What Avril Lavigne Has Always Understood About Growing Up
The pop-punk singer’s debut album, now 20 years old, is a monument to angsty adolescence.
Avril Lavigne seemed to baffle music writers in 2002 when she released her first single, the infectious mid-tempo banger “Complicated.” her a “tiny terror” with a “nouveau-punk” sound who could be, of all things, “a fine country singer in the making.” breathlessly whether she was “the teen Bob Dylan.” Eventually, critics settled on comparing her to every other major female artist at the time, calling her “” over and over, and as the singer who’d burst the artifice of bubblegum pop simply by not being overtly bubblegum-pop-y. , after Lavigne’s debut album, , became a blockbuster hit, called her “an icon … who wears baggy pants, plastic bracelets and a scowl—not the skimpy threads and Ultra brite smiles of Britney and
