![]() Well, good for you, you look happy and healthy, not me The song, performed in a pop-punk style, gained critical acclaim following the explosive success of "Drivers License," with over 114 million views on YouTube in a month and hit the top of the Billboard charts in 15 countries, including Canada, the United States, Germany and Ireland. Pop music can encompass so much, and Olivia is carving out space for herself with a raised eyebrow and a very sharp knife.On May 14th, 2021, "Good 4 U" released as the third single off Olivia Rodrigo's 2021 album Sour along with a music video (shown below). She’s not a fantasist, despite the intense emotion - even when wanting an ex-boyfriend back, she asks simply for the agency to drive on her own to his house. But we’re quickly approaching the point at which that framework isn’t useful in talking about the music (though it remains to be seen which will prove more prescient a descriptor of Olivia’s assured superstardom). (To be clear, that has not stopped me.)Īll that is to say that Olivia Rodrigo has made her biggest influences so known (and so embedded, like with the “New Years Day” interpolation on “1 step forward, 3 steps back”) it’s impossible not to acknowledge them. “God, it’s brutal out here,” with its ties to both Olivia’s own brutal lyricism, is a line so perfect and well-delivered it’s almost difficult to listen to. The immediacy of the gut punches plucks something from you as you listen, some kind of urge to suck in your stomach and wail. Olivia’s perspective, by contrast, feels more present, more minute-to-minute. “Take me back when our world was one block wide,” Taylor reminisces on a perspective that was once so small, the implication being that she’s all grown up now. “But I know it’s not forever,” Lorde slices through a tennis court fantasy. ![]() They positioned themselves as outsider bards, taking covert notes in diaries as they eyed their classmates and the world around them. Thinking back to those musicians’ debut albums, both of which are genius in their own right, there’s a pattern of wisdom, an old soul type of teenage transcendence. ![]() Her voice is effortless, the clear result of years of vocal training plus natural talent that makes her soar where many singers have to strive. She doesn’t traffic in broken fairytales like the former or vivid suburban metaphor like the latter - musically and lyrically, she’s drawn to frankness, laying down the cards all at once. Similarly, a song like “jealousy, jealousy” is a spot-on reflection of Instagram culture, but it’s almost banal in the way it rails against general comparisons (whereas “deja vu” takes a similar thread and flays it open to get to the root of the fear: “I hate to think that I was just your type.”) While Olivia co-wrote all of Sour, “jealousy, jealousy” notably has primary writing credits from Casey Smith ( Jonas Brothers, Ashe) as well as chief collaborator Dan Nigro, which could account for some of the subject matter shift the songs Olivia has solo credits on, “happier” and “enough for you,” are some of the album’s strongest.įor all the comparisons that have been made and will continue to be made to her chief predecessors Taylor and Lorde, Olivia is already proving herself to be on a stylistically different track. ![]()
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