The anti-Britney By: EW November 01, 2002 Avril Lavigne talks about her punk cred, growing up fast, and making things a bit ''Complicated'' for her teen-queen rivals -- an excerpt from Entertainment Weekly's Nov. 1, 2002, cover story. Thanks to Avril Lavigne, the 18-year-old Canadian whose ''Let Go'' is the hottest debut album of 2002, butt cheeks, dance beats, and gleeful artifice are suddenly out, while tank tops, rock, and ''real'' are unexpectedly back in. Pop tarts are assumed to be toast, especially now that tie-wearing tomboy Lavigne has been dubbed ''the anti-Britney'' by her legions of new supporters. ''I don't like that term -- 'the anti-Britney.' It's stupid,'' Lavigne protests, preferring not to stomp to success on someone else's coattails. ''I don't believe in that. She's a human being. God, leave her alone!'' By all means. But surely it's safe to say that fans are looking for less sexually explicit -- ''Have you seen Christina's video?'' she interrupts. Lavigne screws her face into a yucked-out expression at the mere thought of the queasy combination of featherweight boxing, soft-core porn, and bad plumbing in Aguilera's new ''Dirrty'' video. ''Poor girl,'' she whispers. The teen queens may actually need Lavigne's pity. Tom Poleman, who programs one of the country's highest-rated Top 40 stations, New York City's Z100, has seen Avril wax and the old-school teen-poppers seriously wane in recent requests and call-out research. Lavigne is ''the defining artist of this phase of pop music,'' he declares. ''Whereas Britney was more glamour and less reality-based, Avril is much more the regular kid. For boys, she seems more attainable; girls can see themselves living more like her, dressing the same, being attracted to the same boys.'' The alliteration of ''typical teenager'' might have been invented for this unassuming upstart. Utterly unprovocative pink underwear peeks out of her flared jeans; identical multiple bracelets dangle off her wrists. She's wired at the beginning of a conversation and, by the end, curled up childlike in a ball, seemingly near comatose from low blood sugar. There's something brilliantly paradoxical about her: the completely average adolescent who also exudes palpable star quality in spades. Maybe every teenager is a star and it just takes Avril Lavigne to make us recognize it. ''She is the most real thing out there,'' says her manager, Terry McBride, who also represents Sarah McLachlan and Dido. ''Arista [her record company] had a heart attack when she was chewing gum on 'TRL' and pulling it out of her mouth. I just watched that and laughed, because I know a lot of teenagers who do that exact thing in conversation and, like her, don't even know that they're doing it.'' Lavigne's debut album, ''Let Go,'' has sold at least 100,000 copies for each of the last 17 weeks straight and is now topping 2.3 million. Arista Records chief Antonio ''L.A.'' Reid expects to eventually sell at least 10 million globally, and not unreasonably. While Britney and Christina have almost dared radio to add hookless tunes like ''Boys'' and ''Dirrty'' to their playlists, nearly every song on ''Let Go'' feels like a potential smash. The No. 1 hit ''Complicated'' was an across-all-age-groups introduction to Avril; the jumpy ''Sk8er Boi'' is aimed at the pop-punk kids; the more adult power ballad ''I'm With You'' will hit by the holidays, just in time to remind parents about the album. And the grown-ups do like her. Dad may be happy to have a young female singer whose songs he can enjoy without feeling like a lecher, and Mom is thrilled to have a relatively demure new pop star influencing her daughters. ''A lot of moms come up to me and they're like, 'Thank you for not dressing like Britney. Thank you for being a good influence on my daughter,''' Lavigne says. ''I'm like, 'Uh...cool? You're very welcome?''' She's as ambivalent about as any self-respecting teen should be about unsolicited soccer-mom praise. But Lavigne has mixed feelings about her own look infiltrating this year's back-to-school ensembles. ''When fans show up with the ties at the concerts, it's cute because it's like, yeah, support!... But when I see someone on the street dressed up like me, it feels weird.... I don't wear ties anymore. I started feeling like I was wearing a costume. I'm over it. I get sick of things quick.'' Her first manager, Cliff Fabri, remembers Lavigne as the 14-year-old tomboy he discovered singing in a bookstore in her native Napanee, Ontario. ''When I first saw her, I liked her voice, and obviously the looks. But it was the attitude. She goes hunting all the time with her brother and dad. Here's this sweet little thing, and I said to her one time, 'What about when a little doe comes out and starts nudging up to the mother? What do you do?' And she goes'' -- Fabri makes the sound of a shotgun blast -- '''Dinner.''' He chortles. ''I was like, yeah! I loved the toughness.'' Just two and a half years ago, Fabri says, Lavigne was a frizzy-haired waif singing the sort of country-pop tunes favored by her devoutly religious parents: John, a phone-company worker, and Judy, her stay-at-home mom. ''She was so sheltered, she didn't know blink-182 from Madonna.... Her mother kept pushing Faith Hill and Martina McBride at me, saying, 'This is Avril.''' Years of practicing to be a star in front of her closet mirrors paid off in 1998, when Lavigne won a contest to sing a duet with fellow Canadian Shania Twain in front of a capacity arena crowd. ''As soon as I walked out in front of 20,000 people, I'd never smiled so much in my life -- it was like perma-smile,'' Lavigne recalls. Shortly after she turned 16, Lavigne auditioned for Arista, whose CEO L.A. Reid was so impressed by her 15-minute tryout that he authorized a deal worth a guaranteed $1.25 million over two albums -- not bad for a neophyte with no original material. Lavigne also got a $900,000 publishing advance, fulfilling Fabri's vow that this recent high school dropout would be ''a millionaire before she sold her first record.'' There was just one hang-up: The balladic, ''new country''-type material Lavigne auditioned with bore no resemblance to what she really wanted to do. Her style dramatically changed when Lavigne left New York for Los Angeles to work with hit songwriter Clif Magness and the producer-writer collective known as the Matrix (who've collaborated with everyone from Aguilera to Liz Phair). ''She came to our studio and the record company was looking for Faith Hill-type songs, but she didn't seem to be into that at all,'' says the Matrix's Lauren Christy. ''So we said, 'What do you want to do?' She said, 'I'm 16. I want to rock out.''' That afternoon, Lavigne and the Matrix wrote ''Complicated.''. Fabri, her first manager is happy enough with the settlement he negotiated, but, he remains perplexed by how his former charge has implied in the press that she is, basically, self-made. Songwriter Zizzo sees it another way. ''Who of us at 15 had a completely clear picture of who we were? I think by doing something creative you find out who you want to be creatively. Avril was absolutely the architect of her record.... And what you see imagewise is who she was from day one in terms of the fatigues and the tank tops. There's a lot of people out there who think this is somehow a look that was put together for her, but nothing could be further from the truth.'' When asked about the assault on her punk credentials -- a war waged on message boards between her true believers and teens who have a powerful urge to reject her as a role model -- Lavigne sighs, suggesting it's all just semantics. ''Punk is a touchy subject,'' Lavigne says. ''A punk is a person who's always getting in trouble and doing things they're not supposed to. Yeah, I do that.... Then there's punk as a way of life, and punk rock as an aggressive form of music, which is very political, and I never said I was that.... People are like, 'Well, she doesn't know the Sex Pistols.' Why would I know that stuff? Look how young I am. That stuff's old, right?'' Next up for Lavigne: After 10 straight months of promotional work, she'll start a tour, to be followed by another album, expected fall '03. ''Sometimes I'm mature and serious, other times I'm just a little kid jumping around,'' she says. ''I had to grow up fast. I used to never be serious about anything -- and I still goof off. But my friends are like, 'Whoa, you've totally grown up.' And I'm like, 'You're scaring me. Don't tell me that!' I feel really old now that I'm 18.'' Back to Press Section