In this essay on Olivia Rodrigo's new album GUTS, senior culture editor P. Claire Dodson explores the summer of girlhood and what comes after, in the context of Rodrigo's songwriting evolution.
In the summer of 2023, we were girls together. You didn’t just see Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, you reclaimed your girlhood. You didn’t just enjoy Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, you healed your inner girl. After this past weekend, you didn’t just listen to an Olivia Rodrigo album, you had your every thought and feeling validated in what seemed to be the ultimate homage to girlhood, her sophomore album GUTS.
Except that Rodrigo’s album isn’t so much a celebration of girlhood as it is an accounting of early adulthood — its risks, adventures, expectations, and mistakes, the way it pulls all of our worst instincts out of us and uses them for our gorgeous, necessary, early 20s self-destruction. The initial response to GUTS feels like SOUR mimicry, when we all listened to “drivers license” and felt seventeen again, when we belabored the point that Olivia Rodrigo was young, young, young. (Cue the prescient 2015 Frankie Cosmos song: “I wrote some songs that I sung/ And have you heard I'm so young?”) GUTS — and for that matter Eras, and Barbie – says much more about what adult women are allowed to do and be than it does girls. GUTS brings Olivia Rodrigo firmly into the motions and machinery of adulthood. After a summer of girlhood, it feels like a good time to be pulled along with her, to be reminded of the ways women are caged in by childhood, and how we might be set free.
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Rebecca Jennings’ Vox essay Girl Trends and the Repackaging of Womanhood — and her use of Robin Wasserman’s 2016 essay What Does It Mean When We Call Women Girls? — has rolled around in my head for weeks as the summer of girlhood has come to an exhausting end. Both writers explore the forever draw of “girls” as a concept, a marketing tool, and a historical retaking of power. “The word has become a weapon with which to fight back,” Wasserman writes, referencing the important history of Riot Grrls and girl power. And both writers acknowledge its inherent failings and connotations. “...People will always care about what girls do, because girls are not yet women and therefore less easy to despise,” Jennings writes. “Girls are more available for consumption, and girls have more available to them.”
Related: Olivia Rodrigo at the Crossroads
In 2023, does every young woman who makes music need to be honoring girlhood, or inviting us back into nostalgia? GUTS is a rock opera about control, decision-making, and agency, and how much we do or don’t have of those things in any given scenario. It feels limiting for ourselves, and patronizing to Rodrigo and to people in their teens and early 20s, to look at a young woman’s emotions and see in them something juvenile, or resonant only in its ability to conjure us back to youthfulness. (This discussion also provokes the question of who, exactly, is allowed to be a girl, is allowed to be seen as young and fragile, or cutely volatile, or emotional in any way.) Instead of being eternal teenage girls in our 20s or 30s or 50s, what if we could expand the idea of what being an adult woman looks like instead of retrofitting girlhood ad nauseam?
It’s a context that Rodrigo herself seems interested in exploring on GUTS from the very beginning, with her scathing opening “all-american bitch.” She becomes the ultimate archetype of contradictory feminine perfection in an anthem that’s the Gone Girl monologue meets Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl,” with a title inspired by Joan Didion and a pettiness à la Ashlee Simpson’s “Autobiography.” In the live rehearsal video of the track on YouTube, we see her descend into (appropriately voice-protecting) shrieks, before plastering on an angelic smile to insist, “I’m grateful all the f*cking time.” Even in the scream, she can’t quite let go of responsibility.
The most telling line of the song, however, is in the chorus: “I know my age and I act like it.” Read: Don’t act too old, don’t dress too provocatively for your age, but lean into all the emotions of being 19 or 20 because once you get older you’re not allowed to be that intense anymore. You have to have learned your lessons.
Rodrigo plays around with the concept of age throughout GUTS. On “logical,” she’s “too young, too soft, can’t take a joke, can’t get you off,” but the subtext is skeptical: she was old enough for that older guy to pursue her in the first place, for a man in his mid to late 20s to see her as a romantic option when she was still a teenager. On “making the bed,” she laments “another day pretendin' I'm older than I am.”
There’s a juxtaposition between how she views her place in the entertainment industry and her place as a 20-year-old experiencing life. She’s been playing adult for years, ever since she first stepped on a film set. “When you're in the industry, you're sort of treated like a child but expected to act like an adult,” she told me in 2021. Meanwhile, she’s been aspiring toward an older age in her personal life, from her freshman effort’s “Where’s my f*ckin’ teenage dream?” to “She’s so much older than me/she’s everything I’m insecure about.” On Sour, she actively questioned her girlhood as she was experiencing it; now she’s a little older, expected to be more mature and wanting to be, but still seen as young above most anything else. On GUTS, her youth has begun to feel like a trap.
Related: Olivia Rodrigo “Sour” Album Review: It’s Brutal Out Here
“All of the drama that surrounded ‘drivers license’ was baptism by fire,” she told The Guardian recently. The past few years have been an intense education in massive fame, societal expectations, double standards, and the pervasive scrutiny and role model-ification of young women in the spotlight. Meanwhile, she’s been turning 18, 19, 20 — these first years of being out on your own, free to play and fail and f*ck around. The sheer playfulness of GUTS makes it a standout album; not everything about being a woman, being a person, has to be so damn serious. “Bad idea, right?” unabashedly admits how fun it is to hook up with an ex without telling your friends where you’re going, to do things that people might see as “bad” just because you want to, because you can. “Get him back” is the cleverest wordplay she engages in on GUTS, pulling out telling, funny misdirects like the iconic, “I wanna kiss his face/with an uppercut.”
The album’s first of two fundamental thesis statements comes in “making the bed,” one of the most self-aware, grounded offerings from Rodrigo yet. In the sparse, clear-eyed ballad, she acknowledges that she’s the one who has been making the bed she now lies in; it’s not self-effacing, it’s just true. It’s ownership, acknowledging the power you have in your own life amidst all the thousands of things that might render you powerless. Here, Rodrigo utters one of the most poignant one-liners on GUTS: “I’m so tired of being the girl that I am.” At 20, poised precariously between girlhood and adulthood, you’re still largely comprised of the latter.
There’s a sadness to leaving that kind of innocence, or naivete, behind. Nostalgia is powerful, easily and constantly rewriting our memories. It’s not, “I’m too tired to make food, too worn down by how hard it is to be a person, especially a woman, in the world.” It’s girl dinner! It’s not, “There’s no time to make healthy habits because I’m trapped in a capitalist hamster wheel that simultaneously demands my youth and my forever attractiveness to men.” It’s a hot girl walk! And of course, of course, we relish any chance to feel boundless, and our minds go back to the last time we were allowed to feel that way.
But Rodrigo herself is working through those feelings of being “allowed” and just doing what she wants (or singing about it, at least). As today’s foremost women musicians have told us over and over: Adult women hold grudges, have emotions, feel grief, feel betrayed, feel freedom. They slowly shake off the confinements and pressures of youth in favor of something more open to their own desires. Unlike what Barbie might have us believe, mothers do not always stand still for their daughters to see how far they’ve come; they’re changing, too, shifting all the time, learning new things about all the different versions of themselves that they hold. Time heals wounds, it gets better, but not because you magically get to a place of eternal stability (how boring!). We’re not guaranteed growth. There is no future version free of pain or turmoil; there is no past version who was perfectly free to experience the world and make mistakes. We have to enforce that right in ourselves, every day insisting on the right to feel.
Why go back to girlhood to have those feelings? We can have them now, whatever age we are, with whatever experiences we have or dream of having. We can have them whenever we listen to GUTS, but not simply because she’s young or only singing about young people things. Not discarding our teen years, but not overly romanticizing them or using them as constant justification to give yourself a f*cking break. We still have these complex interior worlds — girlhood isn’t something we’ve lost, it’s something we’ve gained.
GUTS ends right back at the very beginning: an interpolation, or a sibling sound, to the iconic open car door chimes that launched her into popular culture’s highest heights in 2021. Track 12, “teenage dream,” outros with a melancholy piano reference tempered by Rodrigo laughing softly over the ending. It’s a song about coming to terms with aging as a young woman in the spotlight, its good and bad parts; one day you won’t be a pretty young thing, but are you ready for society’s youth-obsessed attractiveness scale? One day you won’t be told you’re “great for your age,” but will your work be seen as good enough to speak for itself?
Rodrigo has long been skeptical of the teenage dream in her own life, but she fears the same things we all do, is afraid of the nostalgia trap of girlhood: “Will I spend all the rest of my years wishing I could go back?” She inclines her head toward us, understanding that her first record SOUR was a way to relive those terrible emotions of a heartbroken girl who just wanted to drive on her own to a first love’s house. This one, however, is an assertion of evolution. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t always be your teenage dream,” she tells us. There’s no rage in it. A shrug, maybe. A quiet kind of mourning, or an accepting sigh. Have the fear, and let it pass. Turn off the light, leave the studio, drive home, grow older.
