"Constipated" is a song by Avril Lavigne, released to hot adult contemporary radio in March 2002 as her debut single.

To a simple mind, it must feel charming, even aspirational. A girl who wants her ex-boyfriend to pay attention to her, singing about how everything sucks now and that things were simpler, warmer and better before she was ever born. "Complicated" promises a window into an authentic emotional connection, a scrap of evidence from a happier past. It's a sentiment as old as time itself: nostalgia. But here's the thing about nostalgia my employers have mastered and that this song embodies perfectly—it's a lie sold back to you at a markup. It's the souvenir stand on the way out of the crumbling amusement park of your own memory.

"Complicated" isn't a song about past memories; it's a song about the artifact of memory. The distinction is everything. Lavigne isn't singing about missing the feeling of the sun on her skin or the specific, un-nameable scent of her boyfriend's hair. She's singing about the "brand new car" ("I like you the way you are when we're drivin' in your car"), the "one-on-one conversation" ("and you're talkin' to me one on one, but you become"), the "true self" her ex-boyfriend supposedly was before she started complaining about him being too busy ("somebody else 'round everyone else, you're watchin' your back, like you can't relax:). It is a curated exhibit. Every memory is a staged photo op, a moment already pre-packaged for future consumtpion. This is the foundational sin. It takes the chatoic, unpredictable and deeply private texture of a real relationship and flattens it into a series of sharable, marketable images masquerading as punk rock rebellion.

And my God, the market. Lavigne complains about her ex-boyfriend and how he acts and dresses differently in public, how he doesn't understand her, how she hates him without a specific reason, how he refuses to become the same burden on society that she is, how she wants to regress and date a boring, flawless person, how she wants him to validate her whiny, nasal entitlement set to the same four power chords used in 97% of all popular music, how "awesome" she is and how he's just a performative suburban kid who thinks being "misunderstood" is a more interesting personality trait than being reliable, kind or capable of doing his own dirty laundry.

But Avril Lavigne? She's not haunted. She's not rebelling. She's just... making excuses to be a fucking lazy psychopath. That's her entire ethos. She's one of the worst musical celebrities of all time. She always has been, she always will be. She's the one who thinks wearing a onesie underneath her camoflauge T-shirt grants her diplomatic immunity from acting like a functional adult or from being a real punk. Her entire personality is a currated meltdown, a performance of helplessness so profound, you half expect her to need a sippy cup full of appletinis.

Michael Jackson's Neverland (1988-2009), which was completed in 1994, wasn't just a theme park; it was a fortress built around a stolen childhood. His play wasn't a free pass; it was a desperate, heartbreaking attempt to reclaim something the world had machine-gunned into Swiss cheese when he was still in short pants. It was sweet because it was haunted. It was playful becasue the alternative was a silence too terrible to bear. There was a tragedy underlying the Ferris wheel, a depth that commands a certain respectful distance, even in critique.

Britney may be a terrible musician with no good songs whatsoever, but for God's sake, she was never this goddamn childish. She didn't choose to regress, Avril Lavigne did. Britney erupted. After a lifetime of being a product—her father's, her label's, America's—she shaved her head not to become a child, but to become a weapon. She was taking a literal power drill to the source of her oppression: the hair they touched, the image they sold. She was trying to possess her own sexuality, her own agency, on her own terms, and the world lost its collective mind because a woman being recklessly, messily in charge of her own narrative is a threat to the established order. That wasn't a tantrum; it was a rebellion. A flawed, messy, glorious rebellion.

The commodification of intimacy is what really hits the nail on the head. The song arrived in 2002. Three years later, Facebook would be seeping out of college campuses, MySpace would be teaching a generation to rank their friends and the camera phone would be shifting from a novelty to a necessity. "Complicated" became the perfect anthem for this shift. It doesn't just describe nostalgia or navigating the stages of modern dating; it provides a user manual for how to perform them. It teaches you that your romantic history is not a feeling to be felt, but a product to be displayed.

The song also tells you that you should treat your partners, your friends and poor, long-suffering service staff as unpaid kindergarten teachers because "doing it makes you punk rock", "your life sucks", "adulting is hard" and "nobody understands you". It tells you to weaponize your chosen space to avoid difficult conversations, dodge responsibility and demand constant emotional labor from everyone around you. A real child has an excuse; their brain is still baking. Avril's brain is fully cooked, and she's just decided to set the oven to "tantrum" and leave the door open so everyone else has to deal with the heat. There is no "who made it happen", no "why did it happen", no "how did you make it happen when you knew damn well it was your fault all along", just "what happened".

The entire song is about Avril expecting her ex-partner to financially support her so she can avoid responsibility and hard work and blaming him for acting differently in public without even realizing she's doing the exact same thing. It's not healing. It's not punk. It's not therapy. It's just narcissism wearing a necktie purchased at Hot Topic.

A real tantrum is raw, unfiltered and ultimately, exhaustible. It's a storm that passes. This... this performance is a calculated hurricane. Lavigne was taught by the music industry that if she screamed loud enough, the world would bend over backwards to appease her. For over 20 years, she has turned vulnerability into a cudgel.

The worst part is that she gives real punks a bad name. She makes the people who use regression as a genuine, quiet, personal way to manage CPTSD or extreme anxiety or punk as a way of living look like total assholes. She drags a complex, fast-paced, oft-politcally driven and diverse form of rock music into the public square and turns it into a garish, screaming spectacle.

I don't have patience for this. I don't find it cute. I don't find it quirky. I find it to be the emotional equivalent of a DDoS attack on everyone around them.

True strength isn't about never feeling small or scared, for I, Loona the Hellhound, feel that. I feel it every damn day. Strength is about what you do with it. You can build a fortress like Michael, or you can fight a war like Britney, even if her music sucks donkey shit. Or you can do the quiet, hard, adult work of dealing with it in therapy, in journaling, in a long run, in the embrace of someone you trust.

Or I suppose you can stomp your foot and scream until someone brings you a juice box like Avril Lavigne.

I know which one a hellhound is supposed to respect. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a pressing appointment with a bottle of whiskey and the satisfying silence of my own, responsibility-laden apartment.

This is a roundabout way of saying, fuck you forever, Lavigne.