Avril Lavigne Discussion- Divorcing Nickelback

[SHOOTER]

Mar 17, 2014 17:35:45 GMT -5 Snowbeast said:

Mar 17, 2014 12:28:47 GMT -5 SHOOTER said:

Avril Lavigne has sold 125k to In a World Like This' 110k.

Now do the worldwide sales lol
Avril Lavigne ‏avrillavigne...because I LOVE JAPAN and I am going to be shooting a music video there!!!!! Crazy. So excited. Yay. Sushi. Hello Kitty!


#westayprayingforahit

747k for IAWLT; 600k for AL. Touché.

[Snowbeast]

Avril's recording of Breakaway when she was 16 has leaked. I really do think Avril could deliver a nice country album, and her voice already goes there naturally when she's not wanting to be a rock star.

[Deleted]

Mar 31, 2014 16:47:14 GMT -5 Snowbeast said:

Avril's recording of Breakaway when she was 16 has leaked. I really do think Avril could deliver a nice country album, and her voice already goes there naturally when she's not wanting to be a rock star.

Really nice!! Kelly recorded a carbon of it with a few high notes.

[Lahey's Lucky Star]

I dunno why, but "Hello Kitty" would be so much better as a Kesha song.

[🅳🅸🆂🅲🅾]

Apr 2, 2014 2:07:11 GMT -5 Lahey's Lucky Star said:

I dunno why, but "Hello Kitty" would be so much better as a Kesha song.

It feels like it would have been perfectly at home on Love Angel Music Baby in place of "Crash."

[George]

Video Shoot?

[George]

LYRIC VIDEOS:

[blahsi]

I'll admit I didn't give this album much of a shot when it released. I've been revisiting it the past couple days and I actually think this is one of her best albums. It will be a more regular addition to my rotation now. I hope (but sadly doubt) one of the new singles gains traction at radio.

[Juan Carlos]

"Hello Kitty" (Music Video)

[irice22]

That is the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen happen to an established artist.

[MyLastView]

Apr 21, 2014 23:47:30 GMT -5 irice22 said:

That is the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen happen to an established artist.

That just about sums it up. The disturbingly obvious endorsements, the awful dancing, the whole thing in general..

It was actually a little sad.

[Robert J]

"Hello Kitty" is seriously just awful. From the song itself to that video...wow. I can't believe she even agreed to doing that.

[Deleted]

I loved it

[Deleted]

Apr 22, 2014 15:30:11 GMT -5 @touch said:

I loved it

Me too. I found it entertaining, lol.

[Rose "Payola" Nylund]

I'm trying to figure out to what degree that video is offensive. :/

[Dammn Baby]

Wow, that was utterly pathetic.

[.indulgecountry]

I expected that to be a lot worse given all the negative comments, but I actually didn't mind that at all. The song still is one of my least-faves on the otherwise excellent album, but the video was colorful and fun and fit the song very well, and it was pretty well-made tbqh.

I want a music video for GYWYL now though.

[Snowbeast]

add it to the list of let-downs. For more than half her career, its always 2 really great steps forward, 3 really bad one's back. The only positive thing is that it put her name back into headlines (negatively, but there nontheless), so when GYWYL is released it won't be totally ignored. Since the songs are on opposite sides of the quality scale, maybe it will even be more appreciated/take people by surprise.

[Gray.]

"Hello Kitty" as a song is a great guilty pleasure, but omfg that video

[dbhmr]

There are few Pulse (B-level) faves I have less respect for than Avril Lavigne, and this video encapsulates that. I get that Japan is the only place where people still give a shit about her, but her use of faux-Harajuku is still really off-putting. And holy shit is that song awful.

[Ivy Leegue™]

Ka-ka-ka-KAWAII! *enter dubstep drop* YESSSSSS. So glad there is a video for this jam. Can't wait to see it!

[Snowbeast]

I can't believe it's still trending on Facebook 12 hours later. It's so bad that everyone is talking about it. If she put out a good video, nobody would have cared. She better hope that any publicity is good publicity.

[George]

Avril Lavigne 'Hello Kitty' Video Is An Embarrassment In Any Language
By Jason Lipshutz, N.Y. | April 22, 2014 5:34 PM EDT



Why, Avril? Why?

"Hello Kitty" is the weakest song on Avril Lavigne's fifth studio album, a grating earworm that squeezes Gwen Stefani's Japan fetishization into an even more unseemly package. But in a lot of ways, its music video, which wormed its way onto YouTube on Tuesday (Apr. 22) and then was quickly taken down, is even a bigger train-wreck than the track itself. Click here to watch the gloriously ghastly video on Lavigne's web site.

The majority of the "Hello Kitty" music video finds the Canadian pop princess parading around with four identical, creepily expressionless Asian women behind her, performing mind-numbingly generic dance moves, in locales like a bedroom, a candy store and a street. When she's not commanding her vaguely offensive troop, Lavigne is clumsily playing guitar, wearing glasses, eating sushi, waving at admirers, taking a single photograph, and… not much else, really. The Skrillex-y hair with pink highlights wins the singer back a few points, but the shameless camera-mugging quickly makes them evaporate.

So, wait, how is the "Hello Kitty" video even more abhorrent than the song, which has a dubstep breakdown so unholy that Keanu Reeves probably battled it in "Constantine"? Well, the music videos previously released from Lavigne's largely dismissed new album have been pretty excellent, actually. The clip for "Here's To Never Growing Up" was an enjoyably cheeky nod to Lavigne's sk8er boi beginnings, while the guest star-laden "Rock N Roll" visual allowed the singer to battle comic-book scum with imaginative gusto (and Billy Zane). Even the video for the schlocky Chad Kroeger duet "Let Me Go" was fittingly overdramatic and well-produced. The first three videos from "Avril Lavigne" varied in ambition, but one could feel the singer trying to accomplish a real effect with each clip, be it nostalgia, appreciative chuckles or the plucking of Canadian heartstrings.

The "Hello Kitty" video tries to do nothing. Its laziness is demonstrated in the first 21 seconds, during which Lavigne holds a plush stack of cupcakes, shakes her hips, stares at the cupcakes, bounces her shoulders, and then, when she sings the line "Someone chuck a cupcake at me"… tosses the fake cupcakes at the camera, her lip movement not matching up to the backing track whatsoever. Cool!

Hopefully Lavigne will release another video from "Avril Lavigne" before that album cycle ends, because that underrated LP cannot die with the pained whimper of this "Hello Kitty" video. Maybe she'll make a video for the Marilyn Manson duet "Bad Girl"; it can't be worse than this, right? Right?

[George]

A serious attempt to explain Avril Lavigne's 'Hello Kitty' music video
By Darren Franich on Apr 22, 2014 at 3:41PM @darrenfranich



So Avril Lavigne has made a new music video, about which there are several dozen completely accurate, utterly withering comments to make. She’s trying to out-Miley Miley; she’s aiming for Gaga but barely achieving Xtina; Kesha wants her dollar sign back; this is literally just “Hollaback Girl.”

There are serious questions about whether it’s offensive (expressionless Asian dancers, Tokyo-as-prop) or offensively obvious (this one’s for you, large Japanese fanbase!). There are even more serious questions about the title, “Hello Kitty,” which is also like half of the lyrics, and which everyone agrees is a double entendre.

Lavigne herself told DigitalSpy that the song is both “flirtatious and somewhat sexual” but that the song is “genuinely about my love for Hello Kitty as well!” This statement strikes me as much more than just an ambient piece of pop star rorschachiana, the media-trained instinct towards vagueness and ambiguity. This strikes me as the very core of Avril Lavigne and everything she still kind of represents.

Now, the simplest way to understand what’s happening here is that Avril Lavigne had her most iconic moment astride the pop zeitgeist over a decade ago, with “Sk8er Boi” and “Complicated,” maybe the most ’90s songs ever released after the ’90s ended. We like to ascribe context to our musicians, but Lavigne arrived sans context in the midst of whatever pop-punk was.

If you don’t take the phrase “pop-punk” seriously, then A) you’re most people and also B) you probably don’t understand how we’re still talking about Avril Lavigne today. But if you were a high school kid at the monocultural moment when a band like Blink-182 seemed vaguely revolutionary insofar as they weren’t the Backstreet Boys, then Avril Lavigne equals everything: High school, nostalgia, first girlfriend, Baggy-Pants-As-Aesthetic, Skating-As-Counter-Culture, Eyeshadow-As-Individualism. Every period of rock history has its own struggles with authenticity — grunge and selling out; punk and flaming out; classic rock and cultural appropriation. Pop-punk is unique in the sense that it’s utter inauthenticity was the central authentic aspect. By the late ’90s, it was a genre of dudes playing guitars repetitively singing sweet nothings about suburbia.

In this context, Avril Lavigne — Canadian, Converse shoes, ties and a tank top bwwwaaaahhhhh? — was the culmination. Questions of authenticity simply don’t matter here: When she first appeared, Lavigne dressed like a slightly older person’s idea of what hip young people dress like. (In 2002, almost immediately after she emerged on the scene, she told EW that those ties were “a costume.”) And so questions of authenticity don’t matter for “Hello Kitty.” Almost a decade and a half into her career as a famous person, Avril Lavigne endures, faceless yet ageless. The idea of an entire song composed of a nominally vaguely “punk” personality screaming “Hello Kitty” over and over again through what sounds like seventy thousand synthesizers — such a concept would’ve seemed like a vision of a dark but hilarious future back in 2002. The closest and most obvious analogue is “Hollaback Girl,” the closest correlative example of a pop-ish punk-ish rock princess turning towards a radical new genre. “Hello Kitty” even closes with basically the beginning of “Hollaback Girl”: [Insert Pop Star Here] taking a picture of Asian Back-Up Dancers.

The central fascination of post-No Doubt Gwen Stefani is how voraciously she appropriates every culture possible. So in just a few minutes, you’ve got the Harajuku Girls driving through the hood before taking a detour into All-American milquetoast High School filled with cultural identifiers that would’ve looked regressive in Happy Days, except mixed with too much fashion; also, Pharrell. (It’s basically Glee half a decade early.)

Conversely, “Hello Kitty” feels purposefully anti-culture, constructed to purposefully reflect every possible cultural background in a manner that doesn’t really speak to anything particular. Here is the second stanza of the first verse:

Let’s all slumber party
Like a fat kid on a pack of Smarties
Someone chuck a cupcake at me

The use of “slumber party” as a verb: Questionable. The use of “on” in the context of “a pack of Smarties,” as if it’s drug: More Questionable. The phrase “chuck a cupcake at me” apparently said in all sincerity as if “chuck a cupcake” is something anyone has ever said before: Priceless. Where are we? When are we? It feels like Lavigne reverse-engineered her own mistranslation. And all of this builds to an essentially endless chorus wherein Lavigne is either A) expressing her love for one of the most abstract brands in the world in the most abstract way possible, or B) singing a triumphal ode to her own sexuality in the least sexual way possible.

So we’re left with the possibility that a faceless corporation is Avril Lavigne’s best metaphor for her own sexuality, or that faceless sexuality is Avril Lavigne’s best metaphor for her own corporate persona. “Hello Kitty” feels like staring into the vacuum. Avril plays a guitar, but nothing comes out. She doesn’t really dance, but she doesn’t not dance. This is what pop wants to be, but also where pop came from: Alpha and Omega, retro-futuristic. Avril Lavigne never changed; the world just changed around her.

[SHOOTER]

at "aiming for Gaga but barely achieving Xtina". Most accurate description ever! She has 0 sex appeal and this video can't even pass off as tongue-in-cheek.

[irice22]

Get those streaming points!

[reidster]

I seriously can't handle the criticism she's getting. The video is not racist. People who are calling it cultural appropriation are themselves essentializing Japanese culture. Take a f*cking graduate course in culture before making such accusations.

[dbhmr]

Apr 23, 2014 16:57:31 GMT -5 reidster said:

essentializing

I do believe "appropriation" has met its match.

[Libra]

You think maybe deep down she knows just how bad it is, but after being criticized for what-the-fuck-ever for as long as she has (pretty much her entire career?), she's just completely over giving any fucks about it?

[reidster]

Apr 23, 2014 16:58:57 GMT -5 dbhmr said:

Apr 23, 2014 16:57:31 GMT -5 reidster said:

essentializing

I do believe "appropriation" has met its match.

Quite literally.

Most of the racism allegations stem from this idea that she is trying to represent Japanese culture in this video. The problem, however, is that it is those who are doing the criticizing that are making the claim that the video is Avril's representation of Japanese culture. As such, it is them who are essentializing said cultural artifacts as a representation of Japan. Avril is simply havin' fun, and 'never growing up'. Criticize her for that, sure, but don't make this a racial equity and cultural appropriation issue.