Sk8er Boi is the second single from pop-rock star Avril Lavigne’s debut album, Let Go. Written by Lavigne and The Matrix and released in 2002, Sk8er Boi reached number ten on the US Billboard Hot 100. , thirteen in Canada, three in Australia and number one in Spain.
Sk8er Boi was used in many different media. It has been heard on the TV show Cold Case. It also appears in the video games Elite Beat Agents and SingStar Pop. In 2003, Paramount Pictures optioned the song for a movie, but it has either been abandoned or is in development hell.
The song Sk8er Boi is about a preppy girl and a skateboarder. The boy openly likes the girl, but she refuses to tell him her true feelings, that she likes him too, due to pressure from her friends. Eventually he becomes a rock star and she sees him on TV. She regrets not telling him her feelings while she had the chance. She is now dating someone else.
Some people attribute the song’s inspiration to Marc Gould, who Lavigne was dating at the time. Other people say that Sk8er Boi is Lavigne’s autobiography, with one small exception, she’s the skater who liked a preppy boy.
The music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. The video begins with a man in an alley with a bunch of spray paint on the ground. He is advertising a concert that Lavigne is organizing. The video continues with advertising seen everywhere from computers and cell phones to coffee cups. There’s even a star, the symbol of her concert, spray-painted on the road. In the middle of the music video, Lavigne and her band are shown preparing for a concert on top of cars. The concert begins and people start to fill up around the cars. Finally, the police try to stop the concert. They start putting people in the police car and Lavigne ends her concert by smashing her guitar through the windshield. The last shot of the video is of a helicopter flying over Lavigne and Lavigne looking at it. FYI, if you watch the music video closely, you’ll see that Lavigne changes from blue pants to black with her green shirt halfway through the music video.
In the music video, Lavigne is wearing a green and gold t-shirt from Wilkesboro Elementary School in North Carolina. She picked up the shirt at a thrift store in New York. Orders poured in from all over the world for the t-shirt Lavigne had worn in the video. The shirts had been out of circulation for four years, but were reprinted. The school made enough money selling t-shirts to buy new computers.