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Such is the fate of so many Canadian stars who make it big - and in the case of Avril Lavigne, huge. As she eclipses Britney Spears as the role model for young girls across the land, the anti-Avril movement has reached a deafening roar to rival the rockin' guitars in Complicated.
Like buzzards to fresh carrion, critics are picking at every aspect of this 18-year-old superstar - her fame, her songs, her guitar playing, her hair, her clothes, her makeup, her mispronunciation of David "Bowie," her habit of wearing ironic T-shirts, her sneering on stage, the fact that some of her co-writers worked with Christina Aguilera - you name it. Even The Sun's Michael Coren weighed in with a Jan. 12 piece titled "Complicated? Avril is downright simplistic," in which, among other things, he criticized the singer's short painted fingernails. Must've been a slow day for chaos in the Middle East.
With Lavigne playing Skyreach Centre Thursday, we've heard all the opinions. Except for one - the target herself.
She claims ignorance, "What do you mean, backlash?! So now there's like this huge backlash thing going on? I don't really read things, but the dude I just talked to before you asked me the exact same question. OK, backlash is when people say bad things about you, right? So what are they saying?"
That you're manufactured, that you're claiming to be punk when you're not, it goes on and on.
"That's what happens when someone gets really big. Then everyone just tries to bring them down. Second of all, I never, ever claimed to be punk, thank you," she laughs. "The media labelled me as punk. That was because I was a little teenage girl who came out and wasn't the typical pop bubblegum little act. So everyone just like decided to label me punk because I was different and I had more of edge. OK, I'm not made up. I write my own songs. I've been doing music my whole life. I buy my own clothes. I say what I want. I make my own decisions. People don't tell me what to do. They don't tell me where to go. I do what I want to do. That's bull----!"
There you have it. She sounds like a perfectly normal teenager.
The attitude disappears instantly when she talks about her songs, which are all just her "venting." It's mainly about boys, as one can hear in Complicated, Anything but Ordinary, Too Much to Ask, Unwanted, Losing Grip, most of the songs on her debut album, Let Go, come to think of it. Some critics say her lyrics are juvenile, perhaps forgetting that she was an actual juvenile when she wrote them. Lavigne survived the bullies at high school in her home town of Napanee, Ont. She seems perfectly capable of handling a few jaded music critics. As for the gruelling schedule typical of any major recording star, she says she knew what she was getting into, but still finds it strange that her every move is scrutinized. She wore a Home Hardware T-shirt on Saturday Night Live and now everybody wants one.
"It's definitely weird," she says.
Lavigne is on the phone from a tour stop in Indianapolis. She had only 15 minutes to spare for this interview, though she says she spent four hours shopping earlier in the afternoon - "I need new clothes because I'm sick of all mine."
Again, perfectly typical.
What perhaps is not normal is that Lavigne knew she was going to be famous. From singing in church to doing school musicals to being discovered while singing country karaoke (no joke) to landing her record contract after singing three songs for Arista Records boss Antonio Reid, everything went exactly according to plan. Avril's plan.
"When I was little, people used to always say to me, 'You're going to be famous one day.'
"I don't know, I kind of always thought I would. Not in a cocky way or anything. Everyone knew me as the singer girl around town. People would say 'you're going to go somewhere with your music.' I believed in myself. I have like a huge dream. That's all I ever thought about and I think that I wanted it so much and that's why it happened."
I suppose I ought to come clean here. The critic-dissing-other-critics shtick can get obnoxious. The extent of the mean things I've written include saying her music is "cleverly written rock songs wrapped in bubblegum," and that she isn't the anti-Britney, but the alternative Britney.
That's actually an improvement, say some people.
As one father of a teenage daughter put it, "At least Avril wears clothes."