The critics are pouncing on Avril Lavigne.
The Canadian singer’s latest music video, for single Hello Kitty, has been met with almost universal scorn, with the four-minute long clip decried by critics as everything from lazy and embarrassing to “the worst thing you’ll watch all week.”
The video for Hello Kitty, the third single from Lavigne’s self-titled 2013 album, landed late Tuesday. In it, the pop songstress cavorts with a group of stonefaced Japanese women as she puts forward her best “arigato” and suggests that she and a pal “roll around in our underwear, how every silly kitty should be.”
The U.K. Mirror seemed lukewarm on the video, designating it “so bad that it’s actually quite good, a bit like anything by Rebecca Black.”
Hello Kitty feels like staring into the vacuum
“Avril’s new song borrows some of Skrillex’s trademark noises,” The Mirror notes under a header claiming that Hello Kitty sounds like “a Skrillex song that got lodged in a dishwasher.”
“but there are also bits where Avril is ‘shredding her guitar’ and strutting around and it all feels like several noisy things are trying to happen at the same time.”
Idolator was a bit more concise with their criticism, posting the video under the headline “Avril Lavigne’s ‘Hello Kitty’ Video Is Probably The Worst Thing You’ll Watch All Week.”
“To be honest, I kind of shut down physically and emotionally after the first four seconds here,” writer Robbie Daw notes, taking particular issue with Lavigne’s juvenile themes — and behaviour — in the track’s music video. “Has anyone reminded Avril that she’s nearly 30 lately?”
Meanwhile, Entertainment Weekly put on its best cultural criticism cap and made a very respectable attempt at explaining the video in the context of Lavigne’s career history and Hello Kitty‘s obvious similarities to Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Girl-stocked Hollaback Girl — though writer Darren Franich still didn’t seem to be able to find any merits in the pastel-hued clip.
“The simplest way to understand what’s happening here is that Avril Lavigne had her most iconic moment astride the pop zeitgeist over a decade ago, with Sk8er Boi and Complicated, maybe the most ’90s songs ever released after the ’90s ended,” Franich writes. “We like to ascribe context to our musicians, but Lavigne arrived sans context in the midst of whatever pop-punk was.”
“There are serious questions about whether it’s offensive (expressionless Asian dancers, Tokyo-as-prop) or offensively obvious (this one’s for you, large Japanese fanbase!),” he goes on. “There are even more serious questions about the title, Hello Kitty, which is also like half of the lyrics, and which everyone agrees is a double entendre. … Hello Kitty feels like staring into the vacuum. Avril plays a guitar, but nothing comes out. She doesn’t really dance, but she doesn’t not dance. This is what pop wants to be, but also where pop came from: Alpha and Omega, retro-futuristic. Avril Lavigne never changed; the world just changed around her.”
Policymic doesn’t mince words about the song, immediately decrying the video, which was yanked from YouTube almost as soon as it debuted on Tuesday — but can still be viewed on Lavigne’s official website — as “racist.”
News Source:www.arts.nationalpost.com
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