Avril Lavigne - Let Go (2002)

What?

Back then, "Complicated" was the hot new thing.  Wearing ties with tank tops was the shit.  Everybody was talking about it - wow, a teenager who didn't want to be the next (insert pop sensation here)? Someone with a punk attitude*, someone with flair, with an identity she wasn't afraid to flaunt... and easy on the eyes, too.

Right off the bat, the reason why I wanted to listen to Let Go wasn't because of that fucking annoying single, it was because I was curious.  What was the deal with this one? The story she had told in Sk8er Boi was a teenage romance gone bad, past regrets over what could have been.  That one intrigued me.  So I went in, got the album, went home, found the first empty room and proceeded with the ritual: lie down, put it on, press play, don't stop until it's over.

To say I was blown away would be an understatement, but the why of it is even more important here: there is an honesty in Let Go, an honesty Avril Lavigne wasn't old or experienced enough to know to filter out.  Heart and soul, it was indeed herself she had put on the record - not pretending, not mincing words, telling it like she sees it.  This was a level of identity I was struggling to find in my own creativity, an unrestrained expression of "That's just how it is." Listen to songs like - y'know what, just listen to the whole damn album.  It's pretty much apparent.

Just listen to My World and tell me it's not the type of blatantly honest/descriptive 90's soft rock you'll always pine for at some point or another.  That's right, you can't.  Because you will.

First of all, almost no album without a sense of darkness has earned a place in my collection.  Let Go has that, not in instrumentalization alone but in lyrics as well.  The cold isolation of Losing Grip, the bitter rejection of Unwanted, the loneliness of I'm With You, the unbelievable ache of Too Much to Ask, the limbo and indecision in Tomorrow* and the undertone of shame in Naked all serve to show that when we were teenagers, our worlds were actually much more complicated than they would become in the years to come.  The simplicity of being naked around someone, worrying that it shows, worrying that it's easily recognized because we just want to hide... who hasn't been there?

But there were notes of optimism.  Bypassing the spirit of fun in Sk8er Boi*, songs like Things I'll Never Say, Mobile, Anything But Ordinary* have more to do with conjuring up images of open skies, of small town/suburbia dry summers*, fresh-mowed lawns, of being young in a place of possibilities, dabbling in bullshit.  Going everywhere but going nowhere but the tank town, knowing the whole world through a television screen or the page of a magazine, always meaning to but never doing.  Friends and brittle, bullshit romances, being young and alive.

Let Go is aptly titled, because I myself can never let go of whatever is holding me back to let loose like this.  What I have to say makes monsters scared, and I don't think I have the strength to see that actually happen.

But back then, I was just 18, thinking I could conquer the world so long as I was myself.

Footnotes: 1- Except, punk was long dead, even though they insisted otherwise, and frequently.  But I didn't know that.  Wouldn't learn just how dead it was until much, much later, but I guess any culture dies a slow an agonizing death only to have its reanimated corpse feed the masses.  That's an essay right there.
2- Tomorrow is actually torn, between optimism and pessimism, but the mood is decidedly a sombre mood.
3- Thing is, Avril Lavigne has tried unsuccessfully to replicate this in later albums, most noticeably with He Wasn't, there's just no equivalent there.
4- Anything But Ordinary is a case of being careful what one wishes for, 'cause it's Hello motherfucking Kitty that's so anything but ordinary that it circles back around and becomes ordinary.  I'd rather go for Robyn's delightfully nonsensical Konichiwa Bitches for that sort of thing, thank you very much.  I think Nobody's Fool is a second good example of this.
5- Yet to see one of those in New York, it's moist as fuck over here.

My Grandmother's House (Introduction)

My grandmother's house, or flat if you will, was a peculiar alternate universe.  Thing is, when my parents married, my father was given the deed of a 2-bedroom flat that was in the same building and immediately across from my grandmother's flat.  35th Street, flat number 2.  Since our house was made by my mother, it was wildly different from my grandmother's house - the layouts were very similar, the fixtures were the same, the only difference was everything.

So returning "home", but having to live in the flat right across from the one I had cried over leaving was peculiar.  Since they were both two-bedroom flats, my mother, sister and I were huddled into the spare room, with my mother and sister sharing a bed.  The room had no room to walk around in, and whatever room there was, was taken over by our luggage - there was no wardrobe space for our clothes.  There was an old sewing machine, the outer shell of which was the stand on which a very small TV sat.

As my mother was looking for a home, me and my sister had nothing to do.  I was attending, well, sort of visiting a study institution.  For context: in Turkey, there is a university entrance exam you have to take in order to get your higher education.  The examination is done once a year, every year, after the classes end.  High school seniors go in.  The exam lasts for three hours, and is comprised of 180 multiple-choice questions on the basic education subjects: Turkish (grammar and use of language), history, geography, philosophy, math, physics, chemistry and biology.  Since high school is split into four separate kinds of paths (Turkish-Math / Science-Math / Social Sciences / Foreign Languages), the groups of categories you had to go for differed.  It's still a minute a question, however, as not all questions can be answered within a minute.

This exam determines which university you'll get into, and that determines, or so we were told, how well you'd be received in the "job-seeking world", then an abstract for us all.  As such, the preparation is intense.  In addition to regular school, since the grades you get are extra points for your overall score, you have to start going to after-school classes in select institutions you pay monthly stipends to.  Junior year is easier, you get one day during the week, and weekends.

Senior year however, means that you are in that place seven days a week: for three classes / hours during school days, and 6 to 8 hours on weekends.  Endless tests, often clashing with schoolwork.  I don't know how many multiple-choice study tests I've gone through, but I'll say this: if I brought together every study book, every booklet, and every practice exam (of 180 questions) I had to go through, put them in a sack and hit you over the head with it, you wouldn't just die, your bones would be turned to dust.

But... starting with our time in my grandmother's spare room, 2002-2003 school year marks the best year of my life.  Despite the constant stress, despite the mounting pressure, despite the ongoing tension at home, some of the best things I've experienced all came during this time.

One of which was a recurring theme.  My mother and I both suffered from bouts of insomnia.  My childhood is riddled with nights where we'd squeeze into my bed (the living room was sectioned off into two pieces, one of which was my parents' bedroom, so no dice) and read books - sometimes all night.  Well, one such night, while my sister was sleeping, I woke up and couldn't sleep again.  I turned on the TV, volume as low as possible, and I found a subtitled, British play.  Having been fond of British sitcoms in my younger years (Dad's Army, Red Dwarf, Last of the Summer Wine), I stuck around.  My mother revealed that she hadn't been sleeping either.

It turns out, we were watching Pygmalion, the 1983 version with Peter O'Toole and Margot Kidder.  It was easily one of the most beautiful things I have watched, and having watched it again recently, I can safely say that this was one of those nights.  I first saw Groundhog Day, Tuesdays with Morrie and the unforgettable I'm Not Rappaport during similar sleepless nights.

Another development was my mother, desperate in trying to keep my sister from being bored, found an innocent little magazine.  She came in one day while I was watching the video of Evanescence's Bring Me to Life, mesmerized (which I'll get to.) This was the translated version of a quaint little Italian comic, W.I.T.C.H. One day, out of boredom, I picked it up.  Issue 3, first arc, just getting started.  I thought it good, at least I wasn't too late.

I kept buying it even after my sister stopped, until they stopped publishing it in Turkey.  Now, I grew up watching Sailor Moon.  I wanted to be Tuxedo Mask pretty badly back then.  I've played with dolls.  I've armed dolls against GI Joe uprisings.  I love Magic Knight Rayearth.  I always got along better with girls.  So this was not new to me, and the fact of the matter is, the first few story arcs in the comic series is pretty dark, the first one perhaps darker, and the issue we bought was one of the lowest points for the characters.  Depressing, dark, struggling... up my alley.

In short, I fell in love with the damn thing.

By this time, I was also attending, as a tourist again, to weekend classes to get me reacquainted with what would be hitting me full-force in the upcoming school year: the preparation for the university entrance exam.  Now, to elaborate further, this requires attending a separate set of classes, sort of like cram school, on the weekends and holidays for your sophomore/junior year, and 7 days a week on your senior year.  That's well beyond what's considered a full-time job in and of itself.  And since cram school isn't part of school property, you often go quite a ways around the city to get to one.

Mine was in Kızılay.  Luckily for me, one of the few advances made before it all went to hell was a rather rudimentary subway system throughout Ankara, which took me about half an hour to forty minutes to get within walking distance.  Ever since discovering the joy of listening to music on the go, this became a goldmine for me.  Since most albums I was listening to didn't quite exceed the 40-45 minute mark, it was perfect to listen to 'em twice - on the way to and back.

Also, I had been blessed with a multimedia store two streets over from the cram school, which I took to visiting to buy cassettes.  This led to an exponential increase in what I listened to, though I was pretty much grounded in the music that had brought me this far.  There were deviations, however, which is where our story starts.  With a very unlikely candidate, a Canadian girl from a small town that everybody had dismissed as not being worth it.