6/23/2023 0 Comments Olivia rodrigo deja vu reviews![]() The remarkably potent Sour, out today, plays a similar game of bait-and-switch with expectations. Rodrigo's songs have lived-in details to spare, as though she had all this time been assembling a detailed dossier on the emotional minutiae of the teenage experience. "Guess the therapist I found for you, she really helped," she shrugs on "good 4 u" - one of those kung fu lyrics that cuts its intended target in seven different places before he even realizes he's bleeding. "Trading jackets, laughing 'bout how small it looks on you," she sings on the hypnotic "deja vu," as a chorus of backup Olivias exhale a scathing line of canned, can-barely-be-bothered laughter at such a romantic cliché: ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. ![]() ![]() The two singles she's released in the lead-up to her debut album, Sour, have effortlessly slipped into unexpected genres - who among us could have predicted that the "drivers license" girl would go scorched-earth pop-punk on her third single, or that she'd pull it off? - and both have been sprinkled with striking, cleverly documented observational details. "drivers license" would have been a hard act for any new artist to follow, but in the past month, Rodrigo has seized every opportunity to prove that there's more to her than even that song could fully showcase. Because on the inside, where all the feelings are, her caps-lock key is JAMMED. And so that bridge exposes the great irony of not only "drivers license," but the lowercase girl herself. (Perhaps the surest indication of the song's massive, cross-generational appeal is the fact that its bridge inspired both a TikTok challenge and an SNL skit - some kids may have been editing their small-screen video responses to it as their parents watched the episode on some old technological innovation called live TV.) Rodrigo's songs play out like bottled-up soliloquies rather than two-sided conversations, which gives them the emotional force of someone who has previously felt unheard (by an apathetic boyfriend, or maybe by adult society writ large) finally speaking her mind. "drivers license" certainly benefits from that tonal shift, but the most moving thing about the song is actually its careening sense of dynamism, the way it swings repeatedly from a private muttering to a collective, belt-it-out exorcism of the heart. ![]() In the last few years, given the success of Billie Eilish's ASMR jams and Swift's soft acoustic reveries - "lowercase girl album" bona fides that were documented by Jill Gutowitz in Vulture last year - it has sometimes felt like pop musicians are playing one big round of the Quiet Game, daring each other into an ever more provocative hush. Although she is usually overlooked, underestimated and even ignored, she sometimes turns out to be the one who's been writing the story all along. And it always does." Beware the lowercase girl. "My only advantage as a reporter," Joan Didion wrote in 1968, unwittingly describing her own species perfectly, "is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. Some of the best of them never grow out of it. For one thing, they've been all over the streaming charts in the past few years: folklore, evermore, "thank u, next," girl in red, mxmtoon, dodie, beabadoobee, how i'm feeling now, "drivers license," "deja vu," "good 4 u" - to name just a few recent, femme-forward musical phenomena that wouldn't even think of imposing the tyranny of capital letters on the listener's imagination.īut lowercase girls have been there forever, in the back rows of classrooms and the corners of parties, daydreaming, doodling, stockpiling vivid details and observations in the marble notebooks of their minds - waiting for the precise moment to launch them like a carefully crafted dart that punctures everybody else's apathy and proves just how sharply she has been paying attention. Lowercase girls tend to fly under the radar by design, but once you start looking you'll see them everywhere. ![]() Olivia Rodrigo's debut album, Sour, is out May 21, less than six months after she shattered streaming records with the breakthrough single "drivers license." ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |