It’s been a long, long time since anyone accused “punk princess” Avril Lavigne of writing songs that were intelligent, insightful, or even any good. But now it’s starting to look as if she might be incapable of coming up with even a dumb, crappy song on her own. First came the lawsuit brought by James Gangwer and Tommy Dunbar of the Seventies power pop group the Rubinoos, claiming that Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” was a straightforward ripoff of their song “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”:

We are not so naive as to chalk it up to some sort of cosmic coincidence. The lyric, the meter, the rhythm - they’re identical.

Now a blogger who shall remain nameless is pointing out that the intro to Lavigne’s “I Don’t Have to Try” sounds an awful lot like the song “I’m the Kinda” by electronica musician Peaches. Avril is angrily denying these plagiarism charges (actually, she does just about everything angrily), but it helps not at all that in this month’s issue of InStyle, she names “I’m the Kinda” as one of her five favorite songs.

The lawsuit and the plagiarism charges are likely to mean trouble for Lavigne’s musical career, but suffering is supposed to be good for the artistic soul. Anyway, she’s the kinda artist you kinda enjoy seeing suffer.