“Forgive and I forget / I know my age and I act like it / Got what you can’t resist / I’m a perfect all-American bitch…” (“Forgive and forget / I know my age and I act accordingly / I have something you can’t resist / I’m a perfect American bitch…“). After Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato o Tini, Olivia Rodrigo He is the latest pop star to emerge from the Disney machine that has turned the tables. It is curious because many people who listen to her hits on the radio or Spotify do not initially associate her with the mouse quarry, but we all have a past. And this twenty-something recently turned the corner.
They are fandom He claims to have found “the new Taylor Swift” in the singer-songwriter. Communicating with that ugly habit of labeling artists as the natural evolution of previous idols, due to the sound of her new album, GUTSthe correct name would be “the new Avril Lavigne“. The proof are songs where the electric guitar, percussion and synthesizers take over verses and chorus, like All-American bitch, Bad idea, right?, Ballad of a homeschooled girl, Love is embarrasing o Get him back!, where reaffirms itself in its another self bad girlalludes to “social suicide” and openly complains that “all the boys” he likes “end up being gay.”
“You found a new version of me/ And I damn near started World War III/ Jesus, what was I even doing?” (“You discovered a new version of me / And I almost started a fucking World War III / God, what was I doing?“). Ten of the 12 songs that make up Rodrigo’s second album are, a week after its release, on the Top 50 Global de Spotifyin between hits summers like Columbia of Quevedo and the LALA by Myke Towers and boomerang songs like Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift. Yes, it couldn’t be any other way: Swift continues to dominate lists where the presence of rock groups is merely residual and responds to sometimes incomprehensible fluctuations, as is the case with Artic Monkeys or The Neighborhood. But the sustained position of Olivia Rodrigo on the podium, with a proposal that is neither novel nor transgressive, but sufficiently attractive to the perreo generationmanages to restore hope to the old time rock.
Hence the enthusiasm of fans to listen GUTS live on a world tour that includes, for the first time, two dates in Spain. It will be on June 18, 2024 at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona and on June 20 at the WiZink Center in Madrid. The tickets go on sale this Thursday, although applicants to get one have had to previously register on the Live Nation website to receive a code. If a already seen from Taylor Swift’s tour that collapsed sales online.
Pigeonholing Rodrigo in pop seems unfair when, precisely, she is one of the international artists who make the greatest effort to emancipate herself from cliché in lists dominated by Latin and urban rhythms and Anglo pop. Her influences are varied: we talk about Lorde y Phoebe Bridgersbut also Nirvana y The Cure on topics like Pretty isn’t pretty. One from the band Rage Against The Machinewhose ideologically charged verses are stimulating for a young woman who has already spoken out in favor of the right to abortion and fought vaccine denialism from the White House.