Song #340: "Girlfriend"--Avril Lavigne (2007)

For most of you faithful followers of our musical journey, this song will likely feel like it's coming out of left field. But there is a definite back story here.

It's early 2007 and I'm living....err.....working at the then-Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia). 70 hour weeks are the norm, sometimes more, especially Wednesday and Thursday nights, always trying to get the production orders out ahead so my awesome producers upstairs could hit the ground running each morning, get the work done, and get out of dodge on time. That was my mantra.

So, at some point, maybe walking down the hallway on studio row upstairs or some other way, I came across a song that immediately stopped me dead in my tracks. And this was my thought:

"If 'Mickey' by Toni Basil (1982) had a child, it would be this song."

Now, you won't see Toni on the Top 500, in fact, my sophomore year in high school my "group" of lunch friends got so tired of this song on the jukebox (yes, Patrick Henry had a jukebox in the cafeteria), that one day we decided we'd walk out if it came on.

It did.

We did.

But fast forward a quarter-century. I absolutely DUG this song. I'm like, this is "Mickey" but with a super attitude. "Mickey" on steroids. Driving rock, not annoying cheerleader hand claps (until the bridge, of course, but I accepted that....)

So, for many nights in the last nine months I labored on Basie Road, I would fire this tune up on NexGen and play it right before I left. Some nights, it would be played over and over and over again to get me over the hump and out the door.

And thus, the reason why, of all people, Avril Lavigne is in my Top 500 countdown.

Of course, the CLEAN version is posted here. Had there not been a clean version, A) it never would have aired on the radio, and B) I never would have accepted it.