Everything you need to know about pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo ahead of Cork gig
Olivia Rodrigo plays in Cork and Dublin this week.
When it was announced Olivia Rodrigo would open the Ireland and UK leg of her first ever world tour at Cork’s Live at the Marquee festival on June 29 2022, Irish twitter needed a moment to compose itself.
Cork has, of course, hosted major pop stars previously: Lady Gaga and Ed Sheeran, for instance. But, with the possible exception of Billie Eilish, few artists have dominated the pop news cycle to the extent 18-year-old Southern California native Rodrigo did last year. She hasn’t simply had a successful 12 months. She has owned the year.
Rodrigo’s calling card was the single Driver’s License, released with minimal fanfare on January 8. A manifesto for teenage angst, it captures the rawness – and also the excruciating banality – of young heartache. Against a wintry wash of piano, the narrator reflects on having passed their driving test and how the freedom this affords has brought not joy but a very dreary sorrow.
“Guess you didn't mean what you wrote in that song about me,” she croons as the track heads the chorus. “’Cause you said forever, now I drive alone past your street.”
Driver’s License debuted at the top of the charts and in its first two weeks was streamed and downloaded more times than the rest of the top five combined. It went on to stay at number one in Ireland for nine weeks.
It was a teen pop instant classic, then. But Driver’s License wove a mystery too. Who was the boy who had broken Rodrigo’s heart? There were a few clues scattered through the lyrics. Obviously he was a songwriter. And Rodrigo elsewhere sings of “that blonde girl…She's everything I'm insecure about”.There was a puzzle here, concealed in plain sight.
Prior to signing a deal with Geffen Records, Rodrigo had headed the cast of the Disney + reboot of High School Musical. And soon there was gossip that Driver’s License was about her co-star Joshua Bassett, whom she was rumoured to be dating. However, neither ever confirmed a relationship – and Rodrigo has refused to comment on the identity of her paramour in Driving License or the romantic rival she suspects of prising him away.
With its finely-tuned anxiousness and power-ballad structure, Driver’s License appeared to mark out Rodrigo out as another chronicler of the Gen Z experience in the tradition of Billie Eilish or Lorde. This idea was quickly turned on its head, however. She wasn’t a sad girl recreating a gauzy scene from HBO’s Euphoria in her bedroom.
“I’m so sick of 17, where’s my f***ing teenage dream” Rodrigo sings on Brutal, the opening number on Sour, her debut album from last May. Echoing the uncompromising lyrics, Brutal is a pedal to the floor slab of bubble-gum punk, steeped in the Weezer and Avril Lavigne songs Rodrigo’s parents would play for her as a child.
Yet Brutal also created controversy with claims the introductory riff bore a more than passing resemblance to that on Elvis Costello’s 1978 single Pump It Up. Coming to Rodrigo’s defence was none other than Costello himself, who said all rock musicians were magpies. “It's how rock and roll works," he wrote on social media. "You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy.” It would not be last time Rodrigo was accused of appropriation. Over the summer Taylor Swift and her collaborators Jack Antonoff and St Vincent’s Annie Clark received songwriter credits for Rodrigo’s single Deja Vu. As Rodrigo had admitted upfront, the track was inspired by Swift’s Cruel Summer (co-written with Antonoff and Clark). Swift and Antonoff received further credits for Rodrigo’s New Year’s Day.
This wasn’t a case of plagiarism: Rodrigo was not trying to pass off someone else’s work as her own. Instead, Swift, Antonoff and Clark received an “interpolation” credit – meaning that Rodrigo had taken Swift’s melodies and repurposed them in her own original compositions.
All of that was handled with good grace on both sides. That was not the case with Rodrigo’s pastiching of American high school imagery in the video to the single Good 4 U and in a photoshoot by Nick Walker, where she poses as a miserable prom queen. The photos, in particular, were seen as referencing the tragic prom queen aesthetic of Hole’s Live Through This album from 1994.
That was pointed out on Instagram by Love – who said Rodrigo was “rude” for not seeking permission. Of course, as Rodrigo later stated, the Hole image was, in turn, inspired by Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. So a movie from the 1970s had been reframed through a 1990s prism and then reinvented all over again for the 21st century. This says a lot about pop cultures’ reliance on recycling old ideas – and it says something about Rodrigo, the new pop queen whose work communicates a wisdom beyond its years.
Her lyrics bristle with the vivacity of youth and yet there is something old-fashioned and resonant about the sadness rippling through her music. And perhaps that is why Rodrigo has created such a splash. She captures the intensity of adolescence in a way that speaks not just to teens but to people who were once teenagers too – which, it turns out, is every adult on the planet.
- This article was first published on December 28, 2021
