Yes, Avril Lavigne was a huge hit in the new millennium as she dealt mind-blowing songs like “Complicated” and “Sk8er Boi”. But for some reason the public didn’t like her much, hmm, weird.
She was called faux-punk and a wanna-be who is ruining music.
But the funniest part was, everyone loved to talk about how much they hated her but somehow everyone still knows the words to the radio hits.
Fast-forward five years.
Now the semi-annymous world of Youtube has taken the main stage and Avril is still holding on.
At over 106 million views her song “Girlfriend” holds the number one spot on most viewed videos ever.
In fact, a video, which simply has pictures from her wedding, has 10 million views.
Is Avril someone America just loves to hate or is she a dirty secret that people don’t want exposed?
Let’s investigate.
After searching “Avril Lavigne” her top 10 videos have totaled 265 million views. OK, so she’s popular.
The viewers are allowed to rate the video from one to five stars and with the mob-mentality it is easy to tell if people truly do like the video . Every one of her top 10 videos has either 4.5 or 5 stars.
OK, so she’s liked.
What about an insight on the community that’s doing the voting? There is no way to look at someone else’s video and see the age and sex of the people voting (which is a shame) so the only logical way would be random sampling.
For example, take Avril Lavigne’s “When You’re Gone”. It managed 34 million views and 73,000 comments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW2LTnzD-vE
It is way too time consuming to go through every comment so here is a snapshot of the comments.
Darkligher3491 has a pretty standard comment saying he/she adores the song. There is no added info on this persons channel to give away age or sex but the background is of Kelly Clarkson and says “Official Tour Merchandise Web Store”.My guess is this person liked the image of Kelly as the background and copied it from the offcial site and put it on his/her own channel. Someone who does this tends to be in the range of 13-17. For the sake of avoiding stereotyping the sex will remain unknown.
Comment two talks about how a certain scene reminds them of their burying their grandmother. This person ends it with a sad emoticon and using grandmother twice in a five-word sentence.
Call me crazy but with a username like 13mymy13, the overuse of words, and an emoticon, all signs point to a 13 year old girl.
The third comment reminds me of someone who may have a pinky-twitching disorder because the shift button seems tO bE used a lOt.
This type of text is a dead giveaway. It’s either a 13-15 year old female or a cat that ran across the keyboard. According to her profile she is 15. I call her a she because the background is all pink and 90 percent of the time pink is associated with girls.
Finally, Aurras tells us how the video gave him/her goosebumps and the song is really powerful, OK, the sentence is put together decent but the context of Avril Lavigne being “really powerful” makes me think 16 or younger.
Her age isn’t revealed but again, the background is pink.
OK, so four random comments and the results look like this:
Person 1: Female?
Person 2: 13 year old female
Person 3: 13-15 year old female
Person 4: Female
Also, three out of these four are from Canada.. so is Avril.
Maybe it isn’t America that secretly loves her. Maybe it’s the adolescent youth up north that are running the numbers so ridiculously high. The only logical conclusion would be that the majority of her fan base won’t be able to legally drink until 2015.
The summary: Avril Lavigne has catchy songs that can either deal with the hardest of breakups or the excitement of new relationships. Her songs cover a wide array of topics.. er, relationship topics, that can really only be popular with those who can’t wait to go clothes shopping before school next summer.
Great, I got an answer but still have one question: Why is it that I still find myself singing “Complicated” in the car?
1 comment:
The writer goes after familiar quarry in this column - the popular person who no one wants to admit is popular.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president, no one would admit having voted for him - and he won in a landslide!
Good job explaining the background, though I got a little lost in the explanation of the comments. Might have been all the teeny-bopper references. (Is that what young teenage girls are called still?)
Nice point about most of comments coming from the Great White North.
Puts a lot of that popularity into perspective.
Eh?
Nicely done.
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