In Continuum.

Pretense

When the then-seventeen year old Avril Ramona Lavigne first appeared in the music scene, everybody dismissed her as yet another young pop star wannabe who just wanted to make it big somehow. With her petite figure, it was hard to imagine her getting anywhere further than the front doors of her house. The truth is that Avril had a lot of angst in her, the kind of angst you find in average high school teenagers, after being detained in too many detention classes and grounded on too many occasions. Sick of their school and sick of their parents, they decide to write seemingly angry songs to release their angers. Thousands and millions of teenagers all around the world do that from time to time, letting out their frustrations on the back of their school notes, or on the table with their permanent markers.

Most of these music remain in the pages of their diaries, and never making it anywhere beyond the borders of the papers. However, there are cases whereby some deaf music producer out there would recognize one of them as being 'talented' and 'marketable', and then try to make something out of that writer - even if he or she cannot utter a single right note. After all, with the aid of modern technology like voice synthesizers, it becomes possible to make even the most musically declined people in the world, as good a singer as - say, Diana Ross. Somewhere in Ontario Canada, some idiot dug out the seventeen year old Avril Lavigne and decided to make her a star - something he should have done with the consideration of the mental welfare of the general public.

In 2002, Avril Lavigne exploded onto the music scene with a bang, shattering all the cynicisms in the critics and captured the hearts of frustrated teenage girls and horny teenage boys. The image of her wrecking havoc in a local mall by crashing a car into a tower of cans became a symbol of 'cool', and anything against the convention was thus labeled as being 'right' as well. The cynics remained cynics as more and more teenage girls began to relate to the lyrics of this petite seventeen year old. After all, to have a person your age making it somewhere with the same kind of frustrations in life as you should be loved and respected, right?

No, of course not. If you pay close attention to her lyrics, it's not difficult to realize that she doesn't exactly have anything much to say, at least not anything worthy of our time anyway. Much of the issues have been talked about by every teenager in the neighborhood, and it's not like her lyrics were written in much ingenuity and wit. Most of the words were probably written for the sake of rhyming with the last word of the next line, and the whole song works on basic chord progression and the same kind of whiny vocals throughout. It becomes predictable, expectable, and ultimately - boring. However, it didn't stop her album from reaching the top of the Billboards in the States, earning the money and the love of all the teenage girls that paid for her records and concert tickets.

My sister was the victim of such bad music, as usual. My sister never truly grew out of listening to bad music, despite the ripened age of 24 this year. Avril Lavigne was and probably is, one of the few English artiste she ever listened to, and she is still very much a fan of her music. She was there in line when she came down to Singapore for a gig a few years ago, and actually queued up so long at HMV that she almost got into a fight with another eager fan. Anyway, the point is that the predictability of her bad music did not prevent people from liking her at all.

Being a seventeen year old, it was hard for her to be any more mature than a seventeen year old, especially when you are singing about things that have been repeated a dozen times over. To be a seventeen year old is fine, but trying not to be one is just pushing the envelope. It becomes a pretense, an act of ostentation. By pretending that you are a 'rock chick', doesn't make you one at all. By the way, smoking and pointing the middle finger at the camera sure as hell doesn't label you as being a rock star. After all, when was the last time you saw Chris Martin doing the same thing? Exactly.

When you are seventeen years old, you do not go out there and grab songs that you 'love' and then cover them in your most horrendous way. I remember the first time I heard her cover of Goo Goo Dolls' 'Iris', and I almost died halfway through the song. Or, perhaps I died three times over and forgot about it altogether. She was on stage with Johnny Rzeznik, and I swear Johnny must have had the urge to smash his sunburst guitar on her blond head, which was probably the most efficient way to stop her from ruining his masterpiece. Standing next to Johnny Rzeznik, Avril became a dwarf or a gnome of some kind, and one with a bad singing one at that. And the situation only got worse when she went on to cover Coldplay's The Scientist a few days ago at a British radio station. By calling it 'her favorite song' she went on to rape every note and word of the song, and turned it into yet another teenage angst-filled song that was originally meant to be beautiful.

Everybody grows up, and everybody leaves the stage of angst behind sooner or later. What happens when you have to move on in life and away from the part of your personality that made you famous? You run out of ideas, and you sit in a random hotel room, fearing that whatever you write from now onwards is not going to be well-received by fans all around the world, the ones who still want t hear more teenage angst-filled songs from you, the ones who are still dissatisfied with their school, their parents, their love life and the world. You come to the dead end, a sort of writer's block that comes in the form of a giant wall, a wall that rises up into the clouds and forcing you to look back for comfort.

Just then, inspiration strikes in the most unexpected way, and the cornered Avril Lavigne had an idea to redeem herself, to find her grounds all over again. She looked to old bands to aid her in the new album. She looked to the Rubinoos for her first hit single of the new album, and the Peaches for another song off her album. It is OK to be inspired and influenced by bands of the past, everybody does that in the music industry. However, when you are lifting directly off their songs, it is not a matter of influence anymore, but plagiarism. You don't write a song with the chorus going "Hey Hey, You you, I wanna be your girlfriend" when the Rubinoos had a song with the chorus going "Hey hey, you you, I wanna be your boyfriend". That's just being stupid, and it makes you even more stupid if you are going to appear in magazines saying," Well, I have never heard of the Rubinoos." It is as if we can brush away our murder charges by saying that we have never heard of the victims before. Besides, perhaps you have never heard of the Rubinoos. How about the Peaches? Now, explain.

It is bad enough that you are making bad music, but it is worse to cover and ruin songs by other artistes. It is made even worse by copying and lifting whole lines from other bands like that. And of course, there are still blind and deaf teenage fans out there, calling Avril Lavigne "The Best Singer Ever" when they should open up their eyes and ears and stop being so ignorant about things. I have nothing against Avril Lavigne, but covering The Scientist and then ruining it was just pushing it for me.

So the next time you listen to an Avril Lavigne song, remember that this is the music done by perhaps the most unoriginal artiste out there today. Every word and line may have been stolen from a song somewhere else, who knows? It is so easy to deny thins these days, so easy to play innocent. It is the false pretense that people put forth to others these days that make their cases so reliable, so credible. However, there are listeners with sharp eyes and sharper ears. We know what is good, what is bad, and what is the ugly. And putting Avril with the likes of the ugly, is an act of insulting the ugly, really.