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As a pop star, Olivia Rodrigo wields a rather unusual arsenal of weapons. She is a sharp writer and an unconscious singer. She greatly abhors artifice. She is modest, not lascivious. In just three years, she’s achieved something approaching stratospheric fame: a four-times platinum debut album and a Grammy for best new artist, while still being an underdog.
But the weapon he returns to again and again is a very pointed and versatile curse word, one he used to vivid effect on both his 2020 smash hit, “Drivers License,” the first single from his debut album, “Sour ” as well as “Vampire,” the Grammy-nominated single from his second album, “Guts,” released last year. He’s in plenty of other places too, giving his anguished pleas an extra edge of enthusiasm. She wants to make it clear that beneath his calm exterior, he is seething.
On Friday night at the Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, California, during the opening performance of the Guts World Tour, Rodrigo couldn’t get enough of that word. He used it for emphasis, to connote disdain and demonstrate exasperation. But mostly he used it casually, between jokes between songs, not because he needed it, but because using it seemed like getting away with it.
Much of Rodrigo’s music—especially “Guts,” with its detailed, delirious reflections on newfound fame and discontents—is about what it feels like to act badly after being told how important it is to be good. It is set at the moment when freedom is about to give way to bad behavior.
This also applies to their performance, which brought the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano ballads between which their songs alternate. For more than an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately roared and pleaded, stomped and collapsed. He led a reverent crowd of 11,000 (a considerable jump from the theaters in which he performed on his first tour) in songs that were raucous and church-like, but never raucous.
Throughout the concert, Rodrigo made gestures of abandonment, singing the first verse of “Get Him Back!” through a megaphone, lowering the mic at the end of “All-American Bitch,” and performing saucy for a camera peering in from beneath a clear section of the stage in “Obsessed.”
While she has an exuberant stage presence, she’s not a full-service pop star and is best to avoid that trap. Rodrigo is in his safest position by performing faithful and discreet recitations of his songs. He opened the night with a forceful “Bad idea, right?” followed by “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” perhaps the truest statement of purpose on his latest album, and lets the dry, whining ’90s guitars convey anxiety and sadness.
Those songs emphasize Rodrigo’s taste for rock, which is serious, studied and reinforced by an impressively roaring band that gave him a soup of courage. But he followed up with an even more powerful troika of howls of repudiation: “Vampire” in “Traitor” and “Drivers License,” a series of slow ballads that are among his most bracing songs. (Almost as moving was hearing three girls, maybe 8 years old, scream “Traitor” at the top of their lungs while watching its music video in the back of a loaded Mercedes Sprinter van in the parking lot before the show.)
But making their songs feel big didn’t require much more than the songs themselves. At the end of “The Grudge,” Rodrigo was clearly left alone at the foot of the stage, a flash of self-sufficiency and defiance. (The dancers joined her for several songs, and in some, she danced with them awkwardly.) At the end of the performance, she sang a breathless “Happier” and the casually sinister “Favorite Crime” while she sat on the edge of one of the stages. tentacles. And although she was floating above the crowd on a crescent moon with “Logical” and “Enough for You,” two of her most heartbreaking songs, it was the steady tremor of her voice that moved her most, not the show in the air. .
In his outfits, Rodrigo leans toward a combination of demure and tough. His fans have been taking notice. Among the crowd, there was near unanimity in dress: young girls, mostly teenagers, in mid-thigh skirts and black boots or Chuck Taylors. Almost everyone had at least one item that glowed. He recalled Taylor Swift’s early tours, where thousands of young fans would arrive in summer dresses and cowboy boots. At one point, Rodrigo asked the crowd if anyone had come with his father (many), then if anyone had come with a boyfriend or girlfriend (not many). He then asked if anyone had dressed up for the show and the crowd roared almost in unison. (Women outnumbered men so significantly that most men’s bathrooms became all-gender overnight.)
At merchandise stands, vendors sold childhood accessories: lavender butterfly-shaped tote bags, star-shaped stickers that stick to your face (to emulate the “Sour” album cover), and Band-Aids with sayings. by Rodrigo. And on stage, the performers announced the power of girlhood: the members of Rodrigo’s band and dance group were all women, non-binary or transgender.
Rodrigo has also included supporting young women as part of the tour: proceeds from each ticket will go to her charity, Fund 4 Good, and support “non-profit community organizations that champion girls’ education, “They support reproductive rights and prevent gender violence.” .”
This is in keeping with Rodrigo’s enduring and persuasive narrative that childhood is complicated. His performance of “Teenage Dream,” a ballad about wondering if the best years of his life are already behind him, was particularly revealing, especially with images of Rodrigo as a little boy playing with acting, unaware of the consequences. realities of stardom.
The opener was Chappell Roan, a sexually frank singer whose big voice was erased by her arrangements. She offered a contrast to Rodrigo, who sings about sex with superficial references and punchlines, often hidden in the middle of a verse. (Starting in April, openers will be Remi Wolf, PinkPantheress and, very promisingly for the intergenerationally curious, the Breeders.)
That topic is still too raw for Rodrigo, who never strays too far from his younger fans, nor from his younger self. But that could soon change. Rodrigo turned 21 a few days before this show, perhaps the last publicly recognized line of demarcation between youth and adulthood. She didn’t let it pass without comment.
“I went to the gas station the other day and bought a pack of cigarettes,” she said, sitting at the piano after “Driver’s License,” in what threatened to be the only moment of genuine misconduct of the evening.
But then he confessed: “I promise you I didn’t consume it, I just bought it because I could.” Did he add a bad word for emphasis? She did it.