Avril Lavigne takes the stage and from afar, she looks like the same young girl who two decades ago achieved immense popularity with her edgy pop songs. In her time, she was an essential artist in the soundtrack of high schools around the world, and now that she has been brought back to music thanks to the magic of TikTok, she has seized the opportunity by jumping back on the train exactly where she left off. Dressed like a rebellious schoolgirl with the age of a teacher, 39 years old (nothing to reproach, few rock stars dare to embrace their age as time passes), she sings Girlfriend and What the Hell once again, with a crowd joining in and having a blast.
And then comes Complicated, a sentimental ballad elevated to the status of a generational anthem, and within 10 minutes, the concert has already become a major event.
The Canadian singer has been one of the highlights of the last day of Mad Cool, the Madrid festival that is closing its seventh edition this Saturday with The Killers, The Kooks, 2 Many DJs, The Gaslight Anthem, and Bring Me The Horizon, among others. This edition of Mad Cool ends without major incidents, following the mobility and access issues of 2023, and looks to the future with hopes of continuing to grow at the Villaverde Alto venue, where approximately 220,000 attendees have gathered over these four days.
Now, that young girl once scorned by the elite of punk-rock as a watered-down version of their countercultural rebellion, quickly swallowed by the novelty machine and forgotten as she fell ill, turns out to be not only the heroine of a new generation of stars like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish, but also impressible listeners even define her as a pioneer, although she didn't actually invent anything. Her teenage sitcom rock is a collection of more or less catchy clichés, and of course, she didn't even invent the raccoon-eyed smokey look, although it must be acknowledged that her style crystallized in some gigantic hits of the last FM era, when the '90s values of authenticity and integrity were starting to go out of fashion (note the irony in the expression).
Today, the punk-pop from 20 and 30 years ago has been discovered by the Generation Z and is trending on TikTok, as was also evident on Friday night at the crowded Sum 41 concert at this same festival.
Avril Lavigne performs old songs like My Happy Ending, Sk8er Boi, and He Wasn't, along with other self-pity and revenge ballads like I'm with You, and if The Who have been singing My Generation for decades, why shouldn't she defend a tribute to adolescence like Here's to Never Growing Up while holding a champagne bottle? Her message there is not for her new fans, few among the audience, but for the thirty and forty-somethings who loved her two decades ago and who eagerly waited under the sun by the thousands half an hour before the concert.
This wave of nostalgia for Avril Lavigne is an unexpected plot twist that occurs just 10 years after the artist contracted Lyme disease from a tick bite. The woman around whom a conspiracy theory developed claiming she had committed suicide in 2000 and had been replaced by an actress named Melissa, spent several years from 2014 bedridden on antibiotics (a period during which she divorced from Chad Kroeger, the lead singer of Nickelback, shortly after getting married). It was a long period of incapacity, physiotherapy, and intensive medication. When she managed to stabilize her health, Lavigne celebrated with a Christian rock album, Head Above Water, which went completely unnoticed and had little presence in her concert repertoire this afternoon.