Olivia Rodrigo’s Relatable Superstardom on the Guts Tour

Rodrigo’s best songs feature her clowning on herself—“Everything I do is tragic / Every guy I like is gay,” she sang while charging around the stage during a performance of “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” a raucous song teeming with excellent one-liners—or meditating on a choice made in pursuit of fleeting bliss. That sort of thing might not seem radical—who among us has not muttered, “Fuck it, it’s fine,” and run directly toward the wrong person, as Rodrigo gleefully recounts doing—but, in an era in which a woman’s desire is still often thought of as inherently dangerous, Rodrigo’s unself-consciousness about what she wants can feel nearly revolutionary. She never projects superiority, and her relatability—perhaps the most powerful cultural currency of our time—doesn’t feel overly engineered. She knows that true yearning is always a little humiliating. “God, love’s fucking embarrassing,” she sang in the middle of “Love Is Embarrassing,” before turning one of the song’s more defeated proclamations—“How could I be so stupid?”—into a blithe punch line. This is another recurring theme of Rodrigo’s writing: the indignities of growing up when you have to learn everything the hard way.