Avril Lavigne

Let Go

Life's Like This

Review Score:

(6/10)
I gotta admit that I chuckled a bit the first time I heard "Complicated" on the radio and heard the (then) seventeen year old Avril Lavigne utter the line, "Life's like this, you fall and you crawl..." There's something endearingly audacious about such a observation coming from someone that young. OK, that's a little patronizing, I suppose. Actually though, when you think about it, what can be more typical or suitable teen lyric? Adolescence is all about trying to figure out just what exactly life IS like. And every reasonably introspective teen worth his or her salt has these little epiphanies from time to time, and sometimes they're actually right.

Because in fact, you DO "crawl and...fall, and take what you get." But you also do more, and I'm willing to bet that Avril and her legions of fans will come to many, many more conclusions about life and love (and maybe even skating) before their days are over. Avril may even come to realize that the guy she writes about in "Complicated" isn't all that complicated after all--at least not in his seemingly inconsistent behavior when he's around friends. Yeah, he acts like a jerk around his friends. It's called being a typical adolescent boy.

So Avril Lavigne, who sincerely wants to be "anything but ordinary," is voicing the concerns and heartaches of fairly ordinary teens everywhere. And that's not a bad thing at all. She's clearly operating in a pop tradition that stretches back to at least the 50s and 60s. Her simultaneously cool and petulant image (and material) hearkens back to Lesley Gore in the mid-60s. A little bratty and self-obsessed, but also a little perceptive and self-possessed.

More real than Britney? A poser singing about posers? I'm glad I'm at a point in life when such questions are pretty much irrelevant. But I think that Avril Lavigne (or was it the Matrix?) captures what it's like to be a teenager in the early years of the 21st century. What adolescent...heck, what HUMAN BEING, can't identify with a line like, "Sometimes I get so weird, I even freak myself out..."

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