THAT'S RACIST!!!
The bad news is, there's no actual Hello Kitty cameo in Avril Lavigne's new "Hello Kitty" music video. And the good news is… well, there is no good news. "Hello Kitty" is mewlingly terrible.
So terrible, in fact, that it is not even on her official YouTube channel, although it can be viewed on fansites and as a non-YouTube version on her own website.
Avril's bizarrely bad new clip premiered Tuesday night, and the claws instantly came out on the Internet, with music fans calling out Avril (and by proxy, her husband, Chad Kroeger, who co-wrote the song) for ripping off Skrillex's side-shaved haircut and Gwen Stefani's "Harajuku Girls" shtick from more than a decade ago — not to mention for inappropriately appropriating Japanese culture.
The video features the "Here's to Never Growing Up" singer (who, incidentally, is now 29) gleefully snacking on sushi, guzzling sake, oddly switching between exaggerated British and Japanese accents, seemingly screaming a dubstep remix of Styx's "Mr. Roboto," and ramsacking a candy shop — all with a posse of her own fembotic, identically dressed Harajuku Girls in tow. It's like a segment of that "Saturday Night Live" skit "J-Pop America Funtime Now," except, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be a parody.
If inappropriately appropriating Japanese culture is racist, the Japanese government has a lot to answer for.