8 things

8 things I would like my pre-teen daughter to understand are wrong with Avril Lavigne’s Sk8r Boi:
1. Skater boys don’t usually play guitar. At least not the ones around here.
2. Just because he’s a boy and you’re a girl doesn’t make anything obvious. There’s a psychological phenomenon called “projection,” where you project your desires onto the blank slate of someone you don’t know well, who somewhat fits your notion of an ideal person. As the real person emerges over time, you’ll wonder how he has changed. In fact, he hasn’t changed at all, he just never was the person you projected him to be.
3. I’m not kidding about that. It can be a killer. Watch out for it.
4. It should really be “stuck up their noses,” not “stuck up their nose.” Unless her friends have only one nose, or it was some big papier-mache nose left over from a ballet version of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Which seems unlikely, and a little involved for this song. So I think the lyric’s wrong.
5. I have a problem with baggy clothes, myself. Listen, we wore some pretty stupid looking clothes when I was a kid, but at least we had both hands free. Hey, Sk8er Boi: Wearing a belt is not a crime.
6. I guess she did need to come back down to earth. She’s way too young to be having a baby. You cannot imagine the impact that’s going to have on her life. You really need to understand about contraception.
7. If they were really her friends, they’d have been considerate enough to have called and asked whether she wanted them to get tickets for her. This is just rude.
8. No one has rocked up MTV since at least 1992. They rock out on Fuse, or on VH1 (if they’re Warren Zevon).
McSweeney’s was going to run this as one of their lists. Then they never did. So here it is.