Canadian singer-songwriter Avril Lavigne, best known for her worldwide smash Complicated 12 years ago, has laughed off withering criticism over her song Hello Kitty and the accompanying music video.
Lavigne, who has sold more than 50 million singles and is now aged 29, took to Twitter after the song and video was slated for objectifying Japanese culture, defiantly posting: "RACIST??? LOLOLOL!!! I love Japanese culture and I spend half of my time in Japan. I flew to Tokyo to shoot this video…"
She then tweeted photos and a short behind-the-scenes video about the clip, which focuses on herself pouting, posing, making the metal 'sign of the horns' hand gesture and interacting with the mostly local production crew.
In the song, co-written by Lavigne and her husband Chad Kroger, from the band Nickelback, Lavigne sings the word "kawaii" (which means 'cuteness' but also describes the 'cute' entertainment culture primarily aimed at young people) then "Hello Kitty you're so pretty / Hello Kitty you're so silly". She also sings: "We can roll around in our underwear / How every silly kitty should be".
Hello Kitty is a fictional female cat created by Yuko Shimuzu in 1974 which became a global brand used to market the products of the Japanese company Sanrio to pre-teen girls. Hello Kitty is also now an animated TV series, she has her own music album, she is the main character in more than 20 video games and the theme of several cafes and restaurants.
Billboard.com's Jason Lipshutz called Lavigne's song song a "grating earworm" but added the "gloriously ghastly" video clip was "a bigger train wreck than the track itself".
Lipshutz said the video "shows Lavigne "parading around with four identical, creepily expressionless Asian women behind her, performing mind-numbingly generic dance moves ... When she's not commanding her vaguely offensive troop, Lavigne is clumsily playing guitar, wearing glasses, eating sushi, waving at admirers, taking a single photograph, and … not much else, really."
Gawker's Jay Hathaway called the song and video "the clumsiest attempt to appropriate Japanese culture and fashion since Gwen Stefani's ill-advised Harajuku phase back in 2004. Maybe clumsier."
In a Huffington Post piece headlined 'Avril Lavigne, Asian women are not your props', Amanda Duberman wrote: "Hello Kitty is not cute. It's not novelty. It dismisses Asian culture and the women who choose to enjoy it as mindless pawns at white America's disposal. We've been over this."
Our view is that the song and clip look like bad lapses in judgement by Lavigne and her team. She might indeed love Japanese culture but the way she has meshed together her signature slacker style with snippets of kawaii culture results in an uncomfortable tribute so half-hearted that it looks and sounds tacky and reeks of being cynical and derivative.
In short, she did not put enough thought or effort - or respect - into the song or the clip
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