The early Internet buzz on Avril Lavigne's third outing, The Best Damn Thing , was that the album was anything but. Much has been made of the fact that the disc wasn't made available in advance to critics, which is usually a sign that a record blows worse than Hilary and Haylie Duff's mangling of the Go-Go's hit "Our Lips Are Sealed".

To be fair, The Best Damn Thing at least shows Napanee's most famous Home Hardware booster to be an accomplished mimic. Toni Basil's stupidly catchy "Mickey" was an instant one-hit wonder back in 1982, and it sounds every bit as infectious here, where it's been retooled as the first single, "Girlfriend". Mostly, though, Lavigne seems to have run out of ideas, not that she had many to begin with. If you think Good Charlotte deserves to be strung up for poseurism, wait until you hear the flaccid pop-punker "I Can Do Better", which sounds like Mrs. Deryck Whibley wrote it between pushes during her good-morning dump.

What might be most telling about where Lavigne finds herself at this point in her career is that she suddenly seems to be everywhere. Before the release of The Best Damn Thing , the word from her record company was that she'd be doing three interviews for all of Canada. All were going to TV, ensuring maximum pop-culture saturation among those who have trouble making it through The Cat in the Hat . Strange, then, that as reviews began to surface suggesting The Best Damn Thing is a huge step backward that makes you stupider with each listen, Lavigne suddenly turned into a real-life Chatty Cathy. Even though she's never displayed much interest in the interview process, features began popping up in dailies across the country, as well as in on-line publications like Salon . At this rate, it's only a matter of time before she's spilling her guts to Modern Lederhosen Illustrated .

What's funny is that Lavigne has fuck all to say. That's not exactly a shocker. Right before the execrable "Sk8er Boi" turned her from pimply postpubescent nobody to stadium-filling superstar, the skinny-tie-sporting singer set up camp in Vancouver, holing up in a downtown practice space with a preassembled group of backing musicians. Those who met her during her real-life version of Making the Band recall her as a vaguely sullen, personality-challenged snot bag. In subsequent television interviews, she seemed unable to do more than grunt out single-sentence answers while staring at the floor.

When she deigned to talk to print media in the past, Lavigne argued that, while she's happy to play the girl you'd love to take to the Warped Tour, she's much more. Fair enough. But on The Best Damn Thing , it's no longer clear who the real Lavigne is. An antisocial girl-power rebel who hates your parents and everything they stand for, or the dance-pop queen shaking her bony ass in the video for "Girlfriend"?

And now that she's having to do damage control for The Best Damn Thing , she doesn't have the intelligence to clarify things for her fans. Recently, she found herself sitting on the interview sofa on popworld , a sneakily subversive British TV show where subjects are lobbed the most moronic questions this side of a Hannah Sung retrospective. As the host threw out rambling queries about whether daffodils smelled better than sunflowers, Lavigne couldn't summon the brain wattage to respond. For most of her time on camera, she looked ready to claw the eyes out of whoever had convinced her to sit down on the sofa. What viewers saw was Lavigne exposed as nothing but a vacuous, prefab construct, not the punk-savvy pop-culture shifter who toppled Britney Spears in 2002. Funnily, it was the best damn thing ever.