Girlfriend is the lead single on Canadian Pop Rock star Avril Lavigne’s third album, The Best Damn Thing. It was produced by Lukasz Gottwald and has done the best out of all of Lavigne’s songs in the United States hitting the number one spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. In the United Kingdom it reached number two and it was number one for 6 weeks in Australia.
The song is about Lavigne’s crush on a boy that currently has a girlfriend. It features they pop-punk influence of the eighties and sounds like Lavigne’s earlier songs. It did so well that it has been translated into seven different languages; French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish. It has appeared in many things such as the video game Burnout Dominator and Burnout Paradise. Girlfriend also appeared in the trailers for the live action Bratz film, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Bring It On: In It to Win It.
The music video for Girlfriend was directed by The Malloys and filmed in Norwalk, California at the Golf ‘n’ Stuff. Lavigne plays two girls, an innocent girl with glasses and red hair, and an evil girl with black hair. The black-haired girl tries repeatedly to outdo the red-haired girl and win over a man, played by American Model Bryan McMullin. In the end she hits the red-haired girl with a golf ball, making her fall into water, and stealing the heart of the boy.
Lavigne’s hit song had some controversy when the Rubinoos filed a law suit against Lavigne saying that she copied their 1979 single “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”. In January of 2008 the lawsuit was settled and it was decided that the similarities between the two songs were because of “certain common and widely used lyrics”, and they “completely exonerate Avril and Luke from any wrongdoing of any kind in connection with the claims made [in the] lawsuit.”
Lavigne told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this about the Girlfriend law suit, “You have to understand this kind of stuff happens to people all the time, especially when they have a big hit song. And it’s happened to me before with other songs; it just wasn’t made public. That’s what people do, it’s like whatever, it’s not a big deal. Everyone made it into a big deal because it went public. It was never a big deal for me.”
