![]() Another piano-led epic, albeit with the very un-Disney climax “I still fucking love you”, it provided mass catharsis during that desolate winter lockdown and hit No 1 worldwide. If HSM made Rodrigo a star to gen Z, Drivers License, released in January 2021, made her a household name. Manicurist: Yoko Sakakura at A-Frame agency. Styling: Mindy Le Brock at 11th House Agency. Olivia Rodrigo wears dress and tights, Gucci. Unlike her Disney forebears Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, she chose not to make (inevitably sanitised) music for the corporation’s in-house label, and picked Interscope/Geffen because they were the only label she met that perceived her as a songwriter, not a pop star, and didn’t blow smoke up her ass. After the piano ballad All I Want went viral, Rodrigo sought a record deal. (It’s striking that she sort of picks a film set for us to meet on.) Then Disney execs invited her to write an original song for her HSM character. Rodrigo, a music nut since she was little, was also a budding songwriter with a readymade audience for the demos she shared online, though she worried that they wouldn’t connect because her life was so unusual. She would never attend real high school, instead studying on the sets of both shows. Rodrigo orders an iced chai latte and points out the table where she was revising for “chemistry or something bad” when she got the call. More significantly, it is where she found out, at 16, that she had landed HSM (having previously starred in Disney’s Bizaardvark, about two offbeat tween bloggers). In the queue, she says this is her “favourite joint” because it’s where Timothée Chalamet’s character works in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Rodrigo and I meet in a cafe a few weeks after her rampaging comeback single, Vampire – the first taste of her second album – hit No 1 in the US. Similarly, if there was kickback, she recalls, “I didn’t really pay attention to it or let it affect me.” Being a puppet, she says, “doesn’t work any more”. (Historically it has arrived in a repressed explosion of latex and panting, long before the considered political statements.)īefore Rodrigo’s set, she considered her many “young girl fans, which I always think about”, and concluded: “That’s actually why it’s so important – I would love, if I was a little girl, to see someone stand up for future-me like that.” (Allen can testify to her young fan contingent: when she got Rodrigo’s invitation, she says, “my daughter saw the email and was like, ‘If you don’t do it, I will kill you.’”) Even when Rodrigo was at Disney, she would tweet her anger about issues such as Trump’s various misdeeds, or the murder of George Floyd. The Disney-to-pop pipeline is well trodden, and it usually takes a long time for young women making that transition to find anything close to free expression, straitened by America’s puritanical double standards and the commercial imperative/threat to be a good role model. Before she was a pop star, Rodrigo had been a Disney Channel actor since the age of 12, most notably a lead in the meta mockumentary High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (HSM), in which a group of teenagers stage a theatrical production of the Zac Efron juggernaut. ![]() If there was a backlash, she didn’t see it. Lily Allen and Olivia Rodrigo on stage at Glastonbury in 2022. That’s what music’s for, says Rodrigo, “expressing your rage and dissatisfaction”. It was perfect, meeting incomprehensible injustice with petulant anger. “We hate you,” Rodrigo said, then danced around with Allen, middle fingers flipped. On stage, Rodrigo said: “I’m devastated and terrified, and so many women and so many girls are going to die because of this,” then dedicated Fuck You to “the five members of the supreme court who have shown us that, at the end of the day, they truly don’t give a shit about freedom”, listing them by name. “She goes, ‘See the news? I guess we know who we’re gonna dedicate this song to.’”Īllen recalls Rodrigo pacing backstage, memorising her speech. “We were so devastated, crying because it felt so surreal and so awful.” Then Allen texted her. “We were all like, we should stay here,” Rodrigo, 20, says when we meet in August in Pasadena, the LA-adjacent city where she lived as a teenager. Then the day before Rodrigo was due to play, Roe v Wade was overturned, removing the federal right to abortion in the US. Rodrigo already had big plans for her Saturday afternoon performance: she asked Lily Allen if they could duet on her favourite song by the British pop star, her 2009 hit Fuck You. Of all the highlights of Olivia Rodrigo’s first two years as a pop star – breaking streaming records with her heartbroken debut single Drivers License aged 17 helping President Biden encourage young people to get vaccinated winning three Grammys after she released her debut album, Sour – her set at Glastonbury 2022 still stands out.
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