Day 289: Olivia Rodrigo – SOUR
Today I got so irked by an Irish Times headline that I decided to finally listen to a bit of Olivia Rodrigo. The headline was, “Is Olivia Rodrigo covering Fontaines DC and CMAT the pop artist’s bid to garner grown-up cred?” where the author says that because she’s collaborated with Robert Smith and cites Fiona Apple as an influence, “How more explicitly could she articulate her desire to be taken seriously?” Hmm, I don’t know, I actually think she might just like The Cure and Fiona Apple.
Album cover courtesy of Geffen Records
I’ve never really listened to Olivia Rodrigo outside of hearing some of her stuff when I’m out and about, but I know how much everyone rated her first album SOUR, so I thought I’d start with that one. It came out in 2021, and it was only supposed to be an EP, but her song “Drivers Licence” went extremely viral on TikTok. She was only 17 at the time. Before that, she’d acted on a Disney Channel show called Bizaardvark and had performed and written songs for High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.
The general theme of SOUR is exploring the sour emotions of teenage girls that they’re often chastised for, like anger, jealousy or sadness. They’re written intentionally with the melodrama of wildness that comes with being young, formatted almost as diary entries of raw emotion, with inspiration clearly taken from country storytelling rather than just traditional pop. She says she also wanted the album to be a mixture of all of her different influences, beyond just pop:
My dream is to have it be an intersection between mainstream pop, folk music, and alternative rock. I love the songwriting and the lyricism and the melodies of folk music. I love the tonality of alt-rock. Obviously, I’m obsessed with pop and pop artists. So I’m going to try and take all of my sort of influences and inspirations and kind of make something that I like.
The talent it takes at that age to write things that not only make you remember what it was like to be young, but also resonate with adults, must be immense. The hits like “déjà vu” and “drivers license” are almost perfect break up songs, even if you’re decades too long in the tooth to be listening to songs about teenage heartbreak. Despite the slight dip at the end of the album, it’s still constantly interesting to listen to. And unlike a lot of new pop debuts, it just doesn’t sound like she’s in well-treaded water, it ends up sounding pretty unique to her. If we’re measuring it against the benchmark of Gen Z pop that trends on TikTok, anyone would have to admit that SOUR is exceptional.
The author of that Irish Times article scoured Reddit for critical comments about her new album and concluded his piece by musing that “The worry is that the fans who have watched her grow up in public may not be ready to see their favourite pop star morph into an artist who worships The Cure and covers Fontaines DC and CMAT.” I’d argue that the broad-ranging influences she had were clear from the start. But also, isn’t that kind of obvious? Even if she spent her career releasing SOUR 2, SOUR 3 and SOUR 4, there’s still no guarantee that all her old fans would like to keep listening – you’d assume that the fans who watched her grow up probably grew up, too. Tastes change.
Surely the expectation is that artists also grow and learn and develop as they age, especially if they wrote their first album when they were only 17 years old. And if SOUR is Olivia Rodrigo’s starting point, who knows where she’ll go in her lifetime? I hope she changes as an artist a million times over and does whatever she wants, never even thinking of playing it safe for the part of the audiences who expect her to still be the same person she was on the Disney Channel.
I’m listening to the rest of her stuff soon, I liked SOUR. I never thought I’d want to revisit post-breakup teenage angst, but it’s such an elegant execution of the concept that you can’t help but to be impressed. It’s an 8.5/10, it would have been a nine if the rest of the album would’ve been as good as the start.
Also, at the risk of sounding too woke, I just don’t think there would ever be articles insinuating that a 23-year-old male artist is pretending to like The Cure to seem like a serious adult.