Avril Lavigne’s Suburbaphobia

The mother fucking princess circles back

This piece was written in 2022, around the 20 year anniversary of Avril Lavigne’s debut record, Let Go. I was going to repurpose this into a video script, or try to publish it somewhere, but I never got around to it. Presented here, for your perusal.

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In the slow apocalypse there is no beginning, middle or end, just the dilatory premonition of nothingness. Hard to say when, but the shop is closing. Don’t feel down, don’t get scared. It won’t make a difference. Plot your own inflection points, announce your omens, name that startling calamity. Do whatever you need to make meaning and get by. 

Or—if you find yourself paralysed by the prospect of sudden nothingness—you can do nothing at all. 

In the summer of 2002, the slow apocalypse is more listless than ever. The vibes are deteriorating. There’s war in the Middle East and trouble at home. Children are snatched from their beds, the Godless march on Washington, the jeans are low-rise, and Britney and Justin are so over. There is chaos spilling from all corners of the milk carton. And who is the harbinger of fraying times? The most powerless and energetically sensitive among us all, of course: the teenagers, our heavenly bored. 

In 2002, Avril Lavigne became their emissary, the patron saint of feeling lost for no discernible reason. Her first record, Let Go—a languid elegy to suburban malaise—turns 20 this year. “In this head my thoughts are deep/ Sometimes I can’t even speak/ Would someone be and not pretend?” She bleats on My World, a deep cut from Let Go, in which she spends the whole day braiding her hair; wondering where and to whom she belongs while sneaking out late on her tiptoes across the neighbor’s grass that she cut for a couple of bucks.   

There are, of course, more eloquent chroniclers of municipal unease, but Lavigne’s perspective is unique in that it shoots from the hip. Let Go is the brain dump of an unlikeable brat straight from the heart of the concrete doldrums. She is no wordsmith, but her performance was consistently true—to herself and the unexamined languishing of her time.  

Bimbofication and head-empty culture is Gen Z's own energetic shrug to the prospect of sudden nothingness. Their disaffection is familiar to the millennials, who also inherited a flaming garbage world of geopolitical chaos and diminishing economic returns. Let Go is due a closer look, now, as Lavigne resonates with this new generation of our heavenly bored.

Consider the medium for her second act: on TikTok, Lavigne’s legacy is experienced the way God intended, with equal focus on the music and the iconography, which was always central to her artistry. Gen Z often delivers their shrugs to sudden nothingness in Lavigne-esque garb—donning cargo pants, neck ties, vintage tees etc. 

Her entrance in the summer of 2002 was notable not just for her style—she, too, wore low-rise jeans, albeit with, like, a studded belt—but for her flatness, and her lack of zeal. By then, the major label assembly line was on full throttle. The American imagination was decidedly resilient, happy again, or so the pop stars kept telling us. So long Alanis! Bon voyage, Jewel! Sexy, sunny fembots were delivered to varying levels of success, plotted along the maiden to Magdalene pipeline. 

Lavigne was different. She was disinterested in pop-stardom. Unlike her contemporaries, she seldom smiled. She was not grateful for her breakout song, Complicated, or for her fans, who liked her so much they copied her style and bought her gifts. Boys were annoying, gross, and boring. They should not be pandered to. Behind the scenes, this sense of self yielded her an unusual agency for a newly signed artist. There were no consultants brought in to fix her hair, or change her wardrobe. “I got to keep wearing baggy clothes and dressing like a dude,” she recalled years later, incredulous. 

But her agency was sidelined when Let Go debuted as a blockbuster. Some wrote off the project as the dead eyed, focus grouped brainchild of male record label execs. “Lavigne has a good shtick and a qualified staff of hitmakers,” went the Rolling Stone review from 2002. It was a pernicious misconstrual. Let Go is the truest portrait of adolescent despair, in that it is a compromised project; partly a concession to the adults with keys to the castle, and also a psychic release that is capricious and lackadaisical enough to be (as Hannah Horvath put it) a voice of a generation. 

Lavigne rose like cream from Napanee, Ontario (pop. 5,000)—and settled in the West Village, as the honored guest of Peter Zizzo, a producer who saw a tape of her belting on stage with Shania Twain. “She sang without affectation,” Zizzo recalls 16-year-old Lavigne as the blankest canvas. What, exactly, could be made of this big voiced, pint sized teen? Initially, there wasn’t much room for interpretation. Zizzo pitched Lavigne to LA Reid, music mogul and then CEO of Arista Records, who signed her with a persona in mind. She was billed as the Sheryl Crow and Fiona Apple hybrid. 

Reid offered her an eye-popping two album, million dollar deal on this premise. 

Lavigne said in multiple interviews while promoting Let Go, that she was not nervous to meet label executives. She had the premonition of dazzling success as a child. Once she was signed, it was just a matter of figuring out what, exactly, she would be famous for. What became clear was that Zizzo’s dream of a sullen fiddle did not resonate with her. Neither assigned forebear was influential, Crowe was too twee, and Apple was too morose. Lavigne’s taste was younger, and a bit more…accessible. She liked Matchbox Twenty, Blink 182, Green Day, Hole, and the Goo Goo Dolls.  

Nevertheless, she gave the Crow and Apple thing a try. In 2000, she churned out platitudinal ballads. Take Breakaway, for example. Later bestowed on Kelly Clarkson, Lavigne’s version is canyon-like—vast and pretty, but desolate. “I’ll spread my wings and I’ll learn how to fly / I’ll do what it takes ‘til I touch the sky” she croons from a liminal space. She sounds bored of, not invigorated by, the prospect of breaking free. Perhaps this was because at the time, she was on the precipice of extraordinary; not a civilian, not yet a pop star.  

There was a breakthrough in 2001, when Lavigne moved to California from New York. There, Let Go floated up, dreamily, to the surface. Paired with Cliff Magness, she thawed in the Los Angeles heat. He wanted Lavigne to follow her punk-ish instincts. “My belief and method when writing for others is that the material belongs to them.” He said of their work together, noting that she’d been pigeonholed by the label and prior co-writers before their session.  

Magness’s collaborative spirit helped triangulate her vision. Two unnerving songs emerged from their work: Losing Grip and Unwanted. The latter is her roughest construction to date, a nu-metal pop suffused with a celtic tin-whistle that sails on waves of distorted guitars. 

She finally found her sound. But the label wasn’t convinced. “Arista was drop-dead shit afraid that I would come out with a whole album like Unwanted and Losing Grip,” she told Rolling Stone. “I swear they wanted to drop me.” And so, a compromise. Reid secured the promising (and pop-oriented) production trio, The Matrix, to rein in his wayward Canadian. Lauren Christy, Scott Spock, and Graham Edwards were puzzled by how different Lavigne was from the apathetic warbler on her early session tapes. “Avril was an intriguing sort of girl,” Christy recalls of their introduction. Lavigne showed up bare faced, in a tank top carrying her guitar, sporting melted toothbrushes on her wrists. “She certainly wasn’t a pop princess.” 

Lavigne played them Unwanted and Losing Grip and then requested more of the same. Their first session culminated in two songs, one of which was Complicated—an irresistible, bluesy earworm and fatefully, her pot of gold. As curators, The Matrix tamed the unwieldy angst put forth on Unwanted and transmuted it into something palatable (and adult) enough to go the distance. On Complicated, Lavigne’s frustration is palpable, her cadence is staccato, and the tone is pugnacious. 

In total, Lavigne and The Matrix wrote 10 songs for Let Go, half of which made it to the final track list—three are her crown jewels, Complicated, “Sk8er Boi,” and “I’m With You.” The final track-list is uneven but spirited. She raps, screams, croons, and yearns. It’s organized chaos. Though it’s clear from the singles that boys suck and we should throw rocks at them, elsewhere, Lavigne wades further into the fear and loathing of suburban adolescence. 

On Mobile, a deep-cut and album highlight, co-written with Magness about leaving Canada for New York City,  she bellows: “Everything’s changing / When I turn around / All out of my control / I’m a mobile.” 

In a scrapped music video for the song, Lavigne is bounding towards the camera, burning rubber on a highway in the middle of nowhere. There’s a fender hanging off her shoulder, and an amplifier by her side. “Sometimes, I wanna scream out loud” she howls with tears streaming down her face that do not disrupt her signature, kohl- lined eyes. On Anything But Ordinary, she agonizes over how to make a mark on the world: “Is it enough to die? / Somebody save my life / I’d rather be anything but ordinary, please.” 

It is a distinctly teenage experience to crave adventure so badly, to fall on your sword for it in your head over and over, then cry hot tears of apprehension when it takes you by surprise. At 17, Lavigne was an unaccompanied minor on a rocket ship to fame. Her burgeoning success added a unique current to the general angst on Let Go, and the listener intuits this cosmic alienation throughout. She basks in it on I’m With You,  her power-ballad: “Take me by the hand, take me somewhere new / I don’t know who you are but I’m with you.” 

When it comes to love, her new feelings are so intense that she clams up entirely. On Things I’ll Never Say, another twangy highlight, she struggles to drop the act and surrender to love: “What’s wrong with my tongue? / These words keep slipping away / I stutter and stumble / Like I’ve got nothing to say.”

If the feral, hormonal agony of growing pains were a song, this would be it. In the first verse she’s blushing, tugging at her hair, yanking on her clothes—so uncomfortable in herself and scared of her own heart that she is frenetic, practically clawing her skin off and combusting rather than communicating what’s really going on in her mind to the object of her affection. 

And what’s going on in there? She tells us in the chorus: “ I wanna see you go down on one knee / Marry me today / Yes I’m wishing my life away / With these things I’ll never say.” 

Per usual, the angst stems from a hunger for intimacy—which, when experienced for the first time, is so immersive that it seems insurmountable, rendering the novice feeler myopic and brooding. Teenagers are not known to express this experience eloquently. That’s where this record lives, in a deeply felt but poorly explained anguish. Lavigne communicates this pain unevenly throughout the record, which is true to the volatility of the experience itself.

When compared to coming of age outings by more virtuosic young talents (for example, Tidal or more recently, Pure Heroine), Let Go can feel juvenile, and perhaps even a little bit cringe. And yes, it’s both of those things. Which is exactly why it's a righteous portrait of adolescence, not merely a calculated schtick crafted by old men in a conference room. With a suburban childhood barely in the rearview, and her imminent stardom on the near distant horizon, Lavigne’s startling calamity is circumspect, knowing, brash, and confounding. 

Which is also how it feels to rot in the urban sprawl. Over before you’ve begun, brimming with a superficial understanding that there’s more out there, just slightly out of your reach. The world is disintegrating and that is bad—catastrophic even—but there’s no point in kicking up a fuss, or yelling about what’s out of your control. It’s easier to just, like, chill out. 

The business of growing up has all been done before.