What the Hell by Avril Lavigne

What the Hell is a 2011 pop single by Canadian singer Avril Lavigne. She wrote it with Swedish producers Max Martin and Shellback. They recorded it at Maratone Studios in Stockholm. RCA Records released it on January 10, 2011, as the lead single from her fourth album, Goodbye Lullaby. It peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. It reached the top 10 in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It has since been certified four times platinum in the United States.

Lavigne wrote the song during a trip to Sweden that lasted a couple of weeks. She played Martin the record she had been making. She wrote a handful of songs with him and Shellback. The three had worked together once before, on Dancing Crazy, a song recorded by Miranda Cosgrove. Lavigne sang the lead and background vocals. Shellback played drums, guitar and bass, and Martin played the keyboards. Michael Ilbert engineered the session. Serban Ghenea mixed the final track.

The song opens with Martin's bright, retro organ riff and hand-claps. Guitars come in for the chorus. Critics heard garage rock in it. Some compared the sound to The Hives. Andy Greenwald of Entertainment Weekly pointed to the Farfisa organ as the thing that put Lavigne back in step with the pop acts of the day. The track is in A major at 150 beats per minute. The full breakdown is on the song's key and BPM page.

The cheerful sound was something of an outlier on Goodbye Lullaby. Lavigne described most of the album as raw and stripped down, built on acoustic guitar and piano. She called What the Hell the most pop track on the record and also the least personal one. She said it carried a broad message about personal freedom. She told interviewers it was lighter and more fun than the rest of the album. The other songs, she said, had turned out bittersweet.

Gil Kaufman at MTV connected the lyrics to Lavigne's divorce from Sum 41 singer Deryck Whibley and to her public frustration with her label. She posted on her website in November 2010 that the album had been finished for a full year. She blamed her record company for holding it back. The same post named What the Hell as the first single. Jody Rosen of Rolling Stone read it more simply, as a party song about a good girl deciding to cut loose.

The rollout leaned on television and social media. Lavigne debuted the song on December 31, 2010, in a pre-taped segment for Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. She also played her 2007 hit Girlfriend in the segment. She described the new song as a fun, upbeat party track. She said a New Year's broadcast suited it. Fans could download it free from her Facebook page for 48 hours on New Year's Day. Digital sales opened in France on January 10 and in the United States and Canada the following day.

Reviews were mostly warm. Many of them measured it against Girlfriend. Kaufman praised its cheerleader energy and its groove. Rosen called the music some of her catchiest. Nick Levine of Digital Spy gave it five stars. He still said it fell a little short of the earlier hit. Jonathan Keefe of Slant Magazine credited Martin's production with making the chorus sound bigger than it had any right to. A few writers were less impressed. One called it immature but praised its theme.

The song did best in Asia. It peaked at number two on the Billboard Japan Hot 100. It topped Japan's adult contemporary airplay chart. It went to number one on South Korea's Gaon international chart and sold close to 800,000 downloads there. It won Hot 100 Airplay of the Year at the 2011 Billboard Japan Music Awards. In Europe it reached number 16 in the United Kingdom, number 15 in Italy and number 18 in France. It is certified four times platinum in Canada, two times platinum in Australia and New Zealand, and platinum in the United Kingdom. BMI honored it at its London Awards and its Pop Awards in 2012.

Marcus Raboy directed the music video. It was shot in 3D in Los Angeles in December 2010 and premiered on January 23, 2011. In it, Lavigne wakes up next to her boyfriend, played by Spencer Hill, locks him in a closet and leaves. She takes a taxi, crashes it, shoots baskets at the Sixth Street Viaduct and ducks into a vintage store. Her mother, Judy, appears as the clerk. The video ends with a concert scene and a stage dive. It also shows Sony products, Lavigne's perfumes and her Abbey Dawn clothing. The New York Post criticized the amount of product placement. Lavigne said her favorite part was the rock-out scene at the end.

She kept the song on television through 2011. She performed it on The View, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and the MuchMusic Video Awards. She sang it in a medley with Smile on Britain's Got Talent. It was also a regular part of the setlist on her Black Star Tour that year.