Chapter IV: Sk8er What?

Avril Lavigne is fucking hot. Note image on the left. Her eyes gaze out at you with such vulnerability that you wish you could just hold her and whisper everything will be okay, but at the same time her strong chin and highlights bespeak of inner strength and passion (I am small and the world is big/But I'm not afraid of anything - "How Does It Feel"); this interplay is what makes her so compelling to angsty teenagers. Of course, Avril Lavigne's image is every bit as artificial as that of, say, Britney Spears, and both are contrived for the sole purpose of selling records. That discussion, however, is beyond the scope of this article.

I am taking issue with just one song, the eponymous "Sk8er Boi." Catchy though it is, the lyrics of the song defeat the intended message of "be true to yourself". As you know, the song recounts how a skater boy is rejected by a "preppy" girl, and he later goes on to fame and fortune and isn't she oh-so-sorry.

My contention is, the girl shouldn't be sorry, because her situation, as described in the lyrics, isn't all that bad.
1. Five years from now, she sits at home/She's feeding the baby... So she has a home, which is promising, and she has a family, which is a very respectable.
2. She turns on TV, guess who she sees?/Skater boy's rocking up MTV... Not only does she have a home, she has a TV, and what's more, SHE GETS CABLE! I know people who live in single-family, detached housing (suburbia) in Orange County who don't have cable. And the very next lyric...
3. She calls up her friends... Aha! She also has friends and, incidentally, a telephone. What more could someone want from life than a family, a house, consumer electronics to put in the house, and friends?

At the very least, it's not fair to belittle someone who has this kind of stability in her life; and certainly not for a decision she made five years back to forgo a deadend relationship. This decision is supposedly an example of caving in to peer pressure and not pursuing your dreams.

Clearly, Avril (by which I mean her cadre of songwriters) was not thinking clearly. The lines of the song I referenced above would be much more powerful in painting a negative picture of what happens when you don't stand by your convictions if they were slightly adjusted, to say, the following:

One month from now, she sits on the street/She's feeding the rats, they think she's already dead/She closes her eyes, guess who she sees?/No one, because her eyes are fucking closed/She calls up her pimp, he tells her to shut the fuck up and get back to work.

You disagree? That's your prerogative. Certainly, a song is not required to be logical, or make any sense at all (i.e. anything by The Butthole Surfers), but this is something I've been thinking about today. Cheers.