Why We Need Teenage Girls to Be Pop Stars
In a life plagued by gossip, tabloids, and interviews, Taylor Swift always maintained her side of the story. Whether it be a high school breakup or a feud with one of the most prominent celebrity families, her strong lyrical convictions allowed her to share her own narrative with the world. At just 16 years old, Taylor’s vulnerability and honesty took the world by storm and she quickly became one of the most successful female artists of all time. Although she reinvents herself every couple of years to survive in a world that disposes of female artists like they’re “a trend” and we’re “so over it” (read: despite the internalized misogyny, Better than Revenge still has a special place in my heart), Swift has never lost sight of herself or her voice.
Less than 15 years after Taylor Swift’s debut, a new teenage girl is cementing her presence in the music industry. Olivia Rodrigo’s driver’s license debuted at #1 on the Billboard Top 100 and remained there for 8 weeks – becoming the longest-running #1 debut single in chart history. Sharp yet melodic, Olivia’s debut single is soaked with the usual melancholy and bitterness that most teenage girls experience after their first heartbreak. Unlike most teens, Olivia’s relationships have been subject to public spectacle, most notably her rumored romance with her High School Musical: The Musical: The Series co-star, Joshua Bassett. Despite criticism that “she only writes about her ex” and social media backlash, Olivia and her team continued to release more chart-topping breakup anthems as singles for her debut album, SOUR.
Her latest #1 single, good 4 u is a vengeful testament to the fury of a teenage girl scorned. It was accompanied by a music video that instantly went viral – accumulating over 124 million views. The music video is a cathartic experience that climaxes when Olivia sets a stereotypical teenage boy’s bedroom on fire and dances in its flames. The video also includes many popular teen movie references, from The Princess Diaries cheerleading outfits to the iconic lake scene in Jennifer’s Body. While the aforementioned movies were intended for millennials in their teenage years, they have since become hallmarks of the shared Gen Z adolescence. A large portion of Olivia’s fanbase are teenage girls only a few years younger or older than her, so they recognize her imagery in her video, and themselves in her rage.
Olivia Rodrigo remembers the unfair criticisms of her career all too well, as they draw an uncanny resemblance to those of her biggest musical influence, Taylor Swift. Early in Swift’s career, she received mass criticism that she “just writes about her ex-boyfriends,” despite her refusal to name any of them in her songs. Undoubtedly misogynistic, this sort of criticism paints a clear picture of the double standard in the art of the breakup song. It’s simple: women are not allowed to own their own experiences. Patriarchal society dictates that men are the active party, and women are the passive party. If a man decides to love a woman, she must either accept or work through his treatment of her privately. To publicly release a song detailing a man’s gross treatment of you is to take ownership of the experiences that a male-dominated society doesn’t want you to have.
With the long-awaited release of SOUR came the opening track, brutal that serves as both a more relatable teen anthem than Katy’s Perry Teenage Dream and a warning for young people looking to make it in a cutthroat industry. Like Taylor Swift’s The Lucky One, brutal depicts the disillusionment many young women face in the music industry but combines it with relatable teenage angst that Swift had long grown out of. Olivia is vulnerable, beginning the song with, “I’m so insecure I think / That I’ll die before I drink”. The audience may wonder how someone as beautiful and talented as Olivia Rodrigo could feel insecure, but brutal reminds us that beneath her newfound fame, she is still a teenage girl with insecurities and fears. Olivia then laments the pressures of the industry, “I’m so tired that I might / Quit my job start a new life / And they’d all be so disappointed / ‘Cause who am I if not exploited?” Although she “loves songwriting”, the stress of being a commercially successful musician makes her want to give up entirely. That feeling is familiar to most teens, with the pressures of school, life, and even a job leaving many teenagers exhausted and burnout. Borrowing a line from Marxist thought, Olivia details how many creatives also feel a loss of identity as a result of being defined by what they can produce and what industries can capitalize on.
No artist understands the brutal exploitation in the music industry more than Taylor Swift. After her masters were sold for the second time without her permission, she began to speak out against the manipulation within the trade. Instead of allowing herself to be silenced by powerful men, she took this unfortunate circumstance as an opportunity to reclaim her life’s work by re-recording her first 6 albums. In the announcements for Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and the upcoming Red (Taylor’s Version), Swift shared the emotional headspace that she was in when she was originally writing and recording the albums. To her, those albums were vivid self-portraits into her life and mind, but to a merciless trade, her work was merely a way to make money.
Olivia Rodrigo proudly owns all her masters after watching her idol “take control” of her work and career. By comparing Olivia’s experiences with Swift’s, we can see that especially strong girls pave the way for other girls. Women, especially younger women, will be attacked and villainized for things that men aren’t for as long as the patriarchy remains intact, but consistently defying the odds wherever you are works to make the world a more equitable place. To quote Taylor Swift at the Brit Awards, the world will meet us with “cynicism or skepticism”, but we “have the right to prove them wrong.”