Avril Lavigne, impish young rock chick, sings her new song “Girlfriend” in eight different languages … And she’s not the only singer catering to a non-English market.
If you need to steal someone’s boyfriend away, now you can learn how to do it in eight different langages with help from Canadian pop star Avril Lavigne’s new single “Girfriend.”
Lavigne, whose biggest fan base is in Asia, is taking her bad-girl, skate Betty image around the world, with a chorus song in English, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin. To get the pronunciation right for the different linguistic versions of “hey, hey, I don’t like your girl friend / I think you need a new one,” Lavigne worked with a language coach.
The song is from a new album entitled The Best Damn Thing, due out in April. The video, which is already circulating on the web, depicts Avril portraying a brash girl dissing a guy’s current rather nerdy-looking sweetheart and then gleefully stealing him away from the poor thing.
All linguistic versions of the song’s chorus can also be found on the web, available to download as cellphone ringtones. Sources have not confirmed whether this is how Avril got her current beau. She married pop-punk group Sum 41’s singer Deryck Whibley last July.
Lavigne’s linguistic feat may be a gimmick but it highlights the current trend of international stars releasing albums in languages other than English while holding onto their American and English-language fans. Colombian-born artist Shakira did one volume of her album Oral Fixation in her native Spanish even after attaining an internaitonal following, while Jennifer Lopez plans to release her first full Spanish-language album Como Ama una Mujer later this month.
Meanwhile Belinda Carlisle, formerly of the all-girls 80s band The Go-Go’s recorded a solo album uniquely in French, entitled Voila, containing covers of Edith Piaf songs as well as other French classics. The album came out in February 2007.
This article was published Monday, March 12, 2007.
