Read: The aughts seem both cooler and sadder in retrospectĪgain and again, Lavigne plays pretend on Let Go, claiming to be wiser than her years while her voice and her words betray her naivete. She just wants someone to finally listen.
“Everything’s changin’ everywhere I go,” she sings softly, “all out of my control.” For all her protesting, she doesn’t really want to scream. “Sometimes, I want to scream out loud,” she wails in the bridge-but just as the guitars kick in, poised to allow her that catharsis, she reverts to a quieter sound. In it, Lavigne ruminates on growing up, equating her angst to being, well, a mobile “hanging from the ceiling … spinnin’ round with mixed feelings.” Such lyrics aren’t particularly sophisticated or polished to metaphorical perfection, but that’s the point. To discuss the album as simply “anti-Britney” is to miss the charm of its adolescent vulnerability, which peeked out from behind every defiant, snarky verse.
In Let Go, Lavigne was asserting herself as any teenager would, insisting on being left alone and being heard at the same time. Lavigne’s chirpy, youthful voice had a refreshingly familiar quality to it, as if she were a friend’s older sister who’d affixed a Keep Out sign onto her bedroom door but who couldn’t help belting out her thoughts from the other side anyway. If anything, its sassy lead singles, “Complicated” and “Sk8er Boi,” obscured the album’s true power. Let Go wasn’t, to me, destroying an era of Top 40 music. When I first listened to the album, I was 11 years old-I know, I know-and contrary to music media’s predictions about the demise of bubblegum pop, I giddily added Avril to my rotation of Britney and Mandy and Beyoncé and Christina. She was a mess of contradictions served in a pint-size package-in other words, a teenager. Onstage, she often stuffed her hands into her pockets and kept her face half-hidden behind her flat-ironed hair, but in music videos, she boldly wreaked havoc in public spaces, including a mall and a downtown-L.A. She sounded nothing like the R&B artists topping the charts at the time, but “Complicated” somehow sliced upward through the Billboard Hot 100, sandwiching itself comfortably between a pair of Nelly hits. Reid, Lavigne was perhaps by design hard to define. Whatcha yellin’ for? A 17-year-old from a small town in Canada who’d been plucked out of obscurity by the mega-producer L. Maybe everyone should have taken the advice Lavigne doled out with indelible spunk in the opening lines of “Complicated”: Chill out. Rolling Stone, in a lengthy profile after Lavigne’s debut album, Let Go, became a blockbuster hit, called her “an icon … who wears baggy pants, plastic bracelets and a scowl-not the skimpy threads and Ultra brite smiles of Britney and Mandy and Beyoncé and pre-‘Dirrty’ Christina.” Avril Lavigne seemed to baffle music writers in 2002 when she released her first single, the infectious mid-tempo banger “Complicated.” Rolling Stone dubbed her a “tiny terror” with a “nouveau-punk” sound who could be, of all things, “a fine country singer in the making.” Entertainment Weekly breathlessly wondered whether she was “the teen Bob Dylan.” Eventually, critics settled on comparing her to every other major female artist at the time, calling her “ the anti-Britney” over and over, and framing her as the singer who’d burst the artifice of bubblegum pop simply by not being overtly bubblegum-pop-y.
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