Explanatory

Avril Lavigne? Tomorrow?

You got that straight!

But why, I hear you ask.

After hearing her first two albums I created a whole theory of pop aesthetics which is, I guess, the whole movement of this blog. I'll put on here some of the stuff which I wrote then (once i've tweaked them here and there), and i'll also be putting up some stuff pondering the direction taken on her newest album, which I am yet to fully ... consider. In between these posts i'll put up more general pop cultural stuff, but all thematically linked to the main movement. And I'll follow what the actual living Avril Lavigne does in the future, how shit changes.

The naming

To call this by her name is not intended to in some way make a case for her as a poet, as a certain trend would seem to encourage. Far from it. The idea of placing a pop/rock artist into the category of the poet seems to be a way of deradicalising pop/rock music. By lazily reaching for the canon of poetry to contain pop music we are ignoring it. It is not a way of removing distinctions between high and low culture but an attempt to reinforce it by including things, swallowing things, smothering things that could be dangerous to the system that perpetuates the canon. The naming as poet distracts our attention away from what is said to how it is said.

Is this too idealistic? Am I suggesting a certain radicalness inherent to pop music? Yes and no. Yes, perhaps I am being too idealistic, clinging to a 60's dream that pop music can change anything. Although what is culture if it does not influence the society from which it comes? I am simply opposed to a notion of culture that would place wholly within the museum. But no, I do not believe that there is some radical presence within pop music. I believe that pop music is what it is, or more precisely, pop music must become what it could be. It is an attempt to (re)radicalise pop music, by thinking of it in different terms to the ones offered by the mainstream.

It is this attempt which we place under the name Avril Lavigne. On her first two albums there is a struggle with this notion. They both contain and question traditional notions of what pop music is. On the albums Avril is between the two versions, jumping neither one way or the other, but she is not just sat on the fence, she is questioning both sides, asking where she should fall (and possibly on her third album falling the wrong way).

And tomorrow?

A dream of something ... better...