Switched on Pop - Summer Hits: Olivia Rodrigo - good 4 u (with Jessica Hopper)

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Olivia Rodrigo’s summer breakup anthem “good 4 u” is filled with the kind of ebullient angst that makes us want to spontaneously dance around our house and belt the lyrics out with abandon. Whether it’s the creeping baseline that pulls us in, or the cathartic release of the chorus, we can’t get enough of this track. And we’re not alone, it seems. The song debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and like its predecessor “Driver’s License,” has fueled and been fueled by viral TikTok memes that helped solidify the song’s position among 2021’s summer jams.  Those TikTok memes range in format, but tend to play off of one unavoidable observable of Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” - just how beautifully it syncs up with Paramore’s 2007 pop-punk “Misery Business.” The two songs share some of the most common building blocks in pop music, from their 4, 1, 5, 6, chord progression to the opening note of their choruses. Those links have led critics and fans alike to wonder aloud if “good 4 u” indicates the emo-slash-pop punk revival we discussed back in May is here to stay.  In the second installment of our Summer Hits series, producer Megan Lubin goes searching for the musical roots of Rodrigo’s ebullient angst, and uncovers two histories - the first is the sound of emo as it branched off of punk music in the 1980s, and the second is of women raging on the microphone through time, from the blues to country, to Olivia’s chart-topping confessional.  Lubin gets help from the rock critic Jessica Hopper, who reminds us of emo’s gendered origins: “It became prescriptive. The narrative was always girls were bad and they never had names” and takes us on a journey through Rodrigo’s rage-full forebears. We’re still thinking about her lines about women in pop and the boxes we try to put them in. “People just need to stop trying to draw it back to something that a man did before, and realize that teenage women have completely remade the landscape of top 40 pop in the last 15 years.” More: Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic Helen Reddington “The Forgotten Revolution of Female Punk Musicians in the 1970s” nikjaay’s “misery 4 u” mashup Music Olivia Rodrigo - good 4 u Paramore - Misery Business Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the U.K. The Clash - London Calling Minor Threat - Straight Edge Rites of Spring - Drink Deep Dashboard Confessional - Screaming Infidelities Bessie Smith - Devil’s Gonna Git You Nina Simone - Break Down and Let it All Out Alanis Morissette - You Oughta Know Miranda Lambert - Mama’s Broken Heart Carrie Underwood - Before He Cheats Taylor Swift - We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I am podcast producer Megan Lubin. Megan, always a pleasure. How's it going? I have my ears filled with the sound of summer jam, so I'm doing great.

Well, that is. perfect. I know that we recently kicked off our making of a summer hit series with the episode on BTS's butter. Right. I've been listening to Olivia Rodriguez album Sauer. And I think we need to talk about her third single off that album. Good for you. Have you guys gotten a chance to listen to it yet? Yeah. I mean, a thousand times. The record has been on repeat. Every time I get in my car and turn on the radio seems to be playing. Yep, sure. If you ever jump on TikTok, I don't know how often you guys TikTok. but that's another very commonplace you might hear that song. TikTok is currently my social media restriction at this very moment.

Okay. As in you're not on TikTok? I usually am, but I've just needed a break. Yeah. So I've kind of missed the phenomenon. Okay. Well, TikTok aside, I know you've both heard it a bazillion times. I want to cue it up and listen to a little bit of it.

Yes, please. I think one of my favorite things about this track is that it's almost like it has a split personality between the verse and the chorus. The verse is kind of funky, kind of slow, kind of sinister. And then the chorus just explodes into this distorted raging pop punk anthem. It's like head spinning. Totally. And put a pin in that mate because we're going to come back to that split personality.

But yeah, I mean, to me, this is just a defiantly upbeat summer jam. And before we go deep on the song, I want to give people a quick refresher on Olivia Redrigo. Olivia is the 18-year-old former Disney star who took the pop world completely by storm with her first single driver's license, which we've talked about on the show. Bringing back the power ballad. Good for you is her second number one debut, which means it arrived on the billboard in the top position.

She's one of a very small hand full of artists to ever achieve that feat. So with Olivia Fresh on People's Minds, I want to get back to what we're hearing in the song. Nate, you mentioned that's what personality verse that starts with that creeping baseline. Let's have a listen to that. I love the way they start this song because it's this kind of low, sparse, funky baseline. And it really doesn't tell you where this song is headed. It really sets you up for it to be kind of this funky slow jam. And that's part of it, but it's not the whole story.

Yeah. I had that same reaction. I don't know where it's going to go, but I do know that something is about to happen. And then right after that baseline, you get Olivia. She's immediately confrontational. Right. Her first line, well, good for you. I guess you moved on really easily.

So something bad has happened, presumably a breakup. Beyond that, she's also escalating the sort of rhythmic energy in the song. That bass is so simple. It's such a good, just two-note little hook. But now she's going, right? You could almost have a drummer doing that. All of a sudden, things that felt slow are now building intention, not just what she's singing about,

but the way that she's upping the ante. in her rhythm. Totally. Then we hear a kind of unexpected sound, something that I didn't catch on my first few listens of the song. Remember when you said that you wanted to give me the world. Did you hear it? Just like a little, it sounds like an electronic shaker going, tz, or hi-hat. I'm not sure what the instrumentation is here. It sounds to my ear like almost like a pressure release valve. Like, as if if this song, were a room, you'd get like steam coming out of little valves. That's a fun read. Right? I think I read it like that because as you're listening to the song, pressure is building,

aided by her vocal delivery, aided by that baseline. To me, it's kind of foreshadowing a much more substantial release. It's like you said, Nate, you've got that one more low-key personality in the verse, and then this huge release in the chorus. It's transformative, you know. It's like I hear the verse as kind of the sarcastic side of this breakup. Like, good for you, but really not. Like, I'm really pissed. But then in the chorus, there's like something almost cathartic.

Pressure valve fully let out. Yeah, pressure valve fully let out. It's liberating musically, but lyrically too. Nate, like you said, she spent the verse directing her energy at the repercussions of this for her ex. And then you get this euphoric chorus that addresses her experience of the breakup. She says, I've lost my mind. I've spent the night crying on the bathroom floor. And in that way, I mean, it's a therapeutic release almost. To me, this song altogether, and in particular the chorus, reflect a very, very private moment that she's a effectively spray painting all over the walls. You know, there are moments in the song where I'm listening

to lyrics and I'm essentially hearing my own words that I've written in my high school journal about boys who made me mad. Like, it's that singular anguish of teenage heartbreak. There's actually a moment when her voice catches on her own anger in the second verse as if she's working so hard to control it and she can't. Oh my God, Megan, this moment is this. This is like my favorite moment in the whole song. I've listened to that little way she delivers that word good for you in that second verse probably a hundred times and I can't decide whether she's laughing or like choking on it. Or even like sneering.

Or yeah. Or if she's like, I can't believe you just, you piece of shit. Or if she's like, I physically can't bear to even think about you. But there's something that is just like seared into my brain about the way she delivers that single word that makes this whole song for me. Yeah, or like maniacally plotting. Ooh, that's that's yet another interpretation, which I am very down with. Now that we've gotten a decent feel for the song, I'm curious, what does it remind you of? I think there's so many different references that you can point to, for some.

There might be the return of a certain pop punk quality. I do hear some mid-2000s alt rock in that baseline. You know, it's funny because maybe a few months ago we talked about Willow Smith on the podcast, and I feel like with her song, Transparent Soul, she's reaching back to a similar era as Olivia Rodriguez is here. With both of these artists, I hear the band Paramour as like a touch. zone. And it makes me think that like Gen Z has been digging into the Paramore back catalog. Do you think, am I hearing that correctly, Megan?

Uh, Nate. Yeah. So the song that good for you gets compared to a lot these days is Paramore's misery business. Quick reactions. There's something about the way that it's like so distorted and heavy and the drummer is just pounding. But then at the same time, it has like this beautiful melody that like you could take this melody and put it in like a Rossini aria. It is so gorgeous. And it's like the combination of those two things just makes this track hit so hard. Yes.

And people have heard misery business and good for you. So much that they're actually a bunch of seamlessly mixed mashups popping up all over TikTok and YouTube. I want to listen to one. Wait, this is melting my brain. That's a great mashup. It's a really good mashup. Oh my godess. That is so fun to listen to. There's some immediate musical connections, which are pretty obvious. And they're easy to mash up because they're just one key apart.

Oh, Chuck's getting out the old guitar. So good for using A. Is we business as an A flat. So they're really close. You can just slow one down or speed. one up or pitch shift them and they sound pretty natural. They both have that same four, one, five, six chord progression. It's probably one of the most common chord progressions of the last 20 years. You can hear the same exact thing in Lady Gaga's Alejandro.

The chain smokers don't let me down. Taylor Swift loves this progression. We hear it in bad blood. We hear it in her collaboration with Zane in the song, I don't want to live forever. which is to say when we listen to the Paramore and we listen to the Olivia Rodriguez, cool that they share these sort of common building blocks, but they really are just common building blocks. The sound-alike conversation is not that interesting to me. Like you said, I mean, both of these songs are built using some of the very fundamental building blocks of pop.

What is interesting to me, though, is the fact that both Olivia and Haley Williams, the lead singer of Paramour, felt free enough to bring that raw, unguarded rage to the mic. They're both singing really emotionally and transparently about heartbreak, about wrongs they've suffered at the hands of a romantic partner. I wanted to know more about who and what made that expression possible. Like, who helped normalize, or dare I say, popularize women's anger on the mic so that Olivia Rodriguez could put out a song like Good for You and be so universally celebrated for it. And while we're at it, I kind of want to figure out if this pop punk lineage that everyone seems to be placing her in is really the core of her sound, like is really her

primary reference. Will you guys join me on a bit of a journey to dig into that? Always. I'm so down. Excellent. All right. So first up, I want to dig in to the roots of that angry, confessional diaristic testimony, as Rolling Stone has called it, like coming out of a diary, that signature emo style of Haley Williams and other pop punk lead singers that Olivia is supposedly paying homage to with this song and with this album. But to understand emo and this genre of music that these folks are pulling from, I think we need to understand a little bit about the genesis of punk rock, which is sort of the larger family that emo stems from. I'm pretty excited that you're doing this investigation because, to be honest, it's an area

of my listening which could use some edification. Yeah, ditto. Take us to school, Megan. All right. So punk starts out in the late 70s. It's fast. It's sparse. I read this line.

It's three chords. It's political. And it's aggressively anti-establishment. Yeah, that sounds right. It's the sex pistols. It's the buzzcoc. It's the clash. Post-industrial British dudes is what I'm guessing.

There are actually a handful of all-women bands that find decent success in this early scene. You've got the slits, the Patty Smith group, polystyrene and x-ray specs. The rock historian Helen Reddington says that it was punk music that allowed many aspiring female musicians to see themselves in the pages of the rock press for the very first time. And then in the 1980s, punk takes a major turn towards the hardcore. That was minor threat with straight edge. And in the process of punk turning towards the hardcore, as bands like minor threat start getting more and more popular, punk gets less and less hospitable for women. It was just getting really macho.

That is Jessica Hopper. She is a writer, music critic, and at this point, kind of a de facto punk history. And front of the podcast. And front of the pod. Jessica. Jessica told me that this harsher, more violent shade of punk was alienating a lot of people, not just women. But she does credit one woman, a guitarist named Sharon Cheslow, with sort of pausing this shift to hardcore punk. In the mid-80s, after her own band assault, Sharon goes to her good friend Ian Mackay, an indie labelhead and sort of the nucleus of the DC punk scene.

And says to him, kind of complaining, you know, you're this powerful dude in the hardcore scene. And that scene, she says, has gotten way too male and way too violent. Skinheads are regularly showing up at hardcore shows. And slam dancing and mosh pits are more likely to lead to serious injury than not. So Ian reflects and begins taking steps towards what would become 1985's revolution. Summer, a full-on ground-up rebellion against the edge that had taken over punk rock. And it's that summer, 1985's Revolution Summer, that gives us Rites of Spring. Rights of Spring was, is, by most people's accounting, you know, the first emo band,

first American emo band. They are immediately so hugely influential. You know, the music is different. It's more textual. Guy Pichotto's vocals are very emotional. They're very dynamic. And up to that point, you know, hardcore was like, bra bra, bra, bra, bra, bra. And he's like, you know, famously kind of mulling. It's not political slogans. It's not rock against Reagan.

It is, it's something deep. And it sounds very visceral. Yeah, we've moved far beyond the Reagan, Thatcher, political. frustration into an internal frustration. Exactly. With emo, punk gets really personal. There's another great Rolling Stone quote. They summed up emo as minor chords, dramatic pauses, and vocals that sounded terminally on the verge of tears. So with emo, this style, this emotional lyricism really starts to take off. There was this point where it felt like emo was being.

codified as being about breakups and that there was a novelty at that time for some, hearing young men be really emotional, you know, almost sounding like they were crying, maybe even actually crying. And according to Jessica, it becomes a subconscious game of one-upsmanship. In some ways, it felt like to me like, who could up the ante where it was like the more over the top. The more expressive, the more nakedly, candidly, like, losing your shit. Like, I'm so heartbroken. I'm going to, like, fling myself into the mic, fling myself on the floor. Like, just the melodrama of it was both masculine, you know, screaming, angry.

I have the mic. I have the voice. I have the floor. This is my story. You know, then the other part of this is, like, a sort of emotion. outpouring that we just typically see as like unhinged and feminine in nature, crying, singing songs about crying. What I'm hearing is Jessica describing this like macho competition of who can be more vulnerable. Yeah, like who can be the biggest sad boy.

It's me. So with emo, punk gets personal. And out of Rites of Spring, we get a whole slew of emo bands kind of mimicking and following in the footsteps of this much more melodic, vulnerable branch of punk rock. And by the time bands like Dashboard Confessional and Fallout Boy hit the scene in the late 90s, you may have heard of them. The days of railing about wanting to be an anarchist are largely stuck in the rear view. Emo, as it evolved from the counterculture politics of early punk and the kind of verse. verbal self-immolation of hardcore to the inner turmoil of heartbreak of romance gone awry, essentially. Funny because the era of the rise of emo in the late 90s and early 2000s was probably really ripe for some more

political reimagination. Right. You know, at this point, I feel like I've heard some of the musical influences going into bands like Paramour, some of the musical, some of the lyrical influences, but where are the women in the scene? And there was maybe this brief moment in the 70s where they were poised to burst in and they were kind of shut out. Like, is emo as uninviting as punk was before it? Yes. And that's actually what brought me to Jessica in the first place.

In 2003, after almost two decades of watching the emo scene get on its feet, flourish, and eventually reach mainstream popularity, Jessica wrote an essay about this. It's called Emo, where the girls aren't. and in it she describes her experience of being at these early emo shows, her experience of watching women, like other fans, watching the men shredding their hearts out on stage and wondering where they belonged in all this. I thought about what did it mean for these young women to so often be in the audience

and so rarely on stage. And then the other part was as emo was becoming sort of, codified as a boy with his broken heart, it became prescriptive. The narrative was always the boys. The narrative was always girls were bad. They never had names. They never had any detail about them other than who they were to the boys singing in the song. So I asked Jessica when that changed, but it turns out that writing that essay was Jessica's emo Swan song. She left the scene entirely right after writing it, just fed up and kind of unable to stay in a creative space that was so where women didn't have a place, weren't on stage, weren't centered in the music. Makes sense?

I did more research after we spoke, and it is really hard to find women musicians in this genre. Like Haley Williams, even to this day, is a little bit of an anomaly. And that's not to say there are no women emo musicians. In fact, there are a bunch. They just aren't as likely to have gained mainstream or even success within the genre. And it makes sense. Like the whole genre, as Jessica tells it, was built on performative male emotion. So I think this history of emo, as Jessica tells it, it tackles a piece of good for you. It gives us context for the current claims that the song is emo or helping to anchor an emo revival, which I would now argue is misleading. As for the women who made a song like good for you possible, we'll come back to that after we take a quick break.

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New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Megan, I feel like from the first half of our conversation, I'm learning a lot about the history of how Pop-Hunk becomes this exclusive space. But I'm feeling a little like, are we boxing ourselves in here? Are we being too narrow in the genre connections that we're trying to make? That's a little bit the feeling that I was left with after my conversation with Jessica. I found that history of emo really helpful, but it definitely doesn't tell the whole story. The reality is, women have been raging on the mic for a very long time, like, since the earliest days of recorded music.

And I think it's fair to say that these artists have more to do with the celebration of good for you that we're seeing right now than any fallout boy song. We'd be sitting here all day if I tried to put together a totally exhaustive list of angry women on the mic. But here is a short list of examples. We've got Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, railing about her partner leaving her and the devil's going to get you. She almost snarls when she says, doggone. I love that. It's a growl. It's so raw.

It's amazing. And what a thing. threat. Like not I'm going to leave you, the devil's going to get you. And how about the great Nina Simone with Breakdown and Let It All Out? More recently, in the 1990s, you have Alanis Morissette bringing us one of the most well-known rage anthems of all time. You ought to know. that I'm happy for you I wish nothing but the best for you

Okay, I also have never in my life connected Nina Simone to Lannis-Morissette, but the way that they use vibrato and vocal control to express anger is amazing. Oh, that is such a good point. We've got Miranda Lambert with Mama's Broken Heart. And then of course, we have the bunks with some rusty kitchen scissors. I screamed his name till the neighbors call the cops. And then, of course, we have the classic Carrie Underwood before he cheats. Before he cheats.

She uses that vocal growl in a similar way to Bessie Smith. Yeah, it's like we came full circle back to 1928. Across time, across genre. It's that continuum of women raging on the mic that you've, that you're, that you're, drawing out for us here. It's really stunning to hear. And you guys might notice I'm creeping in a sort of countryish direction here

because that's where Jessica and I had a bit of a light bulb moment. I read her the line in Good for You, where Olivia says, I guess that therapist I found for you, she really helped. Now you can be a better man for your brand new girl.

To me, lyrically, that is, is that's countryer than than it is anything. Yeah, that's straight in Nashville. Yeah, Jessica hears Olivia's confrontational callout of her problematic

ex in country music. And in particular, in country music's most prolific crossover artists, like think Leanne Rhymes, Carrie Underwood, Randallambert, and of course, Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. I remember when we broke up

the first time saying this is it, I've had enough. Same chord progression is good for you. Same chord progression is good for you. No way. Nice. The baseline even has a sort of punk-ish kind of groove to it. Or what about those ooze bringing us into the chorus? That's like straight out of Paramour, straight out of good for you.

Wow. The overlap here is surprising, but I'm into it. Totally. And Taylor Swift is an off-sighted influence of Olivia, Rodriguez. In fact, Taylor has a writing credit on Sauer, and much has been made of their online interactions with Taylor kind of giving Olivia little boosts here and there on her Instagram page. It might be hard to hear in a track like we are never, ever getting back together. But the fact is that Taylor, Miranda, Carrie, and by extension, Olivia, are all standing on this

long lineage of female artists who at times risked popularity. and sales to sing openly about their experiences of disloyal men and domestic hardship. I love this voyage that you and Jessica have taken us on because it makes me here good for you in yet another light. Like we already unpacked all these different layers to it and here's yet another one. Like what laid the groundwork for Olivia Rodriguez to sing and express yourself this way in the first place? And to answer that, you need to go way back and then bring it all the way.

way forwards. Every time I hear the song in my car now, I'm going to be thinking about that too. And not to get to what's the word where you reduce everything down to something that's like more simple than it is? Reductive. Reductive. And not to get too reductive here, but that, Nate, is pop, right? On so many of these episodes, we're breaking down pop songs, trying to get to the root of certain influences. And what we inevitably find in. a lot of these songs, like whether it's Lil Nas X's Montero or The Weekends, Blinding Lights, is that they are amalgamations of a lot of different sounds. They're drawing influences from a bunch of different places. And this was something that Jessica went really out of her way

to emphasize that female pop artists who are topping the charts right now are doing just that. They are not the next wave of punk or the next wave of emo. They are doing more in the way of innovative things with genre than we ever could have imagined. The last decade, and in particular the last half decade, what a woman in pop, what a young woman in pop can be and do is so much more dynamic and is constantly being redesigned. It's building on girls that came up on Taylor or girls that were like, you know, pop music didn't appeal to them until they heard Sky Ferreira and like how moody that was. or Lord or Fiona, all these things that have just made greater space for women in pop to be more

fully human, more fully themselves and more resonant. And so people just need to stop trying to draw back to something that a man did before and realize that teenage women have completely remade the landscape of top 40 pop in the last 15 years. So in some, Olivia Rodriguez is good for you. Great song. Rad song. Not radical, but connected to a long lineage of radical women who made history before her. If you liked this episode of Switched on Pop, check out this week's episode of The Cut,

as they discuss Olivia Rodriguez and why grown-up millennials just can't get enough of teenage angst. That'll be out tomorrow. Switched On Pop is produced by Megan Lubin, Nate Sloan, me, Charlie Harding, We're engineered by Brandon McFarlane, edited by Jolie Myers, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, social media by Abby Barr. Our executive producers are Nishat, Karwa, and Hannah Rosen. We're a member with a Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find Jessica Hopper's essay, Emo, where the girls aren't, in a collection out now called The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. That book actually came out in 2015, but there's a revised and expanded second edition that just came out.

It's awesome. I just picked mine up at my local bookstore. Find it anywhere that you buy books. Big thanks to JBL for supplying us with the gear we need to record our show from the road as we visit friends and family this summer. And you can find a next episode waiting for you early this week on Friday. It's going to be really fun. It's a conversation with one of our favorite writers and podcasters, Hanif Abdurkeeb, about Lord's new single Solar Power. You can find that episode anywhere you get podcasts including the Apple podcast app, Spotify or www. www.switchedonpop.com. And on social media at Switchedon Pop, we'll see you on Friday. And until them, thanks for listening.