By Aliya Chaudhry
An eponymous album marks a major moment in an artist's career. For women, owning one's work, body, and artistry can be especially powerful, even political. Throughout Women's History Month, MTV News is highlighting some of these iconic statements from some of the biggest artists on the globe. This is Self-Titled.
“Singing Radiohead at the top of our lungs,” Avril Lavigne belts at the start of "Here's to Never Growing Up," the lead single off her self-titled album, expressing both her love of the band and her devotion to rock music. The Radiohead song in question, Lavigne revealed to Billboard in 2013, was “Creep.” Later in the same track, she sings, “We live like rock stars / Dance on every bar / This is who we are / I don't think we'll ever change” — a promise to stay young, but also to keep true to Lavigne’s alternative roots. Ironically, it’s a pop song, accentuated by acoustic guitar strumming and bright percussion, but the evidence shows Lavigne can be both a pop artist and a rock star. Her eponymous album takes that stance proudly.
Lavigne makes her case on album opener “Rock N Roll,” a love letter to the genre. An energetic pop-rock stomp reminiscent of her early material, it boasts a crunchy electric guitar solo and a chorus beat calling back to Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” The lines “Don't care about a reputation / Must be living in the wrong generation” reference Joan Jett, and Lavigne’s cover of “Bad Reputation” appeared on the extended editions of this album and 2011’s Goodbye Lullaby. The music video for “Rock N Roll” shows Lavigne playing her guitar solo in front of a church in the desert, the same way Slash did in the music video for Guns N’ Roses’s “November Rain.” These nods place the singer in the lineage of classic rock, which bolsters the collection’s argument that her peers aren’t solely the pop stars of the 2010s or the pop-punk bands of the 2000s, but the stadium rockers of previous generations, and that her influence may very well stretch for decades to come. Spoiler alert: It definitely did.
Released in November 2013, 11 years after her debut and 9 years before her most recent album Love Sux, Avril Lavigne arrived at the midpoint of her now 20-year career. It took the artist’s name, since Lavigne felt it was so varied that there was no unifying theme or style to tie it together. “The record is so diverse and it’s all over the map stylistically and lyrically,” she told Rolling Stone around the time of the drop. “I couldn’t really find something to really sum it up. It just felt right with it being a decade and my fifth record. I think it was just time for a self-titled record.”