#98

#98. Olivia Rodrigo - drivers license (#13, 2021)

2nd of 2021

For me, it's a Thursday night ritual to go through all of Spotify's New Music Friday playlist. It's an absolutely arduous task because listening to 90 odd songs in a row you've never heard before is just monstrously tiresome. You do not get the occasional breaks of familiarity to get your veggies down. Most of the veggies aren't even good for you, I'll listen to them once, and never again. It's all just to find that small handful that could very well define my year or even more. The reward is just too good.

It might seem obvious but there's a pretty big lull around the end and start of the year. You get a 3-4 week period where you're not even sure if you're gonna get a New Music Friday, because so little music is being released and promoted during this time. It's nice to get a little reprieve I suppose, but I do still crave new favourites and I'm often struggling to get them for a while. A particular day that comes to mind for me is the 7th of January 2021, where nothing of note happened I suspect. I don't think the playlist was very big that week, but more importantly, I don't think many were bringing their A-game to this dead release period. I think I saved two songs that week initially, and then out of desperation, snuck in another song that piqued my curiosity a little without being an instant addition. That bonus song was "drivers license" by Olivia Rodrigo.

I didn't really know who Olivia Rodrigo was. I might have heard the name in passing, but I quickly just clocked her as a precocious artist with a song that was a little gimmicky but seemed to pass the initial sniff test where I didn't want to rule it out. I went back to it the next morning and it started to warm up to me. For about a day, the song felt like a little secret. Then the song started making immediate appearances in a lot of national Spotify charts and it was like 'Oh, cool, I guess it wasn't just me'. A day later and the song has clearly taken the world by storm. It wasn't just riding on up to #1 during a slow period, it was doing monumentally unprecedented numbers. The difference between 'Oh, I guess this Bella Kay singer is doing well' and 'We all need to stop what we're doing and pay attention to this kid because they might be the most important thing of the year'. Olivia Rodrigo was so far ahead of the competition that when Glass Animals won the Hottest 100 with "Heat Waves" (#741), they were doing numbers that would ensure #1 on most normal weeks, but instead had to wait a full month before "drivers license" could finish its stint. In Australia, its Spotify records stood for a solid 2 years, and it still has the 6th highest weekly total of any song ever, with 3 of its adversaries being first week numbers for Taylor Swift songs.

The odd thing that happened with all of this is that "drivers license" very quickly got overshadowed. It felt like there was a concerted effort in the aftermath to make her later single "good 4 u" (#341) into something even bigger, and it arguably was. Its pop rock sound playing more immediately to a wider audience than this piano ballad. "drivers license" was supposed to be that impossibly big crossover hit that had the Hottest 100 win gifted to it, but by the time voting rolled around, it landed at a pretty underwhelming #13 next to "good 4 u"'s #4. I'm just doing all of this to report that in the confusing lottery of post-chart longevity, "drivers license" lost the battle but appears to be winning the war. "good 4 u" came very close to overtaking the lifetime Spotify streams of "drivers license" but has severely fallen back in the past year or so, falling a rough quarter of a million further behind every day at this stage. I'm not doing this to put down "good 4 u". Sometimes when I look at the daily numbers of the most streamed songs of all time, I have to remind myself that by all accounts they're very good, I just want to give more credit to "drivers license" because I feel like it sometimes gets severely underrated, which sounds crazy for a song of its stature, but with it launching her career, it's the perfect song to downplay in favour of a more interesting personal pick. It's her "Royals" (#134), her "Last Nite", whatever fits best for you.

I just think "drivers license" is a really good song. It manages to be incredibly expressive in its musical queues without feeling overwrought. A lot of subtle decisions with Dan Nigro that make the whole thing just seem like the inevitable conclusion. You'll often see the song's bridge highlighted, and I won't deny it, it's a special cathartic rush that keeps the whole thing together right to the end. I'm often the first person to be critical of writing by incredibly young artists but I think the focused theme of the song keeps it all in check. There's an odd coincidence in this, which is that in correspondence with the 2020 Hottest 100, this song got to share chart space briefly in the top 10 with Spacey Jane's "Booster Seat" (#676). Two hit songs at the same time that use car terms to signify a specific time in one's life. I like the way Olivia uses it here because it works as a launching point for all the experiences she's having, while if you're older, it's a contextualisation that reminds you where she's at with all of this.

Anyway, the other important thing to note here is that Olivia Rodrigo was not exactly an unknown entity when this song came out. To the music charts she was, which gave her a fairly rare feat in the modern era of having her first ever chart appearance being at #1 (something that was fairly benign 10-20 years ago with how many reality TV stars did so). She was just more famous as an actress on the Disney Channel. That's one of the things that will most quickly age you out of knowing stars because every year after you stop watching it, someone new is going to come up and be incredibly important to a generation of fans who will soon be old enough to really buy into it. It feels like the reason why the Jonas Brothers were only a mild chart presence for many years but soon were having solo careers and even a #1 hit that were far bigger than the early preview could've prepared one for. Olivia Rodrigo was on Bizaardvark, and then High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a strangely named show about theatre kids staging a musical based on the High School Musical films.

I've not seen any of this, but it is relevant to the "drivers license" story because the song is heavily believed to be referring to Olivia's HSM:TM:TS co-star Joshua Bassett, who in spite of strong chemistry with Olivia at the time, was reportedly dating Sabrina Carpenter ('That blonde girl') instead. None of this has really been confirmed, it's not even clear if the two were dating, and apparently it was on Dan Nigro's suggestion that 'brunette' was changed to 'blonde' in the lyrics. Regardless of this, there was a quick response to this amid the drama. There were response songs and they weren't very good.

That would normally be the end of it, but as you might have noticed, in the long stretch of time since "drivers license" was released, Sabrina Carpenter has gotten considerably more famous. Huge hits, headlining festivals, massive cult of personality. After years of slumming with a music career that was going nowhere, and seemingly needing an algorithm to prop her up, she's absolutely made it and it can't be denied. The problem for me is that I just cannot help but think of the song "Skin", where she goes full heel, boasting about all the sex she's having and how not mad she is. This is while she was an adult (21) and Olivia was a child (17), and feels like one of the dumbest things I've ever witnessed. It was a long time ago now but I just can't stop thinking about it and as a result, remain almost completely incompatible with her music. I couldn't tell you if it's good or bad, I've just opted myself out of the conversation completely. I'll just say that maybe the best moment from a football game I've ever attended was technically punctuated by "Espresso" playing throughout the stadium (and there's a nice story behind it being that song). Sometimes when I say that a song really changed things, I can be completely genuine, if in an unexpected way.