Avril Lavigne’s “Hello Kitty” Video: The Singer Tweets In Response To The Scandal
Two days ago, Avril Lavigne‘s “Hello Kitty” video premiered on the singer’s website and, eventually, made its way to YouTube. Upon watching, we here at Idolator declared it to be the worst thing you’d watch all week. Hours later, other outlets such as Billboard, GQ, USA Today and E! Online followed suit, all equally appalled at the disastrous clip.
But while many online entities have been citing the seemingly racist overtones of the clip — the song and video reference Japanese pop and kawaii culture, while the visual also employs Japanese dancers, hence Avril receiving a similar backlash to the one Sky Ferreira faced last week over her “I Blame Myself” clip — we were offended because the song just flat-out sucks and the video comes off, to us, as age-inappropriate.
Regardless, head below to see Avril’s response to the “Hello Kitty” furor, via the marvelous medium of Twitter.
RACIST??? LOLOLOL!!! I love Japanese culture and I spend half of my time in Japan. I flew to Tokyo to shoot this video…
— Avril Lavigne (@AvrilLavigne) April 24, 2014
…specifically for my Japanese fans, WITH my Japanese label, Japanese choreographers AND a Japanese director IN Japan.
— Avril Lavigne (@AvrilLavigne) April 24, 2014
Interestingly, other sites also made much of the fact that “Hello Kitty” was supposedly pulled from YouTube, when in fact the video had an early premiere on Lavigne’s website, and the only pulling was done with the illegally uploaded clips that followed. It’s now officially available to watch via Avril’s YouTube channel. Or, again, you can simply watch it here and make your own mind up on the matter.
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