After Olivia Rodrigo’s release of her sophomore album, Guts, following her debut album Sour, I was taken aback by how much of my social media feed was swimming with petty hatred and rude comments. I read each of the critiques with my eyebrows furrowed and steam bursting out of my ears. Despite garnering 14 million new monthly listeners two weeks after her release of Sour and having more than 1 billion streams on her famous single “Drivers License”, distaste for Olivia still grows rampant. After Sour, Olivia created a strong sophomore album, Guts, where she experiments with the rock genre and creates mature ballads. Guts serves as a transition from adolescence to adulthood and a testament to girlhood. Despite her many feats, slander still follows her name. This slander led me to realizing that there really is no winning for a young woman in the music industry.
One widely spread rumor about Olivia is that she steals other artist’s music. Paramore singer Hayley Williams was offered a writing credit on Olivia’s track “Good 4 U” due to its similarity to “Misery Business.” Despite this similarity gaining hatred for Olivia and claims of her unoriginality, it was reported by Billboard that Rodrigo and Paramore’s respective teams were in contact before the single’s release. Olivia was also accused of co-opting a guitar riff of Elvis Costello’s song “Pump it Up” on her track “Brutal.” Costello responded to this by saying “This is fine by me…It’s how rock and roll works.” It’s important to question that, if it’s okay to the creator, why does it matter to the media?
Due to Olivia’s outspoken love for Taylor Swift, she was compared to her. Now, she has been called a “wannabe” Taylor Swift. Olivia’s never been quiet about the fact that she has taken much inspiration from her in the past. She sampled “New Years Day”–from Swift’s album Reputation–for her song “1 step forward, 3 steps back” off of her album, Sour. Jack Antonoff and Taylor Swift have also been credited on the “Cruel Summer” inspired “Deja Vu.” Olivia then stopped talking about her love for Taylor and was, in return, called bitter. When asked by Variety about this alleged feud, she combated the rumors by simply replying, “I don’t have beef with anyone…There’s nothing to say…There’s so many Twitter conspiracy theories.” It seems impossible for one woman to thrive without the other one taking the fall in the music industry.
When Olivia’s famous, record-breaking single, “Drivers License”, created controversy over the question of who it was written about, I thought about how I have never seen songs written by men so heavily scrutinized and analyzed. The invasive questions of who, why, and the story behind it were a hot topic for the entirety of 2021. The love triangle created by the media of Disney star and singer Sabrina Carpenter, High School Musical: the Musical–The Series co-star Joshua Bassett, and Olivia Rodrigo created rapid slander. Sabrina Carpenter seemed to have responded to “Drivers License” with her own song “Skin.” In this song, Carpenter sings, “Don’t drive yourself insane” which many believed alluded to Olivia’s single. When it was speculated that Joshua Bassett wrote one of his singles “Set Me Free” about Olivia, one fan even shouted at his concert, “F–ck Olivia” during the performance of the song. He responded with a head shake and rolling his eyes. Bassett further attempted to diffuse the “Drivers License” drama by stating to GQ, “Why don’t we focus on these women for who they are? Let’s focus on the art they’re making instead of their relationship to a boy.” Instead of focusing on Olivia’s groundbreaking success, the media solely focused on her past relationship. After the release of Sour, she was framed as a villain for writing about heartbreak and how hard it is to be a teenage girl. Instead of being praised for her vulnerable lyrics that won her Grammys, she was instead torn down by society.
Olivia’s lyric, “God, it’s brutal out here” from “Brutal” easily foreshadows the media’s response to her and her music. Rodrigo has even commented on the sexist criticism of songwriters by revealing to The Guardian, “I’m a teenage girl, I write about stuff that I feel really intensely – and I feel heartbreak and longing really intensely – and I think that’s authentic and natural. I don’t really understand what people want me to write about; do you want me to write a song about income taxes? How am I going to write an emotional song about that?” There is no shame in being a teenage girl and writing about it. The only problem is the structure of the music industry and its enabling of this behavior while social media continues to lust for toxicity and pessimism.