Her monthly listens tally close to ten million (mostly from Sao Palo and Mexico City). Her two new album singles – both ballads – Head Above Water and Tell Me It’s Over have just 62 million and six million respectively. While Complicated has 207 million streams, Girlfriend has less than half. It’s particularly clear from the Spotify statistics. For some fans, this was more than coincidence. In the interview, Avril said she’d almost died. The illness is spread by ticks and attacks your immune system, causing chronic fatigue.
Fans blamed Melissa.Įventually in an exclusive 2015 interview with People Magazine, Avril, freshly divorced from Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger – her second marriage, following her fleeting union with Deryck Whibley of Sum4 at and 21 – revealed she’d spent the last two years in bed battling Lyme disease. She was absent on social media, wasn’t producing any music, and her name only made headlines for, almost unbelievably, charging Brazilian fans up to $400 each to take a photo with her in 2014. But it was too late: the theory took on a life of its own, fuelled by the fact Avril had gone quiet. About how the internet would believe anything. She wanted to make a point about how conspiracy theories spread like wildfire. The Brazilian blogger later admitted the post was a hoax. But then she had died, and the doppelganger (hired by the label) continued her work to distract the paparazzi. In fact it became Avril Lavigne's first, and only song to make the US charts.ĭepending on which dark corner of the internet you passed through, Avril had died in a snowboarding accident, had taken her own life after her grandfather died in 2003, or, having simply been unable to cope with fame, begun to use a body double in certain situations. But Girlfriend just felt like chart fodder. The album single Girlfriend, shouty, sugary and delivered Hey Mickey-style, sounded almost sacrilegious to listeners whose souls had fed off Lavigne’s trademark melancholia, her delicate voice almost breaking over lyrics of heartbreak before working itself into self-assured rage for the chorus each song a personal motivational anthem, each melody sticking with you for years. I Don’t Have To Try’s banal song-rap was reminiscent of a teen band performing at their school prom. While some songs, such as Everything Back From You, were reassuringly Avril, playfully amping up the puerile teen angst with lyrics like “today was the worst day I went through hell” against quirky, carefree choruses, others were unrecognisably cheesy. It was her first album for new label RCA, co-written and produced by Swedish pop maestro Doctor Luke, and, to borrow teen Avril terminology, it sucked. While the album was a commercial success, the sound divided opinion. Her makeup, no longer a scribbled afterthought, became a “look”. Her black jeans and T Shirt were swapped for heels and poofy, strapless dresses.
Her poker-straight-hair, bleached peroxide a couple of years before, was suddenly worn in loose, soft princess curls. Yet with The Best Damn Thing, 23-year-old Avril’s music began to mutate. Tenacious, rebellious, but ultimately (by her own admission) not a real punk, Avril, discovered at 15 singing country songs in a bookshop in Canada’s rural Napanee, appealed by way of alternative accessibility. She had an edge (and once kicked a girl in a bar for calling her a poseur), but parents would still wrap up her albums for Christmas. Original fans grew up on moody, punk Avril, whose only accessory was a school tie around her neck, her mouse brown hair like curtains across bright blue eyes that swam in layers of smudged kohl, her nails black and chipped.
Together, they form one of the most curious fan bases of any mainstream musician of the last two decades. The others, now in their mid 20s and eagerly awaiting Avril's first new album in six years (Head Above Water), are a rare breed. Some of them, who have spent the last 12 years knee-deep in Reddit conspiracy theory threads, even think Avril died and was replaced by a doppelganger. The former, the purists, believe she sold out. The fans that stopped listening to her after Girlfriend, the chart-topping single of her third, 2007 album The Best Damn Thing, and the fans that found her at Girlfriend.
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