|
Post by Admin on Oct 6, 2021 4:30:05 GMT
A few of the biggest pop moments in 2021 have come from Olivia Rodrigo, from her hit debut single “Drivers License” and her chart-topping debut album, Sour. But she’s also faced backlash. Many listeners felt some of the young singer’s songs sounded too similar to other artists. And when when artists like Taylor Swift and Paramore received songwriting credits, they accused her of ripping off their work. During a recent interview with Teen Vogue, Rodrigo responded to the criticism. “I think it’s disappointing to see people take things out of context and discredit any young woman’s work,” Rodrigo told the publication. “But at the end of the day I’m just really proud and happy to say that my job is being a songwriter. … All music is inspired by each other.” Rodrigo added, “Obviously, I write all of my lyrics from my heart and my life first. I came up with the lyrics and the melody for ‘Good 4 U’ one morning in the shower.” She continued, “What’s so beautiful about music is that it can be so inspired by music that’s come out in the past. Every single artist is inspired by artists who have come before them. It’s sort of a fun, beautiful sharing process. Nothing in music is ever new. There’s four chords in every song. That’s the fun part — trying to make that your own.” After the release of Sour, Rodrigo credited Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Joshua Farro on “Good 4 U” due to its similarities to the band’s 2008 track, “Misery Business.” Taylor Swift received two credits on the album, first on “Deju Vu” and then on “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” for their similarities to Swift’s “Cruel Summer” and “New Year’s Day” respectively. You can read Rodrigo’s full interview with Teen Vogue here. www.teenvogue.com/story/olivia-rodrigo-october-2021-cover-interview
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 6, 2021 19:38:36 GMT
Olivia Rodrigo CLARIFIES 'Out Of Context' Interview On Industry's Lack Of Color Representation
In a new sit-down interview with Teen Vogue, Olivia Rodrigo opens up about a previous interview in which she feels like her words were taken completely out of context when discussing her Filipino representation in the music industry.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 6, 2021 20:19:17 GMT
Olivia Rodrigo broke a rule when she was around seven years old. Her mom, a third-grade teacher, told her she wasn’t allowed to buy lunch in the cafeteria, out of concern for her health. But Olivia caved — and got busted immediately. You can’t get away with anything when your mom teaches at your school. “I just, like, broke down,” Olivia says now, laughing. “It felt like I had just murdered someone.” Olivia isn’t sure how to trace the root of that need to be good, or the crushing emotion she felt when she couldn’t pull it off. Her parents weren’t super strict, and they didn’t need to be. She got straight A’s and was a self-described teacher’s pet. Straight-laced, she says. She took singing, acting, and piano lessons starting at age six. She threw herself into gymnastics even though she was terrible, thinking that pure determination would lead her to the Olympics. And then, songwriting. Finally, a place for all those messy emotions to live under her goody-two-shoes exterior. Pettiness and jealousy and anger and betrayal. Desire, for control over her choices, for permission to make mistakes. “I’m a human being,” she wrote in her first-ever song, at age eight. “I can clean up my own messes.” It’s part of Olivia’s duality: All the angst and emotion comes out in her music, not her public persona. On her Teen Vogue cover shoot set, she is poised and professional, taking notes and feedback and working them into her poses and facial expressions in a way that seems effortless. She stands amid statues and chaotic shapes in a hot room, surrounded by adults who watch her every move, wearing a tiny, purple Louise Lyngh Bjerregaard knitted top that warrants constant adjusting so as not to reveal too much. You never see signs of fatigue or stress cross her face. Here, she’s working, trying her best. On her bedroom floor, where she pens many of her songs, she’s creating, searching for the next right version of herself.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 6, 2021 20:54:33 GMT
When we meet for breakfast at the Cara Hotel in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, she’s wearing what could be considered Olivia Rodrigo cosplay. A Duran Duran muscle tee, pleated blue miniskirt, giant black platform boots. Her handbag features a “Team Edward” keychain her hair stylist gave her, a nod to Olivia’s well-documented Twilight fandom. It’s a week and a half after her one-two punch at the MTV Video Music Awards and the Met Gala, and Olivia admits she’s still in a daze. She’s running on adrenaline and the oat milk matcha latte she sips between bites of avocado toast. At her apartment nearby, a suitcase lays open on the floor, clothes everywhere. She realized yesterday that she didn’t know how to wash her own sheets, so she phoned a friend to assist. One more thing to learn about being an adult. Olivia turned 18 in February, just over a month after she released “drivers license'' and her whole world tilted. Because she dropped a hit song in the middle of a pandemic, she had a monthslong grace period filled with near-flawless interviews and hit singles stacked neatly on top of one another. As winter turned to spring, the biggest debate fans had over her music was whether to hit play on “drivers license” or “deja vu.” But after you have three-straight No. 1 singles and a record-breaking debut album, Sour, the adulation, well, can sour. Fun TikTok mash-ups become retroactive songwriting credits; criticism about originality boils. “I want it to be, like, messy” — Olivia’s opening line on Sour — seems prescient. But a mess doesn’t reveal as much about a person as how they deal with it. For Olivia, handling it all has been a lesson in sifting through what matters. “I just feel like sometimes there’s so much noise and criticism and weird things going on in the world,” she says, generally referring to times she's felt misunderstood over the past year. “I hope people know that deep down, all that I do is write songs and talk about how I feel, and that’s the most important thing to me. Everything else, I think, is not so important.” But she’s not sure that’s a good answer. (Teacher’s pet, remember?) She tries not to look at the stuff people get wrong about her, she adds. “A hard thing for me to grapple with when this whole thing started happening is just, anyone can say anything. You just can’t control…” she trails off, before broadening the picture. “That goes for anyone, like girls going to high school.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 6, 2021 21:28:22 GMT
The world is indeed noisier now for Olivia than it was when she was growing up in Temecula, California, with her mom and dad, a family therapist. The SoCal city is known for its wineries, and Olivia lived in “the suburbs of the suburbs.” Her parents still reside in the house where she was born, the house where she played with American Girl dolls and had “the best childhood ever.” Olivia’s parents moved with her to Los Angeles when she was in seventh grade, as she began to pursue acting. She filmed her first project, An American Girl: Grace Stirs Up Success, in 2014 when she was 11, and then joined the Disney Channel series Bizaardvark, where she met one of her best friends, costar Madison Hu. That show ran for three years, and then she was cast in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series as Nini, a shy high schooler coming into her own as a performer. All the while, Olivia was writing. In 2020, she ramped up her efforts, writing a song every day for the first four months of quarantine, sharing snippets of almost two dozen on Instagram. It was deliberate practice. “I’m a big believer in creativity as a discipline,” she says. Among songs like “Apocalyptic Crush” and “Twilight Song” are early versions of Sour tracks “happier” and “drivers license.” It’s hard to believe “drivers license” could get any more devastating until you hear the first attempt. Instead of the final version’s accusatory line, “’Cause you didn’t mean what you wrote in that song about me,” there’s a more self-deprecating one: “I don’t believe you when you say I did nothing wrong,” she sings atop a melancholy piano melody. Olivia has said before that she appreciates constructive criticism, and she reiterates that point, calling it one of her favorite things. “My favorite people in the world are people I feel like will be totally honest with me and care about me enough to be like, ‘Oh, you can do better,’” she says, referring specifically to Sour producer Dan Nigro. “It’s just about finding people you can trust and whose opinions you can trust.” That also seems like part of getting older — how do you figure out what advice makes you a better person? If you’re predisposed to being hard on yourself, how do you know what is useful vs. what will send you spiraling? If you’re trying to do everything right and foresee bad moves before you make them, how do you cope with mistakes? “I just had this conversation with my therapist yesterday morning,” Olivia says. “Shit’s real.” Being a young star has reinforced the idea for Olivia that there is no room for error. “That’s something I’ve always felt confused over [while] growing up,” she says. “When you’re in the industry, you’re sort of treated like a child but expected to act like an adult. That’s a really terrifying thought, to think that I’m not allowed to make any mistakes, because I think that’s how you grow as a person. I’m no different from any other 18-year-old out there. I’m definitely going to make a lot of mistakes in my life and in my career probably too. That’s just life.” A few months ago, Saturday Night Live comedian and writer Bowen Yang interviewed Olivia for V Magazine. He asked her about existing as an Asian artist (Olivia is part Filipina), and how she thinks about her career from that standpoint. “I sometimes get DMs from little girls being like, ‘I’ve never seen someone who looked like me in your position.’ And I’m literally going to cry. Like, just thinking about it. I feel like I grew up never seeing that. Also, it was always like, ‘pop star’ — that’s a white girl.” Olivia has said similar things about her identity before, but this particular phrasing struck a nerve with some after that quote was aggregated by outlets like Page Six. The criticism was layered: Olivia grew up in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when nonwhite pop stars like Beyoncé, Rihanna, and more not only existed but were taking over the charts. To many, her words felt at best confusing, at worst like erasure. Olivia has seen this discourse, and thinking about it makes something like anguish cross her face. “That was really sad for me to see,” she says. “I really feel like my words were taken so out of context ... What I was saying is that it was cool to see girls of Filipino heritage DM me and be like, ‘Oh, it’s so cool to see someone that looks like me, and that’s really empowering.’” Perhaps she said it a bit more clearly in an interview with The Guardian in May: “It’s hard for anyone to grow up in this media where it feels like if you don’t have European features and blonde hair and blue eyes, you’re not traditionally pretty,” she said then. She’s still figuring out how to talk about race, ethnicity, and having a platform beyond a statement she repeats twice: “I think representation is all about adding. I don’t think it’s about taking anything away from anyone.”
|
|