Post by Admin on Jul 5, 2021 5:07:38 GMT
Like many sentient elder millennials, I’ve fallen under the spell of Olivia Rodrigo’s sublime, no-skips debut album, Sour. Sure, she’s 18 and I’m 39, but I’m of the opinion that angst knows no age and the teenage girl within never truly goes away. The likes of “Driver’s License” and “Favorite Crime” send me spiraling back to my tortured teen years in the mid-to-late ’90s (oh, the exquisite pain of JNCO-wearing crushes with mushroom cuts), when the soundtrack to my life was full of feral female voices: Alanis, Tori, Shirley, Fiona. In my mind, I’m on a first-name basis with them all.
My past and present recently collided when Courtney Love, the chief musical influence of all my seventh-grade sleepovers, accused Rodrigo of copying the mascara-streaked prom queen on the cover of Hole’s seminal 1994 album, Live Through This, in a photo promoting her Sour Prom concert film. There are forlorn, tiara-clad women clutching bouquets of wilting flowers in both images, which was enough to spark Love’s ire. “Stealing an original idea and not asking permission is rude,” she wrote on Facebook after sharing Rodrigo’s Sour Prom picture across her social media accounts.
The fracas raised questions about homage versus creative theft, although—as The New York Times noted, citing an art law professor—it would be hard to copyright the idea of a beauty queen cracking just below the surface. If one could, both Love and Rodrigo would likely owe a debt to the gory prom scene and titular queen played by Sissy Spacek in 1976’s Carrie. But to me, the head-trippiest part of the Love-Rodrigo clash was the fact that the rock stars of my youth had become Gen Z’s retro influences. As Rodrigo commented on Love’s Instagram: “love u and live through this sooooo much.” Fans of Sour already know how she feels about Billy Joel.
My past and present recently collided when Courtney Love, the chief musical influence of all my seventh-grade sleepovers, accused Rodrigo of copying the mascara-streaked prom queen on the cover of Hole’s seminal 1994 album, Live Through This, in a photo promoting her Sour Prom concert film. There are forlorn, tiara-clad women clutching bouquets of wilting flowers in both images, which was enough to spark Love’s ire. “Stealing an original idea and not asking permission is rude,” she wrote on Facebook after sharing Rodrigo’s Sour Prom picture across her social media accounts.
The fracas raised questions about homage versus creative theft, although—as The New York Times noted, citing an art law professor—it would be hard to copyright the idea of a beauty queen cracking just below the surface. If one could, both Love and Rodrigo would likely owe a debt to the gory prom scene and titular queen played by Sissy Spacek in 1976’s Carrie. But to me, the head-trippiest part of the Love-Rodrigo clash was the fact that the rock stars of my youth had become Gen Z’s retro influences. As Rodrigo commented on Love’s Instagram: “love u and live through this sooooo much.” Fans of Sour already know how she feels about Billy Joel.