As a pop star, Olivia Rodrigo has a rather unusual arsenal of weapons. She is a talented author and a confident singer. She largely abhors artificiality. She is modest, not suggestive. In just three years, she's achieved near-stratospheric fame—a quadruple-platinum debut album and a Grammy for best new artist—while somehow remaining an outsider.
But the weapon she always returns to is a very pointed and versatile swear word, which she uses on both her 2020 breakout hit “Drivers License,” the first single from her debut album “Sour,” and “Drivers License,” the first single from her debut album, was also used to vivid effect on “Vampire,” the Grammy-nominated single from her second album, Guts, released last year. It can also be found in many other places and adds an extra oomph to their anxious requests. She wants to make it clear that beneath her calm exterior she is boiling over.
On Friday night at the Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, California, during the opening performance of the Guts World Tour, Rodrigo couldn't get enough of that word. She used it for emphasis, to express rejection and to demonstrate desperation. But mostly she used it casually, between songs, not because she needed it, but because it felt like she was getting away with something.
Much of Rodrigo's music – especially “Guts,” with its detailed and delirious ruminations on new fame and his dissatisfaction – is about what it feels like to behave badly after being told how important it is to be good . It is at the intersection where freedom is about to give way to wrongdoing.
This also applied to her performance, which gave the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano ballads her songs alternate between. For over an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately screamed and pleaded, stomped and collapsed. She led a reverent 11,000-strong crowd – a significant jump from the theaters she had played on her first tour – in church-like and loud singalongs, but never rowdy.
Throughout the concert, Rodrigo gesticulated nods in surrender, singing the first verse of “Get Him Back!” through a megaphone, flipping the mic stand at the end of “All-American Bitch,” and making a sharp appearance in front of a camera during “Obsessed.” “ looks out from a clear area of the stage.
Although she has an exuberant stage presence, she is not a full-fledged pop star and would be better off avoiding that trap. Rodrigo is on the safe side when she recites her songs faithfully and unobtrusively. She opened the evening with a boundlessly energetic “Bad Idea Right?” This is followed by “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” perhaps the truest statement of intent from her last album, letting the dry, moaning '90s guitars convey fear and gloom.
These songs highlight Rodrigo's penchant for rocking, which is serious and rehearsed and reinforced by an impressively roaring band that gave her a dash of courage. But she followed with an even more forceful troika of howling rejections: “Vampire” to “Traitor” to “Drivers License,” a series of slow ballads that are among her most invigorating songs. (Almost equally moving was hearing three young girls, maybe eight years old, screaming while watching the music video in the parking lot in the parking lot before the show.)
But for their songs to be big, it didn't take much more than the songs themselves. At the end of “The Grudge,” Rodrigo stood ostentatiously alone at the foot of the stage, a hint of self-sufficiency and defiance. (Dancers accompanied her on several songs, and she awkwardly danced along to some.) Toward the end of the performance, she sang a gasping “Happier” and the casually eerie “Favorite Crime” while sitting at the edge of one of the tentacles. And even though she hovered in a crescent above the crowd during “Logical” and “Enough for You,” two of her most heartbreaking songs, it was the firm tremble in her voice that thrilled most, not the spectacle in the air.
In her outfits, Rodrigo tends to have a combination of reserved and tough. Her fans have taken note. There was near unanimity in the crowd when it came to fashion – young girls, mostly teenagers, in mid-thigh skirts and either black boots or Chuck Taylors. Almost everyone had at least one item that shined. It was reminiscent of Taylor Swift's early tours, where young fans arrived in their thousands in sundresses and cowboy boots. At one point Rodrigo asked the crowd if anyone had come with his father (many), and then if anyone had come with a boyfriend or girlfriend (not many). Then she asked if anyone was dressed up for the show, and the crowd roared almost simultaneously. (Women outnumbered men so much that most men's restrooms were converted to all-gender restrooms for the night.)
At the merchandise stands, vendors sold the accessories of girlhood: lavender butterfly-shaped tote bags, star-shaped stickers that stick on your face (to mimic the cover of the “Sour” album), and Band-Aids with Rodrigo catchphrases. And on stage, the artists promoted the power of being a girl: the members of Rodrigo's band and dance group were all female, non-binary or transgender.
Rodrigo has also made supporting young women a part of the tour: Proceeds from every ticket will go to her charity Fund 4 Good and will “support non-profit organizations that advocate for girls' education, support reproductive rights and prevent gender-based violence.” “. .”
This is consistent with Rodrigo's persistent and convincing narrative that childhood is full of burdens. Her rendition of “Teenage Dream,” a ballad about wondering whether the best years of her life are already over, was particularly insightful, especially with the background images of Rodrigo as a young child messing around with performances, oblivious to the realities of stardom is.
The opener was Chappell Roan, a sexually open singer whose big voice was obliterated by her arrangements. She offered a contrast to Rodrigo, who sings about sex in fleeting references and punchlines, often hidden in the middle of a verse. (Starting in April, Remi Wolf, PinkPantheress and, most promisingly for the generationally curious, the Breeders will be the opening speakers.)
This subject is still too raw for Rodrigo as she never strays too far from her youngest fans or her younger self. But that could soon change. Rodrigo turned 21 a few days before this show, perhaps the last publicly acknowledged dividing line between youth and adulthood. She didn't let it pass without comment.
“I went to the gas station the other day and bought a pack of cigarettes,” she said, sitting at the piano after “Drivers License,” which threatened to be the only moment of real misbehavior that evening.
But then she confessed: “I promise I didn't consume it, I just bought it just because I could.” Did she add a swear word for emphasis? She did.