Even though she’s been a Disney mainstay for years, most recently as Nini Salazar-Roberts, the coming-into-herself female lead on “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” the success of “Drivers License” has occasioned exponential growth, and a juggling of Rodrigo’s many selves.
Rodrigo has had to do all of this under an unusually sudden and intense spotlight. “Sour” is an album about accepting alternate endings, and embracing who you become when you have to hot swap one idea about yourself for another all while keeping up a smile, or a career, or several. She is an optimal pop star for the era of personalities, subpersonalities and metapersonalities of finstas and spams of trying on new identities and discarding as you go.
“I just want myself back.”įor Rodrigo, 18, who’s been playing alternate versions of herself in public at least as far back as the first season of the Disney Channel’s “Bizaardvark,” in 2016, it is a natural subject. “I don’t want your sympathy,” she concludes. Rodrigo starts off with a rearview confession: “I wore makeup when we dated ’cause I thought you’d like me more/if I looked like the other prom queens I know that you loved before.” From there, the song plays like an elegy for a persona that no longer fits, Rodrigo singing with a quaver over a steady but reluctant acoustic guitar. But really it’s about a different sort of competition: the one between the versions of the self we cycle through, depending on who’s around. Like those songs, “Enough for You” - from her nuanced and often exceptional debut album, “Sour” - seems like it’s about the contest between the narrator and the woman who replaced her in her ex’s eyes and arms. It’s a phenomenon as awful as it is familiar. Between the undulating ballad “Drivers License” - her huge debut single, which opened at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for eight weeks - and the wistfully aggrieved (and perhaps even better) “Deja Vu,” she’s nailed the agony of collapse, and the anxiety of watching your old partner rebuild.
For the last few months, Olivia Rodrigo has been chiseling out a story about young love turned sour.
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