Complicated

“Why do you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you're acting like you're somebody else
Gets me frustrated
Life's like this
You, you fall and you crawl and you break
And you take what you get and you turn it into honesty
You promised me I'm never gonna find you fake it”

Complicated – Avril Lavigne

This week is an insight into my teenage music tastes. I’ll start by admitting that I’m a bit of a hoarder of anything involving emotion. I have a spike key hanging around my room because it reminds me of my athletics days and somewhere in my childhood room is a box of cards from nearly every birthday and Christmas I have lived through because they still mean a little something to me. If it’s sentimental then I have a hard time throwing things in the trash.

I also have difficulty deleting music that played a big part when I was growing up. For example, I still have every Good Charlotte album on my iPod because they were my favourite band growing up and I could never let them go. I also have a few (twenty) Avril Lavigne songs on my iPod because that girl was the shizz when I was a teenager. She understood me and she understood teenage angst. I was never a big fan of female artists because I wanted to rock out with the boy bands (like Simple Plan and Elemeno P) but I had a special place for Avril Lavigne. Maybe it was because her first hit Complicated and second hit Sk8er Boi talked about hating on fake girls and during my teenage years I could not stand those types of people. I loved her and I wanted to be her.

Over the years I became less attached to Avril Lavigne as I grew up and, well, her music became rather shit. Her tracks Girlfriend and Here’s to Never Growing Up became guilty pleasures for me because I was still hanging on to her that little bit. That is, until I heard her newest song Hello Kitty. I was going to make it the title song of this blog and analyse it a bit but I couldn’t lower the standards of my blog for that song, and this blog doesn’t have very high standards. I can’t even bring myself to post a link to the song because it is probably the worst song I’ve heard, ever. It’s worse than Call Me Maybe. It’s even worse than Friday. It’s an insult to Hello Kitty. And I can’t believe I’m about to write this but Chad Kroeger wrote the song and it’s an insult to Nickelback.

So instead I give a last tribute to the artist Avril Lavigne was when I was growing up with. I’ll keep her early songs on my iPod partly as a reminder of my life ten years ago and partly because the teenager in me still loves the tracks. But as for Avril Lavigne I’ll no longer care for her as an artist nor will I follow any of her new music. I suppose most artists reach a time when their music takes a turn for the worse and their fan base slowly falls away and I expect it will happen to many more of the bands and singers I loved when growing up. But for now I’m giving Avril Lavigne one last bit of attention.