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YOUTH CORRESPONDENT
Avril Lavigne has topped the charts. Avril Lavigne has won awards.
Avril Lavigne has scores of fans who have both bought her CD and her style.
Many young girls can now be seen walking the hallways with ties around their youthful necks. The spread of support for Avril, shown by wearing clothing similar to hers, has caused a great uproar within the punk community. They feel it's wrong, because it has made what they are, and what they choose to wear, more corporate.
From the mid-1970s, punks have lived on the idea that they are rebelling and want to be outside of mainstream society and its beliefs. Their music, clothes and general attitude reflected one of almost resentment.
Today hard-core punks continue to resent popular culture, and have grown even more vocal about it.
The punks today hate the fact that society has embraced the way they dress. They feel that artists such as Avril Lavigne have fueled the fire that has allowed for the transition of their style to popular culture.
Once able to "hide" behind their clothes, as well as each other, they now find themselves looking exactly like what they rebelled against--corporate culture.
Personally, I do not feel that any artist, including Avril Lavigne, should be criticized simply because the clothes she wears later show up on the people who listen to her music. Like it or not, punks do the same thing when they continuously put patches or stickers on their belongings, or wear T-shirts that show The Clash or The Ramones.
I believe that it has simply gotten to the point now where punks have discovered that they are the ones being copied.
Then there is another question: Are the people listening to and copying Avril Lavigne's style really just copying, or might they all feel the same rebellious attitude and resentment that the early punks did?
The fact that the majority of the world may switch to some kind of social genre does not undermine why they did it. Each of the people choosing to wear a tie to school could be feeling the same resentment towards something as the most hard-core punk.
Just because the majority of people do something does not mean that social pressure drove each of them to do it. The people listening to Elvis in the '50s, or the Beatles in the '60s, did not do it because popular culture drove them to do it.
They did it because they felt something. They connected themselves to something they had needed for a long time but had never had.
If today's punks judge each person who wears punk clothes or dresses--like Avril Lavigne--as a corporate sheep, then they will become as superficial as those preps they hate who continually ostracize people who might not shop at Abercrombie or American Eagle.
Is it really that bad for a lot of people to rebel together?
NATHAN MOORE is a home-schooled junior, who also attends classes at Colonial Forge High School.