What Do You Identify Avril As?

I think because we love her we sometimes tend to idolize her. Ofc she won't work on the entire song herself, she's a songwriter and doesn't play every instrument. Also I don't understand why some people (not you) complain when singers co-write. If it results in a better song and they get credit for it then it's a win win. People don't have to do everything on their own.

As for Avril's personality, I've been a bit disappointed in some of the stories and patterns I.e. Chad etc but 1) I don't know her and 2) the media spins a lot of crap. She was always a bit rebelious and didn't take too much stock to the rules. But at the end of the day, she seems a nice person and sticks up for those who are different from the norm, does charity work etc. I think a lot of the things we (or certainly I) question about her come from the fact that she doesn't speak out against things that highlight her in a bad way.

She's also a brand and a product for her record label to sell. We know she's talented, and I agree with you after her being sold as someone who is in control and writes all her own songs and then it came out she probably wasn't as involved as she said she was and basically becoming what she said she was against, it seems like maybe she's not all she's made out to be. But she was a 17 year old girl trying to gain success and her record label sold her well, as well as being an opinionated, loud mouthed teenager.

She's proven her talent and worth, I just hope she properly showcases it again.

I've never really questioned her songwriting skills, apart a little for LG... but she's proven us she can write, GL is a good example. Personally I'm fine both cases, either she writes on her own or co-writes, as long as the song is good

I get your point tho, and I started questioning her a little during AL era, I know it was a mess, but even her attitude towards the entire era, you could see the lack of excitement and passion, as if she was doing smth just because she was told to, all the Chavril thing, I could barely recognize her... Idk maybe I got the wrong feeling tho, beside Idk her.

In her interview about her Lyme disease, she said she got another shot at life, hopefully she'll show us her passion back

I'm not entirely sure what the question is but this is what I think:

We know Avril used to write her own songs even before she got a record deal. But because she was young and inexperienced, the label wasn't going to let her write her debut album alone. Most new artists and even some established artists don't. Taylor Swift is probably one of the few mainstream artists who writes most of her own stuff completely alone, maybe Adele or Ed Sheeran too, but I think even they co-write a lot of it. And Taylor has co-written tons of her stuff too. Even Dalton, he has written the large majority of his songs in the past completely by himself and he is a damn talented writer, yet on his debut album a lot of the songs are co-written because his management or somebody wanted him to write with other people. So I think it is very rare for a lot of artists, especially mainstream or pop acts, to write their own stuff completely, especially when they are first starting out.

After co-writing three albums, she did try writing on her own and she's shown she can do that. Even on UMS she wrote the lyrics to 4 songs alone.

As I said, a lot of artists don't necessarily write their own songs alone, some don't even write them at all. I don't think it's completely necessary for her or any other artist to write their own material totally by themselves. I think Avril is a decent writer on her own but she is not the best with lyrics so I think she benefits from having co-writers, as long as it is something they all agree they want to write (bad examples are what happened with AL).

I'd say during LG she exaggerated how much she really contributed to the writing. It was revealed she never wrote Breakaway at all, that she only received a credit for "inspiring" the song, but she didn't contribute to any of the lyrics or melody. Not saying this happened with the other songs on LG, I'm sure she contributed more on those songs, but I think it is probably somewhere in the middle of what Avril said she did and how much the Matrix said she did (or didn't do). I can believe she contributed ideas and the Matrix helped her shape them a little better and polish them to sound more professional.

Her image during LG was a pop artist who wrote her own songs, unlike many at that time. So it makes sense why she exaggerated how much she probably contributed, the label may have also encouraged her to do so. Since then she has proven she can write and she contributed more to the songs on her later albums, even the co-written ones, so I don't think it is a big deal what she said back then when she was first starting out. If she was still doing this 10 years into her career, then it would be a problem.

I think her entire skater girl image in the LG days was exaggerated. It was her true image and true personality, she was a lot like that before becoming famous, but I think once it became popular and people began copying it, the label wanted to push it to the extreme. A lot of times Avril seemed ruder or more boyish than she originally was, it seemed forced sometimes. We will never know what was really her and what was forced, there are other factors involved like just getting older and naturally changing, or maybe fame had made her become more closed off than before. We'll never really know. But if you look at old videos of her before fame and when she was just starting to make Let Go, there is a difference in her general attitude, she seemed a lot friendlier and happier then, she was not very shy in interviews at all.

People say the further she got in her career and the older she got, the more fake and "sold out" she got, or that she became what she was always against. I'm not sure I really agree, if anything, it may be the opposite. When she was young she was figuring out who she was, being thrust into fame at an early age, the label telling her what they wanted her to be. It's totally natural to change as you get older and maybe like certain things you didn't before. I think the Avril from TBDT era onwards is the "real" her. The teenage Avril from LG and UMS was dark and angry, figuring herself out. Not to say that that wasn't who she really was back then, but it is not who she is now.

I sometimes think Avril was afraid to show the real her because she had built up a certain image. In an old documentary from Let Go you can see a Hello Kitty phone in her bedroom back home. Everybody complains about her obsession with Hello Kitty as though this is a new thing, but I think she has probably always liked it and either her obsession grew when she got older, or she just felt more free to express it the older she became. In some interviews she was shy about talking about certain things she liked, like shopping for underwear or she was seen picking out clothes that she wouldn't wear before. People who knew her before she was famous said she would babysit their kids and paint their nails and shit like that. She talked about missing sleepovers with her girlfriends. She was always painted as "one of the boys", playing hockey and never liking to dress up. That may have all been true and a part of who she was then, but that's not all there was to her, it wasn't the "only" side of her. I think she was encouraged or felt pressure to hide her feminine side in order to stand out amongst the Britneys. By TBDT era she felt more free to express that side of herself. It seemed like a sudden 180 that shocked everyone, when in reality I think it was always there but she never felt comfortable expressing it.

Avril is an enigma, IMO. She was always commercial enough to appeal to the mainstream market but also just different enough that she was not a corporate product. She was always somewhere in the middle I think. I think it would be naive to believe she was exactly what she went around saying she was or what the label marketed her to be. She even said it herself how dumb it was that she was being considered some rebellious punk for singing a song called Complicated or Sk8er Boi. She wasn't that. But she also wasn't a pop tart lip syncing to overproduced bubblegum pop songs written for her by a corporate machine and dancing half naked onstage. She was a kid with a little bit of edge and moxy, who went against the grain a bit, and was different enough to be a voice and role model for teens who also felt like outcasts. She was that kid who would run around the mall, but not get into any serious trouble. She was that singer who spoke real and tough words in her songs but it was still kid friendly. Because she always toed the line, I think that's what made her successful. She was never too much of one thing or too much of another, always just somewhere in between, which made her universally appealing for everybody.

Basically what I think it comes down to is that she's a girl who likes to sing and write songs about her real life, and maybe has some help with forming those ideas. She has to be marketed and commercialized to a certain extent, the way any mainstream artist is. There's definitely been songs she's wanted to put on albums that the label rejected, such as the song for UMS about a serial killer. They likely refused it because it didn't suit her image then. It wouldn't be commercial enough or have enough mass appeal. Just like a similar conundrum with Losing Grip as a single, where it was too pop for rock radio to ever play it, while too rock for pop radio to want to play it. If she wanted to, she could leave pop behind and become an indie singer/songwriter type of artist. But if she wants to stay in pop, there is a strategy to it and that's essentially what Avril has been doing since 2002. If you want to be in pop, you have to play the game. Which means everything is always going to be more commercialized, more watered down, more restricted, more cooks in the kitchen, less creative control.

I don't know if any of that is relevant to the topic or what the OG question was, but I find this kind of stuff interesting to talk about anyway.

I never quite understood the contagious thing because surely she's around her bandmates and team all the time and if no one started to get sick either... but I suppose it's better to be safe than sorry