Staging the Event: Avril Lavigne, “Sk8er Boi” and Corporate-Anarchism

Corporate anti-capitalism wouldn’t matter if it couldn’t be differentiated from an authentic anti-capitalist movement. Yet, even before its momentum was stalled by the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, the so called anti-capitalist movement seemed also to have conceded too much to capitalist realism. Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative political-economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn’t expect to be met.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

In the music video for Avril Lavigne’s pop-punk hit “Sk8er Boi,” an event is staged. The video follows Lavigne and a team of artists who stage a shut-down of 7th and South Spring St. in Los Angeles. They use faux-anarchist red stars and guerilla marketing to promote the show, and, in the end, traffic stops on the major intersection, and Lavigne finishes singing the song on top of a car as crowds of teenagers rush through traffic to get to the show.

“What if you held a protest and everyone came?” Mark Fisher wondered in Capitalist Realism. In “Sk8er Boi,” everybody came: the crowd to the intersection, the viewer to the screen, the consumer to the mall, and record companies to the artist. Lavigne’s “Mall Punk” aesthetic was presented as new punk, and the boundaries between anti-capitalism and capitalism hit a new horizon. Teens flocked to Hot Topic to buy and perform their new anti-conformity identities, and the smug cynics all pointed out the hypocrisy of this new generation of posers.

If the event in the “Sk8er Boi” video was a protest more than a concert, then what was being protested? The red star that markets the event is similar enough to the Anarchist “A” and the Anarcho-Communist black and red star, but inexact enough to resemble neither. If the ideology is presumed to be anarchist, then the object of protest would be against the “State.” However, the State is not a tangible force: there are no police officers or government officials shutting down the show, nor are any people in the cars angry that their commute was delayed.

This type of event-staging was typical of what I’m calling “Corporate Anarchism.” The transition from “Skate Punk” to “Mall Punk” could be traced from 80s bands like Suicidal Tendencies and Big Boys, through the 90s with bands like NOFX and The Offspring, and finally making it into the realm of pop music with Blink 182 and Sum 41. In the early 2000s, “Mall Punk” was repackaged by corporations as the “new” anti-capitalist capitalism.

Anarchism appealed to corporations for a few reasons: 1) it provided a frictionless social condition where commodities were exchanged without regulation; 2) guerilla marketing was considered the future of advertising and reproduced guerilla warfare as a promotional tactic. 3) it made corporations feel cooler than they were. Ultimately, Corporate Anarchism allowed for the event itself to become the goal of political engagement.

After the End of History, theorist Jean Baudrillard recognized that global capitalism had a monopoly on the staging of the ‘political event’. Without a political foil to dialectically engage with — as Fascism or Communism were now defeated and thrown in the ‘dustbin of history’ — capitalists generated their enemies, staged their events, and fed it to the media in a cycle that parodied and simulated production. Within this framework, he theorized that there were no actual real events anymore, but instead, there was a Historical event strike.

The prodigious event, the event which is measured neither by its causes nor its consequences but creates its own stage and its own dramatic effect, no longer exists. History has gradually narrowed down to the field of its probable causes and effects, and, even more recently, to the field of current events — its effects ‘in real-time’. Events now have no more significance than their anticipated meaning, their programming, and their broadcasting. Only this event strike constitutes a true historical phenomenon — this refusal to signify anything whatever, or this capacity to signify anything at all. This is the true end of history, the end of historical Reason.

Nobody benefited more from the ‘event strike’ than corporations. The staging of “History” was a good promotion, the manufacturing of conflict drove up ratings, and simulation of production becoming the only form of production was as safe as it was profitable. These were the conditions for the modes of production at the turn of the millennium, and the effects were that consequences became more and more detached from any Real that produced the outcome.

Like the “Sk8er Boi” music video, the staged event itself didn’t produce any “Real History,” but the media itself was a production and producer of History. Like Fisher, Baudrillard realized that 9/11 represented a break from the event strike. They also agreed that the strike continued as soon as the dust from the Twin Towers cleared and that corporations demanded that events become controlled demolitions of the Real rather than spontaneous challenges to profit and ideology. “Sk8er Boi” came out in August 2002, just under a year after the attacks.

As corporations demanded a return to the event strike, Corporate Anarchism paved the way for Silicon Valley’s “cool” business ethos of a frictionless libertarian economy and casual “too-cool-for-ideology” ideology. Additionally, the event strike brought about an acceleration of brand culture unique to Capitalist Realism, which made engaging with politics an exercise of consumers in the marketplace of ideas rather than a consequential identification. Essentially, there were no political stakes in “Sk8er Boi” and that’s the way corporations liked it.

In some ways, “Sk8er Boi” seems like an artifact. There’s a great deal of nostalgia attached to this song because it seems like it comes from a far-off age, so far removed from our culture of Woke Capitalism in 2020. This, in my determination, is due to the changing nature of corporate culture, and the way that corporations treated morality and identity. One way to analyse this artifact would be to look at it from a psychoanalytic perspective.

A close reading of “Sk8er Boi” cultivates a surprisingly complicated relationship between characters and a central core message that drives the plot. “Sk8er Boi” follows an Oedipal triad: the inauthentic and fallen rich girl (“Pretty Face”), the King and hero of the parable (“Skater Boy”), and an omniscient female Narrator. The triad-relationship assumes a universal heteronormativity, a strictly defined gender binary, and a pro-patriarchal message. It’s anti-woke, it’s anti-punk, and the moral question that the narrative hinges upon is: “are you being authentic to yourself? Are you the true punk that is ‘inside your soul?’”

A few questions come to mind with this reading: Where does this Oedipal drive for domination fit itself into the aesthetic of “being punk?” One thrust of the narrative was the question of authenticity. If we accept Corporate Anarchism as the new Oedipal drive to “stay true to yourself,” then the question becomes a duel one: “what is being punk” and “how does a punk stay true to themselves when corporations mediate their outrage and stage events for them? Hence, the message and aesthetic of “Sk8er Boi” is rendered as “Anti-Punk,” and its Oedipal drive and Female Chauvinism as essential to this new (simulation of) production.

But even the “Anti-Punk” cannot contain the levels of commodification that renders this product specific to late-stage capitalism. Within the framework of Corporate Anarchism, the anti-punk, which was performed rage on a corporate platform, is, itself rendered inauthentic and negated. Then, the next level of negation, the “anti-anti-punk”: Anti-punk negated. Because “Sk8er Boi” side steps even anti-punk cliches from anti-punk heroes like Kurt Cobain who staged protests against MTV while performing on MTV. As Fisher illustrates in CR, Cobain embodies anti-punk at the End of History:

In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliché.

In other words, if Lavigne were a “true anti-punk” then she would have gone onto MTV and sang about how much she hated singing on MTV. This is what defined Cobain’s perceived duel relationship to the network — that he was a poser for working with a big corporation, and that he was, in turn, authentic to his art for protesting the network while performing on the network. Instead, Lavigne does the opposite in a delightful dialectical manner. She declares that the true punk — embodied by the Skater Boy — only fulfilled his or her potential when they went on MTV.

Lavigne’s dialectical response to Cobain’s protest was to remove the authenticity of the protest and replace it with a staging of the protest. Not only did the music video show the staged show, but it also showed the exact process by which a protest is staged. Instead of “objectless rage,” Lavigne neuters the rage and presents the guerilla marketing and anti-punk cliches as promotional commodities. This commodification extended to her style, which became the fetishized authentic mall punk aesthetic. This rendered inauthenticity as the new authentic object to sell.

‘Inauthenticity as a commodity’ was the corporate norm at the advent of the millennium. Global terrorism replaced technological meltdowns and this became the political unconscious ambient hum of the new age. Then, we began staging events again, and a new world was created out of the old, allowing for the products to breathe, to stage their births, deaths, and to manufacture events as a new fetish, a new way to reach this generation.

If Cobain gave a weary voice to those at the End of History, Lavigne was the voice for teens after 9/11. This new generation, uncertain about their future, came to terms with a terrorized reality by making inauthenticity the new punk. “All that was solid melts into PR.” All that was true was subject to ridicule. All the surprises are known and staged; all that was sacred was rendered profane and then sacred again. The ghosts that haunted our futures were reduced to fantastical utopian anarchy which was disavowed by capitalism to prepare us for the psychic trauma that comes with endless war.

The extent to which global capitalism and corporate interests held a grip on artists like Lavigne is multi-leveled and totalizing in its alienation from the product. First, Arista signed Lavigne for a multi-million dollar deal in 2000. Lavigne,15 at the time, dropped out of school, and relocated to L.A. Arista was looking to replicate the success of Faith Hill, whose breakthrough album Breathe (1999) became the best selling Country album of all time. After two years, the company was unhappy with Lavigne’s output and sent in a three-person team called The Matrix to write songs for Lavigne. One member, Lauren Christy, described her first encounter with Lavigne:

We’d been listening to the kind of stuff she had been doing — it had a Faith Hill kind of vibe, and as soon as she walked in the door we knew this was just wrong. This kid had melted toothbrushes up her arm, her hair was in braids and she wore black skater boots. She didn’t seem like the Faith Hill type. And after talking to her for about an hour, we cottoned on that she wasn’t happy but couldn’t quite figure out where to go.”

That all changed after Lavigne played The Matrix a song that she had recorded and really loved, a rock track in the vein of System Of A Down.

“The lyrics were kind of ‘I hate you, I hate you, hate you,’” Spock recalls. “We were like ‘OK, we get where she’s going.’”

In the exchange above, Christy reveals that The Matrix team wanted Lavigne to shed the identity that the record company projected onto her and rebrand herself as a truer version of herself in order to meet the corporation’s profit motive. Lavigne’s frustration seemed to eminate from the restrictions put onto her by the record company, and this frustration manifested, by The Matrix’s songs, with a pro-corporate and anti-conformity message.

Additionally, one of the things that plagued Lavigne throughout the early parts of her career was her “punk” credibility. This was especially true after it surfaced that a corporation was sent in to write all the songs for her. This type of anxiety about authenticity of the author, authenticity of aesthetic, and moreover, authenticity of intention has been a matter of public relations since the advent of popular music, but it’s especially true when it comes to punk music, which relies so heavily on being authentic and living authentically.

There is a double irony to this. The first irony is that the song itself is about staying true to yourself, and being rewarded for knowing that truth. The second irony is that Lavigne disliked these songs because she didn’t write the song, and therefore, they were rendered inauthentic. She favored the single “Losing Grip,” because she wrote it with more artistic freedom. It was the very imposition of this truer version of “Avril Lavigne” that rendered the singles written by The Matrix — “Complicated,” “Sk8er Boi,” and “I’m With You” — as inauthentic to her true self.

“Arista was drop-dead shit afraid that I would come out with a whole album that sounded like ‘Unwanted’ and ‘Losing Grip,’ “ she says. “I swear they wanted to drop me or something. I don’t feel like ‘Complicated’ represents me and my ability to write. But without ‘Complicated,’ I bet you anything I wouldn’t have even sold a million records. The songs I did with the Matrix, yeah, they were good for my first record, but I don’t want to be that pop anymore.”

Lavigne’s identity itself became a commodity, that was as unstable and fluid as the Capital invested in her success. This is the vision of the postmodern “branding” world that emerged after the End of History. Corporations didn’t just want to create products, but to create cultures, to create a future by investing in that future. Arista’s financial interests represented a model of cultural futures trading — trading lump sums of money in exchange for ownership of her identity and mediated control over the branding of the culture that surrounded it.

This is the way that Capitalist Realism changed the socio-political landscape after the End of History. It wasn’t so much that the industry itself was reduced to a marketplace of futures trading — that had always existed — it was that these branding exercises had to mold the new future to their reality to be seen as a success. The inaccessibility of alternative political structures made it so, for the future not to collapse in on itself in a frenzy of stock trades and commodity overload, these corporate entities had to create a future for themselves to inhabit.

The Corporate Anarchism that pioneered ‘Staging the Event’ was a cultural phenomenon that corporations could only sustain for so long. It would later shift into the current paradigm of Woke Capitalism, which has its own staged events and commodified identities. Lavigne herself tried multiple brand identities over the rest of her career, shedding the punk for pop and country. Ultimately, the Corporate Anarchism of 2000s pop-punk faded away, and the future it tried to imagine was a limited horizon of accelerated impossibilities.