For the past year or so I’ve been conducting a sort of cultural investigation into the music I listened to during the 2000s, when I was between the ages of 4 and 14. Specifically I’ve been digging into the common lyrical themes of songs by groups like Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, Breaking Benjamin, Green Day, and so on. I was a baby at the time; basically I’m looking for more perspective on this post-grunge moment when everyone was singing in a mainstream context about their inescapable (yet notably, commodifiably, vague) inner pain.
She wants to go home
But nobody’s home
That’s where she lies
Broken inside
With no place to go
No place to go
To dry her eyes
Broken inside
When I was 7 or 8 I found the first album by Avril Lavigne, Let Go. I listened to it frequently back then, although being a seven- or eight-year-old paid attention to only like 60% of the lyrics, and wasn’t in much of a position to relate to them anyway. In any case I became very familiar with the album (except tracks 6, 7, 12, and 13) during an important period of my growing up.
I listened to it a few times in the car last year and had a surprisingly worthwhile experience with it. Instant transportation back to the feeling of being in middle school (despite the fact I had largely stopped listening by then). Is there a German loanword for a time when you and your preteen friends get a sense of pleasure out of talking about (or listening to others talk about) how emotionally difficult your boring suburban midwestern lives are? Of course there’s a whole musical genre dedicated to exploring this feeling, but we didn’t listen to that stuff, we were just kids who only knew how to scratch the surface of popular culture, music, the Internet, and so on. I wouldn’t have known what Rainer Maria was talking about. The music coming from Lavigne, Linkin Park etc. was corny and unpoetic and consequently pretty toothless, but it’s what I and my social circle knew. It was useful, if limited, as an emotional outlet.
Listening to it recently—not only with my own sense of hindsight, but after teaching at a K-8 school for two years, interacting with preteens every day—I feel that at least this first of Lavigne’s albums captures something essential about being a young teenager. And go figure, she was a teen when she made it! Of course it wasn’t just her who made it, she had producers and mentors and publicity managers who defined the sound of “Avril Lavigne.” In most ways the music is polished/sanded down far beyond what a lone teenager would be capable of. But the lyrics belie the age of their writer: they’re simple, clumsy, hasty. This singer is impatient and distressed as often as she’s amused by the ways those close to her break promises or tell her who and how she’s supposed to be. People are going to disappoint you, she announces—something that’s obvious to anyone even slightly older. During almost every 4th, 5th, and 6th grade recess at my school job there was always one or another kid who’d had their feelings hurt, not by bullies, but by their friends; kids discovering how to be friends with more than just their “best friend,” and what it means to leave alone and be left alone. There’s a bit of an age gap between them and Avril Lavigne of course, but there’s common ground there too. Billie Eilish is who those kids were obsessed with but her music is too well produced, too well calculated to get at the awkward and paradoxically more poignant material on this Avril album. Eilish (and Olivia Rodrigo, for that matter) comes from show business, Lavigne didn’t; 20 years of market research has given modern angsty pop singers an advantage in optics, too.
Most of the songs on here are about Avril’s relationships with other people in a romantic context, but the ones about her more individual experience are what I found most interesting.
(emphasis mine)
“Mobile”
Went back home again
This sucks gotta pack up and leave again
Say goodbye to all my friends
Can’t say when I’ll be there again
It’s time now to turn around
Turn my back on
Everything
(Turn my back on)
Everything
Everything’s changing
When I turn around
All out of my control
I’m a mobile
“Anything But Ordinary”
Sometimes I get so weird
I even freak myself out
I laugh myself to sleep
It’s my lullaby
Sometimes I drive so fast
Just to feel the danger
I want to scream
It makes me feel alive
“My World”
Can’t help it if I space in a daze
My eyes tune out the other way
I may switch off and go in a daydream
In this head my thoughts are deep
Sometimes I can’t even speak
Would someone be and not pretend I’m off again in my world
This transition from the egocentrism of childhood to awareness of a wider world and its emotional highs and lows is I guess what I find most interesting. For me, the experience of adolescence was defined by an intensity of inner feeling and surrounding interpersonal drama juxtaposed with a complete inability to articulate and understand those feelings, which comes through in this album’s lyrics. You can likely get the same thing reading into any album written in this scene, for this audience, under these circumstances, but this is the one I listened to.
