Continuing to ramp up promotion for her debut album, Sour, Olivia Rodrigo has released a third single and video called “good 4 u.” While the theme of the song may echo the jilted lover tone of “drivers license” and “déjà vu,” Rodrigo is doing something sonically diverse from these previous tracks. Even if it’s not exactly diverse from what Avril Lavigne did with the likes of “Sk8r Boi” in 2002.
Indeed, the “pop punk” sound comes across as though it could very well be an interpolation of just that as the Petra Collins-directed video gradually builds up to the overt hints of Rodrigo’s rage leading to a more literal kind of fiery anger. But before we get to the flames, what would a video starring the girl from High School Musical: The Musical: The Series be without offering us a quintessential high school scene? Therefore, we have flashes of Britney Spears’ signature “…Baby One More Time” video as Rodrigo serves us a cheerleading look in the gymnasium (no, it’s not twirling a basketball like Britney, but still, the aesthetic is there). However, there are no sugary sweet Britney sentiments where lyrics and instrumentation are concerned.
It is, in this way, that Rodrigo once again takes a songwriting page from her number one mentor, Taylor Swift, who best hold on to her crown tightly if she doesn’t want Rodrigo to become the new Queen of Being Wronged By Shady Softboys. Then again, maybe that’s just the inherent right of the teen girl du moment. Even if Swift was twenty-two when she released “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”—of which there are many traces present in “good 4 u,” albeit Rodrigo is capable of conveying more contempt in her vocals than Swift, who was still doing her best to play it “nice” while expressing anger in 2012.
After a “cheer” in the aforementioned gym, during which Rodrigo channels some of her angst, it is in the locker room that we veer toward Promising Young Woman territory in terms of an unquenchable desire for revenge. And it isn’t just those elbow-length black leather gloves that scream it (“it” being, “I’m a woman on the warpath now!”). Carey Mulligan’s Cassie Thomas would also surely approve of a little “grocery store run” (in a scene that mirrors Cassie’s pharmacy jaunt with Ryan [Bo Burnham] while “Stars Are Blind” plays). The one where Rodrigo stocks up on a can of gas (like so many Americans right now) so she can claim the vengeance she so richly deserves as she decries, “Maybe I’m too emotional, but your apathy’s like a wound in salt/Maybe I’m too emotional/Or maybe you never cared at all.”
Regarding a lyric such as this one, it’s quite fitting that Rodrigo recently noted to The Guardian, in reference to being “accused” of only writing songs about exes who have done her wrong à la Swift, “I’m a teenage girl, I write about stuff that I feel really intensely—and I feel heartbreak and longing really intensely—and I think that’s authentic and natural. I don’t really understand what people want me to write about; do you want me to write a song about income taxes?” True… and this sentiment is but a gentle reminder that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned because that woman still carries the “emotional” teen girl inside.
And Rodrigo is right to wield her venomous sarcasm toward the boy who callously abandoned her with the faux encouragement, “Good for you, you’re doing great out there without me,” adding, “Like a damn sociopath.” And yes, it has to be said that sociopathy feels like a rampant condition in the male gender perhaps precisely because women “feel too much” for them to handle, ergo a total shutdown occurs in order to “cope” with it.
One might venture to also offer the idea that “good 4 u” provides a Gen Z version of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” but the emotions here aren’t precisely in the same vein. For while Morissette is calculated and methodical in the escalation of her rage, Rodrigo is all bark and no bite. For one definitely gets the sense that it’s just as she has already said: she’s nothing more than a “goody two-shoes,” ultimately fulfilling her vitriol-packed fantasies by putting them in her music.
Another filmic comparison apart from Cassie Thomas in Promising Young Woman flickers toward Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body as Rodrigo swims serenely in the lake at the end of the video, her eyes flashing with a diabolical supernatural air as she poses in just the same way as Jennifer Check after eating a boy. Because, once again, teen girl emotion simply has to be positioned as slightly demonic…er, “dramatic” (hence, Regina George wearing a shirt that announced, “A Little Bit Dramatic”). If that’s the case, Rodrigo is telling us all: so be it.
