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Live Review
by Trueman Kapute
27-3-2003
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| Avril Lavigne: saviour of female rock? |
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Live: Avril Lavigne
Brixton Academy, London
Thursday, March 27, 2003
Avril Lavigne – Pop & Drugs & virginal Roll
Reflections during a gig: here are ten names to figure out what they have in common: Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Avril Lavigne, Kelly Osbourne, Tatu, Pink, W (The Kills), Missy Elliott, Meg (The White Stripes), Ms Dynamite... Christina Aguilera? Of course they all are women (apart Tatu, indubitably?); sure, some are babes, they all sing (to a certain degree), some are musicians (allegedly), they are role models (perhaps)… Well, this is a list the 50-year-wise musical organ NME (New Musical Express to anti-acronymists) published under the banner of Ten Women Who Rule Rock.
It depends what you define as rock but it is neither what Tatu nor Missy do; then, THESE ladies in particular? Perhaps the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O but she is simply a cross between Siouxsie Sioux and Courtney Love although she’d like us to visualise her as Debbie Harry sucking on a stick of dynamite. How about Shirley Temple licking a sharpened banana? Kelly Osbourne wouldn’t have had a second look from the record industry if she weren’t Ozzy’s kid, Avril Lavigne is one-girl-band for rocking tweenagers, Meg and W, all respect ladies but you are only part of a picture. Ms Dynamite – there is talent but its range and durability?
Pink we dig but she alters the world as much as Christina Aguilera – whom, we admit, we substituted for Peaches, the same waste of time but different wrapping – but Tatu… We’d like to appeal to the editor to mince his thoughts with more care, we almost sustained an injury on ‘Crunchy Nut’! All these girls deny it but aren’t they product – bar Missy, The Stripes and The Kills – of manufactured-ness?
The value of hype is really formidable: when you look at someone like Lavigne, just completing three sold-out shows at Brixton Academy, London, after having sold 1 million (in the UK) of her 11.5 million copies shifted worldwide and nominated for 5 Grammys and 2 Brits, you have to wonder – why, oh why? Because it is zilch more that ‘rock’’s equivalent to the paedophile-pop; it is Qulture – yeah, like Q in number-plates, namely – no-idea how this qrap got here. Another unknown is why people don’t find it sweet ignoring it by consuming kuality?
Rather than a spiteful youngster like Lavigne who is marketed as an anti-Britney; unfortunately she shares more with Ms Spears than anyone protecting (serving on) her would ever care to admit: both ‘write’ own material, rely on their youth to hormone-appeal and appear to wear minimum or dressdown with the same zip-fastener effect; music is usually about average, inoffensive with a calculated/healthy dose of teen angst about love, relationships, not fitting in and not wanting to be moulded. (Tough qrap because biology takes care of it and maternal instinct sort out all the rebellious baloney.)
Lavigne’s singing about wanting to be “anything but ordinary, please” and friends who are never what they seem are the depths of the emotional terrain her ‘songwriting’ ploughs. Of course we all are ‘infantile’ and whether you take this kinda music as a bitter reminder (how trivialities appeared to be the most important issues) or embrace it as if it were a gospel, is up to you.
We view it as candy Pop & Drugs & Virginal Roll; drugs, what drugs? Our addiction to suchlike nubiles!
Set list::
Sk8ter Boi
Nobody’s Fool
Mobile
Anything But Ordinary
Losing Grip
Too Much To Ask
I Don’t Give
Basket Case (Green Day cover)
My World
I’m With You
Complicated
Unwanted
Tomorrow
Thing I’ll Never Say
Trueman Kapute
27-3-2003
Avril Lavigne’s album ‘Let Go’ is available now on BMG
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