Olivia Rodrigo is the iconic pop girlie of our generation. From her original hit “Drivers License” to songs like “All-American Bitch” and “Vampire,” she delivers with her catchy tunes.
In her most recent album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” she plays with themes of healing through codependency and falling in love too fast. Love is portrayed as something closer to horror than romance. There’s a kind of body horror she uses to symbolize how the relationship made her feel.
Her song “Maggots for Brains,” for example, uses intense and gross imagery of a rotting and maggot-infested brain as a symbol for how codependency feels. Olivia relies so much on this person that she doesn’t feel like she enjoys life anymore. Without him, the everyday joys of life are meaningless. In the chorus, she sings “I feel dirty, I feel rotten, and the colors are all flat / I’m a sad shell of a woman and I got maggots for brains,” painting the picture of the zombie she’s become.
The tone is very cold and negative — but then, at the end, the chorus brightens, concluding with, “But that’s just the thing that happens when my / when my baby goes away.” That last line is higher pitched, and she sings it in a softer, breathier way. It sounds like a nod or parallel to the whimsical sigh of a girl in love that we would see in dramatic cartoons or films. The end of the song even finishes off with a repeated line of “What can I do / But think of you.”
This song does a great job of showing the progression of her mind during the beginning of the relationship. She’s aware of how she’s feeling and the obsession she has for this person, but she thinks it’s a normal side effect of her love. Olivia shrugs it off, not realizing that being without her lover shouldn’t make her feel so horrible.
As the album continues, the relationship unravels. Time shows the cracks between them, and she starts to come to terms with the fact that being together is hurting her. As their lives start meshing more and more, she loses herself in him, causing her to spiral.
In the video for her song “The Cure,” she sings, “And all the nights I spent fighting bad thoughts in my room / Feeling so alone, might as well be on the moon / I thought I found the antidote with you,” all while making little potions to heal her heart.
She finally acknowledges that she was expecting this relationship to “fix” her. Incorporating body horror, the camera shows her injecting the mystery antidote into fake beating hearts. Every time she does this, the heart goes still and gray. It’s unsettling but rightfully so, symbolizing that no matter what others do, they can’t fix her.
Her song “Begged” could be considered part two of “The Cure.” In the previous song, we see how she reflects on her own mental state, but in “Begged” she shows us the things that this guy lacked in their relationship. I couldn’t tell at first if she felt unloved because of her own doubts, or because of her partner’s actions. There’s one line that specifically caught my attention. She sings, “So I’m cool and forgiving, I’ll take what you’re giving.” She ignored her own feelings, pushed them away for as long as she could, because she wanted to be the “chill” girlfriend. She asked for reassurance and love, but he didn’t know how to give that to her. She’s forgiving the things that he has had to learn in their relationship, but she will always be hurt that to get love she had to ask for it.
The foreshadowing through the whole album finally comes to its peak, and the couple breaks up. In the very last song of the album, “Cigarette Smoke,” she’s reminded of the man she loved. She uses the very universal feeling of regret to tie up the album. She regrets all the time she felt was wasted, and in the end wishes she could just forget all the memories of him.
This album is very sentimental. It feels like a friend telling you every detail of what happened with their ex. Olivia gets deeply personal and is very honest about both her and her partner’s faults. It’s really hard for people to admit that they need help, or to admit that because of their past, being in a relationship can be difficult. There’s healing that a person needs to seek within themselves before being in a relationship, and that can be horrible to come to terms with. Everyone needs to know how to be happy when alone, and Olivia creates a stunning story to tell her audience this.
Leave a Reply