I couldn't be Avril Lavigne

There's something about being 30 and clamering onto youth. I feel in a very comfortable place where I can still enjoy all the things I have been enjoying up til now, with no real plans of properly growing up anytime soon, but there is just that odd feeling when I press to open my TikTok app and watch creators just over a third my age being the new geniuses of editing and content and remembering complex choreography.

When I flick through this app, though, you do also see the creators closer to my age who are either clever adopters or exiles from lands such as Vine and YouTube where their once relevant content has since needed to adapt to meet the infinite scrolling of TikTok.

Then...There's Avril Lavigne, who I saw in her first ever TikTok, teaming up with Tony Hawk...Still holding onto the legacy of Sk8ter Boi. I gotta say...

...I couldn't be Avril Lavigne.

Sure, a good chunk of my life is bathed in nostalgia. I have a retro video game collection, I own way too many Pokemon Cards in the hope promised by YouTubers that they are actually a sound investment, I spend my mornings over breakfast simulating Saturday Morning Cartoons with Disney+. But I'm also not Avril Lavigne. Who is 36, and still riding that Sk8er Boi wave.

Sk8er Boi is older than proably the average user/creator on that platform. Let that sink in. Avril Lavigne was married to Chad Kroeger of Nickelback. Avril Lavigne's career is so spotty there was a conspiracy theory that the Avril Lavigne of today is an imposter/body double and I bought it.

You can't tell me that Sk8ter Boi Lavigne is the same person that did Hello Kitty. Do you even remember Hello Kitty the song by Avril Lavigne? It was like Avril doing Gwen Stefani and yet somehow more cultrually appropriative.

It's impressive that she's been able to ride this wave as long as she has. You can understand it for someone like Rick Astley, who cashed in ASAP once Rick-Rolling was a thing. Sk8er Boi on paper should have had a small half-life, back when skatebording was at a peak in the cultural zeitgeist. Then again, cycles happen, I suppose. Tony Hawk is out there telling people to do a kickflip, appearing in Jack Black's YouTube videos, getting a remaster of the classic video games of his property that propelled skateboard culture further in the first place. Now here he is, being a co-star in currently Avril Lavigne's only TikTok, doing tricks while a soundclip of the 2002 multi-platinum hit Sk8er Boi plays.

Francis Lawrence directed the music video for Sk8er Boi, did you know that? Dude directed three Hunger Games movies, you think he wants to still be known as the director of the Sk8er Boi music video? No. He wants you to forget he directed Red Sparrow.

So I sit there, watching the constant onslaught of anything and everything in small chunks on TikTok, seeing amazing content and voyeuristic insights into other people's lives, seeing Zack King somehow still blowing the minds of people who don't understand a match cut, seeing repurposed clips of YouTube videos and dances replicated over and over again...and I see Avril Lavigne. Singer of the first single I ever bought on CD from a Woolworths in 2002 when I was 11. The year is 2021 and she is vibing with the exact same single. Alongside Tony Hawk, the original Sk8er Boi of a generation. On TikTok. An app that people my age think will never "beat Vine", a platform that ended almost a decade ago.

Time is weird. The fact that Avril Lavigne can do all this, somehow still be the same person (which the conspiracy theory part of me finds questionable), and still make 1.6 million followers from one video with 22.6 million views in TWO DAYS almost 20 years after the original smash hit is insane.

It's the power of TikTok. It's the power of a new platform with a new audience. It's the power of nostalgia. But you still wouldn't catch me dead trying to ride the same success I had 20 years ago. Hell, I even forget that I graduated a decade ago...