 800 million YouTube views. Eight. Fucking. Hundred. Million. When I was Avril's age, I measured success in vinyl sales and radio play, not in "vibes per minute", not in sk8er culture and most definitely not in a duet with Britney Spears and Pink. My generation had to walk uphill both ways to hear a record, and we liked it. We valued craft. We revered songwriting. We didn't just slap distorted power chords over a DJ or production trio like The Matrix scratching the Scooby-Doo theme and calling it "a tribute to the emotional authenticity and aggression of rock and roll".

The real issue, however, is that it's FUCKING POP MUSIC!!!!! She is selling us a MYTH! She's not rebelling! She's PERFORMING rebellion! She's cosplaying angst like it's Halloween and the candy is clout! Her whole shtick—raccoon eyeliner, bullying middle school students she claims are her boyfriends or ruined her relationships, song titles that sound like Nokia messages circa 2003 or Tumblr usernames—isn't punk. It's product. She's taken the genuine, raw, chaotic energy of a movement that once challenged authority, burned draft cards and inspired actual social change, and turned it into a brand. She's not Sid Vicious. She's Hot Topic's mood ring.

And don't even get me started on the merch. I saw her online store. Everything is expensive as shit. Avril has monetized melancholy. She's turned teenage ennui into a Shopify empire. If Johnny Rotten saw this, he'd disown punk rock, change his name and become a tax auditor.

Now, am I saying everything was better in my day? No. The music industry was run by guys in suits who thought rock and roll was a communist plot. But at least the rebellion had stakes. At least when we shouted "Anarchy in the U.K.", we meant it—figuratively, usually, but still, you felt the danger. Today, your version of revolution is changing your reality show bio and posting a picture of a gas station Slurpee with the caption "This is all there is." Riveting.

So, Lavigne, I pity you. You're not a punk. You're a symptom. A finely coiffed, commercially viable symptom of a culture that's turned authenticity into aesthetics and suffering into content. You're not breaking rules—you're following a very specific algorithm of "edgy" tropes designed to be purchased by and go viral among 13-year-olds who've never had to do a load of laundry without crying.

But hey, good luck. Keep trying to scratch your way to the top. Just know that the algorith had forgotten all about you by 2009—and it certainly did—and now we have more kids with green hair and poorly mixed tracks (think Billie Eilish) about hating joy taking your place.

And me? I'll be in my recliner, listening to London Calling on vinyl, wondering when we decided that rebellion could be purchased for $29.99 with free shipping.

P.S. DJ Scratches? That's not a name. That's a job description. Next you'll tell me your drummer is named "Kick Drum". Hopefully not.

His Son Gen Xer Hates Her as Well
Ah, Let Go. The sonic equivalent of biting into a granola bar only to realize halfway through that it’s made entirely of wet chalk and misplaced confidence. Avril Lavigne’s debut album—the record that somehow convinced a generation of middle-school boys they were edgy because they could mosh to “Complicated” in JNCO jeans—stands not as a milestone in music history, but as a cultural cautionary tale. It’s the musical version of a MySpace profile with 12,000 friends and a theme song set to dial-up tones: loud, aggressively inoffensive, and utterly devoid of anything resembling soul.

Let’s be honest—no one actually likes Let Go. Not really. Not in the way people like Exile on Main St. or Siamese Dream or even, God help us, Nevermind. They tolerated it. They danced to it at birthday parties where the DJ played it between Korn and N*Sync because the 13-year-olds with bedazzled flip phones demanded it. But liking it? That would require a suspension of aesthetic judgment so profound it borders on clinical delusion.

And don’t even get me started on the genre soup it tries and fails to be. What even is this album’s identity crisis? Is it pop-punk? Sure, if you define pop-punk as “blink-182 minus the wit, minus the rhythm, minus any sense of irony.” Is it hip-hop-inflected? Only in the sense that Avril occasionally says “whatever” with a sneer and slaps a turntable scratch on a track like “Losing Grip” as if to say, “See? I’m rebellious.” Is it alternative rock? Only if alternative means “alternative to having standards.”

The worst part isn’t even the music—it’s the audacity of the act. Here we have a Canadian pop factory product, shipped out with a pre-fab image of punk attitude, wristbands tighter than her vocal range, and a haircut that screamed “I shop at Hot Topic but I’ve never been to a show.” And yet, legions of self-proclaimed “hardcore” fans—the same ones who wore their Black Flag shirts ironically (or maybe not ironically, who can tell?)—suddenly lost their minds over a woman who thought “sk8er boi” was street poetry. I remember standing in Tower Records in 2002, flipping through the new releases, when a kid no older than 14 told me, “Dude, Avril is, like, punk.” I wanted to weep. I wanted to slap him. I settled for silently judging his skate shoes and walking away.

Because here’s the thing: punk wasn’t supposed to be safe. Punk wasn’t supposed to be a product. Punk was supposed to be a middle finger, a snarl, a collapsed stage. It was supposed to make your parents nervous, not give them a nostalgic flashback to their own rebellious youth while they drove you to soccer practice. Avril didn’t bring rebellion to the mainstream—she sanitized it. She turned “I don’t give a damn” into a branding strategy. She didn’t challenge the system; she licensed it.

And the songs? Oh, the songs. “Complicated”—a tune so emotionally shallow it could be used to drain a kiddie pool. “Sk8er Boi”—a narrative so vapid it makes Teen Beat feel like dense literature. “I’m with You”—a ballad so emotionally constipated it’s basically a dirge about suburban loneliness with a radio-friendly sheen. There’s not a single moment of authenticity on this album. Not one lyric that suggests Avril Lavigne has ever looked in a mirror and thought, “Huh. Maybe I don’t actually skate. Maybe I’ve never been in a fight. Maybe this whole persona is a marketing ploy.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “It was for kids! It was targeted toward teens!” And sure—fine. But so was The Banana Splits. That doesn’t mean we should pretend it’s groundbreaking television. The problem isn’t that Let Go was made for teenagers. The problem is that it treated its audience like idiots. It didn’t try to challenge, provoke, or expand. It just slapped a “rebel” sticker on a factory-produced sound and called it art. It’s like handing someone a plastic knife and calling it a weapon.

And yet, somehow, Let Go made millions. It went multi-platinum. It spawned hit after hit. It earned awards. People dressed like her. They quoted her. I still shudder at the memory of a grown man at a dive bar karaoke night attempting “Nobody’s Home” with all the angsty gravitas of a middle-schooler discovering depression via AIM status updates.

The irony, of course, is that the very people who championed Avril as punk royalty are the same ones who now roll their eyes at her. The WWF-loving, nu-metal-dabbling, choker-wearing boys who once blasted “Losing Grip” in their Geo Prizms now drive Subarus and listen to Pearl Jam in peace, pretending they never once sang “Hey, shorty, you drive me crazy” into a hairbrush.

And maybe that’s the real tragedy—not that Let Go exists, but that it was ever taken seriously. That an album with all the depth of a puddle on a sidewalk managed to be called “revolutionary.” That a singer with zero punk pedigree, zero lyrical insight, and a voice that sounds like a shopping cart scraping across concrete could be held up as some kind of icon.

But here’s the kicker: Avril didn’t even want to be punk. In interviews, she’s admitted she barely listened to punk before she was cast as its princess. She didn’t grow up on The Ramones or The Clash. She grew up on pop radio and Disney specials. And yet, she was sold—mercilessly, cynically sold—as the voice of a generation. A generation that, by the way, already had voices. Real ones. Angry ones. Ones that actually understood the genre they were being asked to replace her with.

So yes, Let Go is vile. Objectively, sonically, conceptually. It’s a musical abortion not because it’s bad—plenty of bad albums are fun in their own train-wreck way—but because it pretends to be something it’s not. It’s a fake leather jacket worn by someone who’s never been in the rain. It’s Hot Topic nihilism for people who’ve never missed a curfew.

And maybe that’s why it resonates with so many Gen Xers like me—not because we hated Avril, but because we saw her for what she was: a symptom. A symptom of a music industry more interested in packaging rebellion than fostering it. A symptom of a culture that rewards image over integrity, noise over nuance, and commerce over craft.

We didn’t hate Avril Lavigne because she was a girl with a voice and a dream. We hated Let Go because it was a betrayal. A betrayal of the music we loved, the ethos we respected, and the idea that art should mean something.

So sure, stream it if you must. Dance to it ironically at your next retro party. Quote “Sk8er Boi” like it’s prophecy. But don’t—don’t—pretend it’s anything more than what it is: a hollow, glitter-coated shell of an album, built on false premises and sold to the emotionally vulnerable.

And to the 14-year-olds who still think she’s punk?

Grow up. My dad needs to grow up as well.

But Gen X Mother Loves Her