Blogocentric Formulations

Girlfriend

"Barrel of Monkeys" 
Day 5





"Girlfriend"
by Avril Lavigne
from The Best Damn Thing (2007)

Until Love Sux was released in 2022, this album - The Best Damn Thing - was hands-down my favorite. It had the most songs on it that I really liked, and it was one of the few albums that I constantly listened to straight through. With most musical artists, I'll listen to specific songs, or put together specific playlists of multiple songs from multiple albums; it's rare for me to love an album so much that I'll just listen to every track without skipping around, but this is definitely one of them. And this song is probably the best known of all the songs on the album. It was also the first single released off the album.

This music video is also one of those classics mid-1990s to early-2000s genre of videos where the artist plays multiple characters in the narrative by dressing up differently. In this one she plays both the girlfriend and the girl who wanted to steal the guy, which is both kind of a fun premise and potentially a real psychological issue that's probably best explored in therapy.

I used to listen to this song a lot when I was commuting to and from work, and working late. During the time this album was out, I was working for a small production company that didn't have a lot of staff, so I'd have to handle a lot of different tasks and usually ended up working really late. That place also ended up laying me off, and you can read more about that experience and my current views on company loyalty in a prior entry: "What The Hell" . Anyway, I would often blast this song when I was alone in the office, or when I was driving home late at night because I needed high-energy music to keep me awake. So this song definitely brings back mixed memories of producing a game show pilot and all those late nights spent in the office to make it happen.


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