Avril Lavigne
Backwards

And now there will be a rain of 1, I already know.

You won't even be able to read these first lines without the act of violating what wants to be not a review, not a critical and/or textual analysis but a... damn, I can't even find the term... grotesque and sublimated of a circle of songs that do not exist, but that can be realized simply by pushing in reverse soulless pop rock tunes. And this is only for the singer in question.

So... probably no one will publish this writing on the site.

Now the "artist" in question: Avril Lavigne, Canadian from Napanee, who with her little screams has by now mowed down half the world's patience, going from rocker to dark, from dark to flashy, and from flashy to bourgeois.

A woman I have always found to be a fraud (no... not in a good sense), who gets one song out of 500 right. One with rather banal or teenage-style lyrics in a hormonal storm.

Well then, listened to in the right direction, Avril seems (and maybe is) the classic contemporary musical cliché: the cute little girl who poses as a singer-songwriter and puts together pieces of adolescence that was. Yet, paradoxically listened to in reverse (yes... exactly... in reverse) she sounds in a completely new way. How did I listen to her? No, I didn't take her CD and spend time winding her record backward, forward, right, left, up and down to find subliminal messages of a sexual, political nature or incitement to suicide (a real witch hunt for those paranoids a bit drowned in madness who find at least 50 subliminal messages behind every music face, whose real target is perhaps the fake and irritating Miley Cyrus). No.

I listened to her backwards purely out of laziness. Wandering aimlessly on YouTube, passing between a snippet of Bunuel and the trailer of Von Trier's "Antichrist," lo and behold in that heavenly vertical line of stinky amateur videos and works of great class, comes the reverse video of "When You're Gone" by this simpleton, complete with English subtitles. Video perhaps by the usual paranoid on duty, or a kid who needed record hits on YouTube and tons of comments. And who could say.

The fact remains that there is the reverse with its gibberish resembling forced English and changing tone completely.

So here a lousy ballad becomes a bizarre/heartbreaking macabre folky dance titled "Enog re'uoy nehw (How Does It Cease?)" with an unceasing scream "How Does It Cease?" tearing a white sheet as if it were a vagina. In a horizon completely of fire and flesh.

Heartbreaking, poignant, absolutely imperfect like the lost divas of the '70s and with an opening instead of the piano hinted at in the original presents a wander of pulsing keyboards à la early Aphex Twin. The text that comes out from the reverse (in some ways forced and senseless) is not at all banal and seems like a painful love song written under the effect of acids.

"Tell me why it's still here in my heart. How does it cease? Telling me why. The way you felt in your dream or in your heart. It condemns you. Help me survive. I beg you. Because your way of living might not go far."

Not to mention a lullaby as much as "Gniden Yppah Ym" ("No Saviour"): if under the alter ego "My Happy Ending" Lavigne gives the worst of herself in one of her less successful pieces, in reverse it's a whole other story: a ferocious and hard song, full of pessimism and dandyism. Black angels peek elsewhere, lost in black magic and perverse darkness.

"No... there are no saviors. Let me cross through the malignancy, because she is me and I will come back... Do you want to see me dead? Well, I can't hear your voice. I will be the wound on your skin"

Inner crisis, mental anguish and paranoia in a singer who has accustomed us to banal lyrics about boys who kick ass on skates.

"Who are you now? No, not your voice. There is no savior to kill me"

Yes, from trash is born a masterpiece. A twilight of epileptic seizures and mental sanity sent to hell.

But now we come to the sore point: that is "Girlfriend", an annoyingly flashy piece with which the poor Canadian from the blueberry fields has stained her pretty soul and destroyed her already weak reputation. Now if she will create, purely for fun, the masterpiece of the twenty-first century, experimental, avant-garde and poignant, everyone will reject it only for her name printed on a cover bearing a painting by Lucio Fontana.

So, as we were saying, "Girlfriend" which changes, obviously in register, to "dneirflirg (Herpes No Fun)" presents such an absurd and nonsensical text as to make even the most extreme Dadaism envious with blares à la Frank Zappa and sound deliriums that not even a Sawako on heavy drugs...

"Yes, I'm working.

I'm working on this lucky day.

Herpes have no fun. No, none.

Walking on paths.

He forced me not to let anyone hear you.

Enter me.

Hey, one!

Hey, one!

Hey, donate where you want more to hit your job, duke

Naked so you wash your eyes

I sniffed der's nickels in your shnozer

I will give, I wish everyone's fate

Hey, kids you know what size rocks the most

I gutted it at home in a sweet way, to the schnozer"

And that's fine, wrinkle your nose, whatever... These are involuted sound deliriums, not lalala songs.

Papapapapapapapappppapapaapp

Excuse me, I've been sublimated.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH...

BUT LIRVA'S SONGS ROCK HARD!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

"T'nasw Eh" is the icing on the cake: hardcore à la Naked City sodomized by a tiptoeing Pj Harvey. Devastating. There are even peaks of thin metal sung by a preadolescent flower child. For those who are no longer surprised by anything...

So behind every Avril is there a Lydia Lunch in post-menstrual mode? Let's not exaggerate. Her talent is purely unconscious and disguised. Probably she herself is unaware of her fierce avant-garde. So this is not art, but a stroke of luck.

But if art is also unconscious then this is art.

And if this is art then Avril is an artist.

After all, even Magritte said "The title is not the explanation of a painting and the painting does not contain the title."

No contemporary response was ever more ominous.

He was a sk8er boi...