When Pop Music Lets Women of Color Express Their Rage

When I was a kid, I loved to study my older sister’s music collection. My eyes would skim the spines of tapes and CDs by Jewel, S Club 7, and the Backstreet Boys. Even though I was a decade younger than my sister, most of my musical taste was gleaned from whatever she was listening to—usually pop ballads or sorrowful laments about relationships—and the Bollywood, chutney, and soca CDs my parents played in the car.

Until I heard Avril Lavigne.

After school, I would spend most of my evenings glued to the television. One of my favorite shows was The Hit List, which played music videos and featured interviews with the artists. When the host came onscreen to introduce Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi,” I was expecting more of the same pop music that they always played. Instead, my eyes widened as the drums and guitar kicked in, Avril Lavigne jumping down into the shot in a backward baseball cap.

Sporting a necktie over a graphic tee, studded bracelets, and the backward cap, Lavigne was the complete opposite of doe-eyed, polished pop princesses like Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears. Her gestures were at once brash and apathetic, one moment punching the camera and the next scratching her head as if deeply bored. Even her lyrics refused to be polite. There was a mocking tone in her voice when she sneered, “Does your pretty face see what he’s worth?” As I watched her smash her guitar into the windshield of a parked car, I realized I’d never seen these emotions given so much space in music before. I knew to expect joy and sadness in music. But anger? Contempt? These were new feelings, and liberating ones.

I was surprised that Avril Lavigne’s rebel attitude resonated with me, because rebel was not at all how I would have described myself. I was a relatively quiet, shy, and obedient child. At the same time, anyone who thinks that an eight-year-old has nothing to be angry about has likely forgotten what it’s like to be a child. Whether it was students turning up their nose at my “ethnic” food at lunch, my first-grade classmate calling me a baby for wearing Blues Clues jeans, or a peer threatening to cut off my pigtails, the classroom was a space of mundane cruelty. Not wanting to be labeled a snitch, I would choose to be the bigger person and let it go. But letting go internally wasn’t as easy. As these events slowly accumulated, I got angrier and angrier.

In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong weaves memoir, cultural criticism, and history to theorize “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” Minor feelings, as she calls them, are “built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” Hong’s definition mirrors the sensations I felt as a child. When these altercations happened in the classroom, I actively chose not to fight back because I believed my reaction would be questioned or dismissed. I sensed that even if I spoke up, the boy who threatened to cut my hair or the girl who called me a baby for wearing those jeans would insist they were “just joking.” Trying to push back seemed needlessly difficult when the end result would be the same, so I gave up and simply accepted it as part of my school experience.

Anyone who thinks an eight-year-old has nothing to be angry about has likely forgotten what it’s like to be a child.

Key to Hong’s definition of minor feelings is that they’re part of the “everyday racial experience,” capturing all of the smaller, negative feelings that build up over time. They’re easier to overlook than overt hate crimes or obviously racist statements, but they are just as important. When I say that the classroom was filled with mundane cruelty, I mean that these events were so commonplace, and so roundly ignored by peers and teachers, that I simply learned to live with them.

Hearing Avril Lavigne, and seeing her music video, was one of the first times I could recognize the negative, dysphoric emotions in myself. I begged a family member to take me to the store to buy the album—the first one I ever owned, and the first vehicle I found to finally channel these feelings.

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When Let Go was released in 2002, critics often positioned Avril Lavigne as a naive girl with trivial concerns. The Washington Post framed the album as “rife with subjects befitting a high schooler: cute ‘bois’ Lavigne wishes she could talk to, the difficulties of opening up emotionally.” They called her music’s subject matter “adorable.” In Blender’s review of the album, the author closes with: “Just imagine how good she’ll be after some real heartbreak.”

These reviews point to a larger cultural problem: that feminized rage isn’t taken seriously. As Soraya Chemaly writes for The Guardian, “Studies show that girls are frequently discouraged from even recognising their own anger, from talking about negative feelings, or being demanding in ways that focus on their own needs.” Instead of getting to be punk, brash, and angry, as Let Go was, “girls are encouraged to smile more, use their ‘nice’ voices and sublimate how they themselves may feel in deference to the comfort of others.” This gender socialization starts from birth and continues on as we grow, often in subtle ways. When I was in kindergarten, the girls were encouraged to play with the house sets. When I was a teenager, my relatives would joke that I would not be able to find a husband because I didn’t know how to cook. For racialized women, rage can be policed even more repressively, as with the “Angry Black Woman” or “docile Asian” stereotypes.

Although Let Go helped me identify my feelings of rage, I didn’t allow myself to act on them. Reading Lavigne’s critics now, I can see remnants of what I was afraid of then. I didn’t want to have my emotions belittled, or brushed off as trivial, the way I knew they’d be in the classroom. Hong notes that when racialized people are honest about how we feel, those feelings “are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, depressing, and belligerent.” I wanted to avoid the shame that came with that.

Through elementary school, high school, and university, I lived a dual life—as the bookish, amiable Natasha in public, and Natasha stewing in her room with the album on repeat in private. University came with a new set of challenges. When I asked an orientation group leader about the dance troupes I might join, they recommended the South Asian dance collective because they thought it would be a better fit for me than any of the others, dismissing my insistence that I wanted to branch out into different types of dance. Similarly, when I became more involved in the school’s creative writing scene, I had a peer insist that my writing was about “the immigrant experience,” even though I was primarily writing about martial arts and the suburb I grew up in. Even though my campus was more diverse than most universities across Ontario, these statements were permissible in a predominantly white institution. Even in a place where I thought I would feel safe, I was still tokenized and stereotyped. But I still swore that I would be the bigger person and let it go.

But I couldn’t push those feelings down forever. They reached a tipping point when I started my first job out of university.

I showed up to the office on my first day wearing ill-fitting dress pants and a cheap blouse from Forever 21, bursting with enthusiasm and trying to look the part of a “real” adult at twenty-two. What seemed most exciting was that my supervisor, Abigail, was also a woman of color, and only a few years older than me. From the clicking of her heeled shoes to her signature bright lipstick, she had all the makings of a real office adult.

Unfortunately, Abigail was not the mentor I had expected. She had assimilated to the customs and punitive measures of white corporate culture—from the way she spoke to her subordinates with an infantilizing, sugary tone to the way she watched our work like a hawk. She was quick to go through my work with a fine-tooth comb and make unnecessary changes, scolding me for my mistakes but rarely giving me feedback for growth.

She prioritized her own schedule, placing me at the front desk from 8:45 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. with minimal breaks. At first, I didn’t want to say anything, but those shifts began to take a toll on me. I was constantly leaving the office drained, and it affected my work the next day. During our regular one-on-one, I sat in the chair fidgeting as she spoke. When she finally asked if I had anything to cover, I nervously explained how the longer shifts were affecting me and asked if she could make any changes. She told me I was being disagreeable. Once again, my experiences were dismissed. I didn’t want to draw any more unnecessary attention to myself. From then on, I tried to assimilate into the corporate culture, just as Abigail had.

For racialized women, rage can be policed even more repressively.

In Minor Feelings, Hong notes that “the privilege of assimilation is that you are left alone.” But this isolation comes at a price. For me, it was the cost of yet again forcing my rage down, accepting that these were my working conditions and I couldn’t expect anything better.

I began to conjure up scenes of hypothetical retaliation. What if I unplug her keyboard so she can’t type up a report? Or swap our schedules without telling her until minutes before? Looking back, I can’t help but feel sad about these daydreams. Even my imaginary rage had become limited. Clearly, the resentment had accumulated into something I could no longer ignore. The idea that these working conditions were just something I had to live with—that it might be like this at every job I ever held in the future—felt intolerable.

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In May 2021, several friends messaged me with the same instruction: You need to listen to Olivia Rodrigo’s album. When Sour came out, I was in a state of hibernation when it came to new media, gravitating instead toward old favorites. But my interest was piqued by the way my friends all seemed to describe Olivia Rodrigo’s music: nostalgic.

Listening to “brutal,” the first track on the album, I could immediately hear the Paramore comparisons that everyone online was raving about. Rodrigo’s music had hints of the punk rock, punk-pop, and alternative rock scenes that I had known growing up. When Rodrigo sang, “So when you gonna tell her / That we did that too? / She thinks it’s special / But it’s all reused,” I could practically hear Avril Lavigne’s “Am I just some chick you placed beside you to take somebody’s place? / When you turn around, can you recognize my face?” Likewise, Rodrigo’s “Well, good for you, you look happy and healthy / Not me, if you ever cared to ask” made me find myself back in Lavigne’s “Why should I care? / ’Cause you weren’t there when I was scared / I was so alone.”

In a Teen Vogue profile of the singer-songwriter, P. Claire Dodson writes that Rodrigo “isn’t sure how to trace the root of that need to be good, or the crushing emotion she felt when she couldn’t pull it off. Her parents weren’t super strict, and they didn’t need to be. She got straight A’s and was a self-described teacher’s pet.” In contrast, songwriting was “a place for all those messy emotions to live under her goody-two-shoes exterior. Pettiness and jealousy and anger and betrayal.”

Like Rodrigo, I was a straight-A kid and a teacher’s pet. I’d also been discouraged from recognizing my own anger, a process I’d internalized so deeply that I didn’t often focus on my own needs or goals. Abigail’s supervision only reinforced the lesson that advocating for myself was a losing battle.

Since I was a contract employee, I avoided taking any vacation or sick days because it meant I would be earning less money. When I got sick before the winter holidays, I convinced myself I wasn’t sick enough to miss a portion of my paycheck. But there was another reason too. I could practically hear Abigail’s voice in my mind: Who would take over on front desk if I wasn’t there?

On the last day before we closed for the holidays, I sat bundled in a blanket scarf, blowing my nose every five minutes and coughing into my sleeve. I was working on the schedule for the new year when the office manager—Abigail’s boss—told us all to go home. Panicking, I insisted I needed to finish this task before I left. She told me the work would still be there in the New Year.

In the New Year, Abigail called me into the office and said, in her signature infantilizing voice, “You should have had this done in December. Back when I was in your position, I was able to get this done and more.” I nodded, smiled, and apologized. When I returned to the front desk, I dove back into my work, but I couldn’t deny the rawness in my throat, the trembling of my bottom lip. My coworker asked me how I was doing. I burst into tears.

Sobbing at the front desk gave me permission to unlock all of my other negative feelings about that position. I was done with being the bigger person. I took the issue to the office manager, who spoke to Abigail, but Abigail’s fake, corporate non-apology only stoked the flames of my anger. After that, I only ever spoke to her in a curt, terse tone, and her visible discomfort with it made me smile. Later, I moved into another position where she wasn’t managing me, and I made a point to complain if she put me on front desk too often. It was petty, but also freeing. For the first time, I felt like I had climbed the mountain of my accumulated rage instead of being crushed by it.

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It’s been twenty years since the release of Avril Lavigne’s Let Go and twenty years since I first recognized my suppressed rage. Unlike the initial reception to Avril Lavigne’s album, the reviews of Sour have been largely positive. Rodlyn-mae Banting’s Bitch Media review highlights that “too many of us still understand girlhood as a phase to be tolerated, rather than a bottomless basin of emotional wealth and unique wisdom.” Likewise, Chasity Hale writes for NPR that Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” music video is “making a case for anger as a legitimate form of artistic expression, and giving other young women permission to feel.”

I’d like to think that this marks a societal change in how we view girls’ and women’s rage in art. At the very least, it’s a testament to the women, especially racialized women, who are taking the lead on smart, insightful expressions of feminine anger. Olivia Rodrigo exemplifies a larger trend in popular music that features (racialized) teenage rage, as Cyrena Touros and Chasity Hale discussed on NPR News. From Willow Smith’s shift to punk music to the Linda Lindas’ viral hit “Racist, Sexist Boy,” all of these artists are “a reminder that feelings are meant to be felt and that it’s OK to feel resentful or to feel sad.”

I wish I had believed that growing up. It’s a reminder that I need even now. Although I had my breakthrough with Abigail, I still find myself falling into familiar habits. I am less amiable now, but there are times when I find myself suppressing my own emotions—biting my tongue after someone makes a comment or excusing myself so no one sees how upset I am. These reactions happen whether I’m at home or at work, with my writing community or with friends. They aren’t easy to unlearn, even when I try to swear off suppressing my emotions.

Remembering that it’s natural to feel resentful or petty is an ongoing process. Works like Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour, Avril Lavigne’s Let Go, and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings have allowed me to better understand these emotions and how to express them. They have created a space that normalizes my negative feelings and that stretches my imagination of a world that validates women’s anger.

Toward the end of the “good 4 u” music video, Olivia Rodrigo stands in a bedroom, the windows aflame as she looks straight toward the camera. The scene begins with her jumping erratically and shaking her head as she sings, but it is crosscut abruptly with her posing and smiling. This is the imaginative capacity I dream of—that sweet spot somewhere between unbridled anger and petty satisfaction. The permission to allow myself to feel these emotions, as messy, ugly, and complicated as they are.

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