Post by Underclass King on May 31, 2022 22:37:00 GMT
With the 20th anniversary of Avril's debut coming up, I found this 2003 MTV article about her impact/the spawn of many "Avril-likes" very interesting!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
-- by Corey Moss
Alexandra Slate is the victim of a new stereotype.
"There's no way I can ever wear a white tank top and cargo pants, which is too bad because I don't mind wearing that stuff," the 22-year-old singer grumbled.
Slate is part of a new crop of rocker chicks who, no matter how hard they fight it, are being called Avril Lavigne wannabes. And they're fighting it hard.
"Never, ever compare Katy Rose to fellow female singer/songwriters," the 16-year-old's bio strongly states. She has "more to do with the likes of early Liz Phair or PJ Harvey than her adolescent peers in the top 40."
Never mind that none of the Avril-likes' albums have even been released yet, accusers have already grasped onto their similarities to the real Lavigne. Slate, Skye Sweetnam and Fefe Dobson, for instance, call Toronto or nearby small towns home.
And all four, who are within three years of the 18-year-old Lavigne, proudly write or co-write their own edgy pop songs, which candidly document the coming of age of a generation that struggles to fit in Britney Spears' shadow.
The truth is, to these girls Avril is a double-edged sword. Without her, there would be less interest in singers who wear cargo pants and stay clear of Diane Warren ballads. "She's definitely paved the way," Dobson said.
Because of her, though, Slate, Rose, Sweetnam and Dobson are going to waste a lot of time defending themselves against the same copycat label that was placed on Lillix earlier this year. "People just want to compare you so they can measure your style against something else," explained Sweetnam, who looks like she could be Avril's sister.
What happens so often when an artist explodes in popularity the way Avril has is record labels unleash similar acts, hoping to capitalize on the fad. And while those artists face being called imitators, they're often successful. 'NSYNC, after all, were introduced on the heels of the Backstreet Boys' success. And Stone Temple Pilots rode the grunge bandwagon to solid numbers. Of course, then there's also C-Note and Sponge.
All this business hoopla is not to say labels create acts to fit trends. Oftentimes they have similar talents already signed, and those acts then become a bigger priority. Such was the case with Slate and Rose, who both had their debut albums finished before Lavigne's Let Go hit shelves.
"It sucks because hers came out first, but whatever," said Slate, whose Edge of the Girl was just pushed back again to early next year.
While the labels behind Slate, Rose, Sweetnam and Dobson will push the budding singers' albums to the same radio programmers and retailers who supported Lavigne, that's as far as the pushing goes.
"Capitol didn't try to make me into anything," said Sweetnam, whose Noise From the Basement is due January 27. "I came with these songs, and that's basically all the album is. That's the best possible scenario ever."
"V2 appreciates me as this quirky weird girl completely apart from the Avrils of the world," added Rose, who coincidentally has the same management as Lavigne. "I'm really lucky they didn't say, 'Why don't you have the Matrix produce your record?' 'Cause I would have never gone with that. They know I have my own ideas about things. They would never want for me to go and wear a tie and be a skater girl. It's not me, and I don't believe in changing for anyone else."
Slate and the others understand the comparisons, but all four claim to be very different from Avril. And really, they are.
"She does her thing, I do mine, they just both have guitars," said Dobson, whose self-titled debut, due in October, is easily the heaviest of the bunch. "I'm just more organic and I look completely different."
Fefe Dobson, 18, has dark skin that separates her from Lavigne, but her understated wardrobe (she wears a wife beater and chain belt in her press photo) has similarities she acknowledges.
"[Avril] didn't have to dress too sexy and she stuck to her own style, and that let the younger generation know you don't have to be like Britney and Christina," Dobson said. "You need that balance so other kids can relate. Not everyone dresses that way."
The differences between the two are more apparent in the music. While Avril channels her inner Sum 41, Dobson was raised on grunge.
"I was 14 when I really started to write, and that's when I listened to [Silverchair's] Neon Ballroom and I realized he wasn't afraid to write all his feelings on paper," Dobson said, referring to frontman Daniel Johns. "Then I got into Nirvana and that's where my sound took shape. Now I listen to Jeff Buckley and the Beatles, but then also Michael Jackson."
A few years into writing, Dobson joined forces with someone who could give her the guitar muscle she desired, producer Jay Levine, who helmed her album. She also inked a deal with Nelly Furtado's manager, Chris Smith, who arranged several showcases in her home city of Toronto, including one for Island Def Jam head Lyor Cohen.
"Literally within the first 30 seconds of the first song, he was jumping up and down and saying he wanted to sign me," Dobson said.
Fefe was quickly whisked away to New York to record her album, which features a cameo from "Wild Thing" rapper Tone Loc on the party tune "Rock It Til You Drop It." The first single, "Take Me Away," is just hitting radio.
"I'm a hopeless romantic and it's about love," Dobson said of the song. "It's about two people wanting to be together, but they can't, whether it's because of religion, race or age, or maybe their parents just don't like the guy or girl. ... I was really into 'Sid & Nancy' at the time."
Skye Sweetnam, 15, has already achieved some success with her first single, "Billy S.," which appeared on the "How to Deal" soundtrack and scored serious airplay in Canada.
"I wrote that song about coming home from school with a lot of homework, and I said, 'I don't wanna do any homework, I wanna write a song,' " explained Sweetnam, whose personality lives up to the sweet in her name. "I think it really captures the moment and how I felt. It's just kind of rebellious and me kind of complaining and venting about school and how much I was annoyed by it."
Sweetnam, who has long, dark hair and stunning green eyes, wrote her first song when she was 9. She got involved in musical theater in Bolton, Ontario, but didn't imagine singing as a career until her mom forgot to sign her up for snowboarding camp and enrolled her in pop stars camp instead. "You learn auditioning techniques, you get your hair done, you get pictures done, you sing over karaoke tracks," she explained.
Those tracks caught the ear of the woman who ran the camp, who then produced Sweetnam's first demo. The singer's grandmother caught wind of the tape and told her friends at the salon, who demanded a performance when Sweetnam walked by one afternoon. One of the women getting her hair done had a brother who is an entertainment lawyer, and he recruited Zack Werner, the Simon Cowell of "Canadian Idol," to manage Sweetnam.
Werner later connected Sweetnam with producer James Robertson, who recorded her in the home studio of his parents' basement (hence the title Noise From the Basement). "He let me do whatever I wanted," Sweetnam said. "If I came to him and said I wanted a tribal song with a horror film score, he would do it. And he is really good at guitar, and as soon as I saw that, I had to put some guitar riffs in there."
Sweetnam recorded a cover of Blondie's "Heart of Glass," but otherwise she co-wrote all the songs. "I get inspired by everyday things," she said. "One day I was jumping on my bed, pretending I was a rock star, and made that a song."
Her straightforward approach to songwriting mirrors some of Lavigne's work, but she considers it "totally different." "She's a girl who knows what she wants and she rocks, and that's what we have in common," Sweetnam said.
Alexandra Slate, 22, has a different frustration with the Avril comparisons.
"My whole point of doing this album was to make every song very different and very diverse and to incorporate every kind of music into one album," she said of Edge of the Girl. "And it's weird when I get comparisons to one person. I would rather have, 'You're a little bit of this, a little of that.' "
In that case, Slate is a little bit Sheryl Crow, a little bit Joni Mitchell. Her press photo, though, in which the blonde wears a long-sleeve baseball tee with the words "Bad Girl" ironed on, is a little bit Avril.
Like Sweetnam and the others, Slate has been writing songs for years. "My mom has a little cassette tape of me singing and making up my own songs when I was about 4," she said. "I started playing guitar when I was 13 and couldn't put it down."
In her teens, Slate began playing coffee shops, which triggered thoughts of singing professionally. "I thought, 'Cool, I could live off making 50 bucks a night. I could do this forever.' "
After signing with Hollywood Records, Slate hooked up with producer by Rob Cavallo, the man behind her "bible," Green Day's Dookie. Three members of Canadian stars the Tragically Hip played on her album, which features the single "Bad Girl."
" 'Bad Girl' is sort of about that spot in your mind where you hold all those personalities you know you have but you never let out," Slate explained. "People view me as this person I may or may not think I am, but I also have all these personalities I don't let people see."
Katy Rose, whose father, Kim Bullard, was a keyboardist for Crosby, Stills and Nash and Art Garfunkel, believes her experience growing up on tour buses and in Los Angeles makes her a lot different than Avril.
"I don't know if we write about the same things," said Rose, a tiny girl with a towering presence. "She grew up in a really small town in Canada, very different. I had a very unconventional childhood, I went through stuff most people don't even go through in college, and I'm already past that."
Those experiences are told through song on Because I Can, due October 7.
"[The songs are] dealing with self-loathing, self-hatred and learning to love yourself and this disease called depression that's looming over me," Rose said. "I've been on meds since I was 14 for all kinds of stuff."
One track, "Lemon," is featured in the movie "Thirteen," written by and starring her friend Nikki Reed. Rose's first single, "Overdrive," is about the fakeness of Los Angeles.
"Automatically if you've moved to Hollywood from, say, Idaho, you've made it," Rose explained. "But the truth of the matter is that 1 percent, maybe, of millions of people who move here to be a rock star or movie star makes it. And that's so sad, to see these people's dream obliterate."
Rose calls her album as real as her journal and does not shy away from criticizing Avril's music for being the opposite.
"I don't want to say anything bad about her because I'm sure she's a nice girl, but she's extremely manufactured, and her record is extremely overproduced," Rose said. "That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just my opinion. I don't feel like she put a lot of heart and soul into it. And it seems like she's trying to be something that is not real."
Wannabe she is not.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
-- by Corey Moss
Alexandra Slate is the victim of a new stereotype.
"There's no way I can ever wear a white tank top and cargo pants, which is too bad because I don't mind wearing that stuff," the 22-year-old singer grumbled.
Slate is part of a new crop of rocker chicks who, no matter how hard they fight it, are being called Avril Lavigne wannabes. And they're fighting it hard.
"Never, ever compare Katy Rose to fellow female singer/songwriters," the 16-year-old's bio strongly states. She has "more to do with the likes of early Liz Phair or PJ Harvey than her adolescent peers in the top 40."
Never mind that none of the Avril-likes' albums have even been released yet, accusers have already grasped onto their similarities to the real Lavigne. Slate, Skye Sweetnam and Fefe Dobson, for instance, call Toronto or nearby small towns home.
And all four, who are within three years of the 18-year-old Lavigne, proudly write or co-write their own edgy pop songs, which candidly document the coming of age of a generation that struggles to fit in Britney Spears' shadow.
The truth is, to these girls Avril is a double-edged sword. Without her, there would be less interest in singers who wear cargo pants and stay clear of Diane Warren ballads. "She's definitely paved the way," Dobson said.
Because of her, though, Slate, Rose, Sweetnam and Dobson are going to waste a lot of time defending themselves against the same copycat label that was placed on Lillix earlier this year. "People just want to compare you so they can measure your style against something else," explained Sweetnam, who looks like she could be Avril's sister.
What happens so often when an artist explodes in popularity the way Avril has is record labels unleash similar acts, hoping to capitalize on the fad. And while those artists face being called imitators, they're often successful. 'NSYNC, after all, were introduced on the heels of the Backstreet Boys' success. And Stone Temple Pilots rode the grunge bandwagon to solid numbers. Of course, then there's also C-Note and Sponge.
All this business hoopla is not to say labels create acts to fit trends. Oftentimes they have similar talents already signed, and those acts then become a bigger priority. Such was the case with Slate and Rose, who both had their debut albums finished before Lavigne's Let Go hit shelves.
"It sucks because hers came out first, but whatever," said Slate, whose Edge of the Girl was just pushed back again to early next year.
While the labels behind Slate, Rose, Sweetnam and Dobson will push the budding singers' albums to the same radio programmers and retailers who supported Lavigne, that's as far as the pushing goes.
"Capitol didn't try to make me into anything," said Sweetnam, whose Noise From the Basement is due January 27. "I came with these songs, and that's basically all the album is. That's the best possible scenario ever."
"V2 appreciates me as this quirky weird girl completely apart from the Avrils of the world," added Rose, who coincidentally has the same management as Lavigne. "I'm really lucky they didn't say, 'Why don't you have the Matrix produce your record?' 'Cause I would have never gone with that. They know I have my own ideas about things. They would never want for me to go and wear a tie and be a skater girl. It's not me, and I don't believe in changing for anyone else."
Slate and the others understand the comparisons, but all four claim to be very different from Avril. And really, they are.
"She does her thing, I do mine, they just both have guitars," said Dobson, whose self-titled debut, due in October, is easily the heaviest of the bunch. "I'm just more organic and I look completely different."
Fefe Dobson, 18, has dark skin that separates her from Lavigne, but her understated wardrobe (she wears a wife beater and chain belt in her press photo) has similarities she acknowledges.
"[Avril] didn't have to dress too sexy and she stuck to her own style, and that let the younger generation know you don't have to be like Britney and Christina," Dobson said. "You need that balance so other kids can relate. Not everyone dresses that way."
The differences between the two are more apparent in the music. While Avril channels her inner Sum 41, Dobson was raised on grunge.
"I was 14 when I really started to write, and that's when I listened to [Silverchair's] Neon Ballroom and I realized he wasn't afraid to write all his feelings on paper," Dobson said, referring to frontman Daniel Johns. "Then I got into Nirvana and that's where my sound took shape. Now I listen to Jeff Buckley and the Beatles, but then also Michael Jackson."
A few years into writing, Dobson joined forces with someone who could give her the guitar muscle she desired, producer Jay Levine, who helmed her album. She also inked a deal with Nelly Furtado's manager, Chris Smith, who arranged several showcases in her home city of Toronto, including one for Island Def Jam head Lyor Cohen.
"Literally within the first 30 seconds of the first song, he was jumping up and down and saying he wanted to sign me," Dobson said.
Fefe was quickly whisked away to New York to record her album, which features a cameo from "Wild Thing" rapper Tone Loc on the party tune "Rock It Til You Drop It." The first single, "Take Me Away," is just hitting radio.
"I'm a hopeless romantic and it's about love," Dobson said of the song. "It's about two people wanting to be together, but they can't, whether it's because of religion, race or age, or maybe their parents just don't like the guy or girl. ... I was really into 'Sid & Nancy' at the time."
Skye Sweetnam, 15, has already achieved some success with her first single, "Billy S.," which appeared on the "How to Deal" soundtrack and scored serious airplay in Canada.
"I wrote that song about coming home from school with a lot of homework, and I said, 'I don't wanna do any homework, I wanna write a song,' " explained Sweetnam, whose personality lives up to the sweet in her name. "I think it really captures the moment and how I felt. It's just kind of rebellious and me kind of complaining and venting about school and how much I was annoyed by it."
Sweetnam, who has long, dark hair and stunning green eyes, wrote her first song when she was 9. She got involved in musical theater in Bolton, Ontario, but didn't imagine singing as a career until her mom forgot to sign her up for snowboarding camp and enrolled her in pop stars camp instead. "You learn auditioning techniques, you get your hair done, you get pictures done, you sing over karaoke tracks," she explained.
Those tracks caught the ear of the woman who ran the camp, who then produced Sweetnam's first demo. The singer's grandmother caught wind of the tape and told her friends at the salon, who demanded a performance when Sweetnam walked by one afternoon. One of the women getting her hair done had a brother who is an entertainment lawyer, and he recruited Zack Werner, the Simon Cowell of "Canadian Idol," to manage Sweetnam.
Werner later connected Sweetnam with producer James Robertson, who recorded her in the home studio of his parents' basement (hence the title Noise From the Basement). "He let me do whatever I wanted," Sweetnam said. "If I came to him and said I wanted a tribal song with a horror film score, he would do it. And he is really good at guitar, and as soon as I saw that, I had to put some guitar riffs in there."
Sweetnam recorded a cover of Blondie's "Heart of Glass," but otherwise she co-wrote all the songs. "I get inspired by everyday things," she said. "One day I was jumping on my bed, pretending I was a rock star, and made that a song."
Her straightforward approach to songwriting mirrors some of Lavigne's work, but she considers it "totally different." "She's a girl who knows what she wants and she rocks, and that's what we have in common," Sweetnam said.
Alexandra Slate, 22, has a different frustration with the Avril comparisons.
"My whole point of doing this album was to make every song very different and very diverse and to incorporate every kind of music into one album," she said of Edge of the Girl. "And it's weird when I get comparisons to one person. I would rather have, 'You're a little bit of this, a little of that.' "
In that case, Slate is a little bit Sheryl Crow, a little bit Joni Mitchell. Her press photo, though, in which the blonde wears a long-sleeve baseball tee with the words "Bad Girl" ironed on, is a little bit Avril.
Like Sweetnam and the others, Slate has been writing songs for years. "My mom has a little cassette tape of me singing and making up my own songs when I was about 4," she said. "I started playing guitar when I was 13 and couldn't put it down."
In her teens, Slate began playing coffee shops, which triggered thoughts of singing professionally. "I thought, 'Cool, I could live off making 50 bucks a night. I could do this forever.' "
After signing with Hollywood Records, Slate hooked up with producer by Rob Cavallo, the man behind her "bible," Green Day's Dookie. Three members of Canadian stars the Tragically Hip played on her album, which features the single "Bad Girl."
" 'Bad Girl' is sort of about that spot in your mind where you hold all those personalities you know you have but you never let out," Slate explained. "People view me as this person I may or may not think I am, but I also have all these personalities I don't let people see."
Katy Rose, whose father, Kim Bullard, was a keyboardist for Crosby, Stills and Nash and Art Garfunkel, believes her experience growing up on tour buses and in Los Angeles makes her a lot different than Avril.
"I don't know if we write about the same things," said Rose, a tiny girl with a towering presence. "She grew up in a really small town in Canada, very different. I had a very unconventional childhood, I went through stuff most people don't even go through in college, and I'm already past that."
Those experiences are told through song on Because I Can, due October 7.
"[The songs are] dealing with self-loathing, self-hatred and learning to love yourself and this disease called depression that's looming over me," Rose said. "I've been on meds since I was 14 for all kinds of stuff."
One track, "Lemon," is featured in the movie "Thirteen," written by and starring her friend Nikki Reed. Rose's first single, "Overdrive," is about the fakeness of Los Angeles.
"Automatically if you've moved to Hollywood from, say, Idaho, you've made it," Rose explained. "But the truth of the matter is that 1 percent, maybe, of millions of people who move here to be a rock star or movie star makes it. And that's so sad, to see these people's dream obliterate."
Rose calls her album as real as her journal and does not shy away from criticizing Avril's music for being the opposite.
"I don't want to say anything bad about her because I'm sure she's a nice girl, but she's extremely manufactured, and her record is extremely overproduced," Rose said. "That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just my opinion. I don't feel like she put a lot of heart and soul into it. And it seems like she's trying to be something that is not real."
Wannabe she is not.
That is part of the issue with being in the public eye, everything you say is recorded and scrutinized, even if your views change over time. And again, I agree it is an interesting article and interesting snapshot in time of the struggles other young artists go through at the time. Avril being on the front-line (so to speak), had her fair share of struggles to deal with too, and many of the criticisms leveled at Avril at the time seemed undeserved to me at the time. In any case it is very interesting to see these things from different perspectives and it's good to always try and keep and open mind about how things really were/and are now today. It's nice to see these days that many artists now are more supportive of each other now versus back then...