Girls Gone Wild

On this era of young women making kick-ass music.

I am the landlord to an amazing amount of cultural tenants, living rent-free in my head. Most are residents who you’ve never thought twice about, or never knew at all. One of my favorites, which I call upon often, is a line of dialogue from 2004’s MEAN GIRLS. After the titular girls’ ‘‘burn book”, a collection of burns and bites at every girl in the school, gets released to the student base, the female students start fighting each other. Scared and looking for answers, a teacher retreats to the principal's office to spread the news of the raging in the machine, and she does so in a very specific way:

The line is one I use with extreme frequency, mostly to refer to Generation Z, the newcomers and newest additions to adulthood and influence and spending power. I use it as they make themselves known in their own unique way into American culture, on their apps and their phones and with their new-fangled lingo.

On the eve of a special musical release, and in the year of several special pop culture events,  Iwant to celebrate and advocate for what is one of my favorite musical genres, one that is incredibly important to me and my recent adult life; young women making kick-ass pop/punk/rock music.

We are in a powerful and long-building moment of creative freedom, creative availability, influence availability, and most importantly listener reach capability. TikTok (the most used app and service since, I don’t know, ever?) has become a platform that can mint a music star in singular days, before they’ve released a single song on Spotify, or anywhere else. Then, of course, there’s Spotify, the biggest part of the vast availability of music consumption available to any living person with internet access, which leads to sharing and learning and also to chart domination and news headlines. When combined, the two apps can create “This Generations’s ____” every week.

That’s (partly) what happened to Olivia Rodrigo, who’s breakout 2021 single Driver’s License broke Spotify’s single day records only hours after taking over TikTok. After acting and singing in a Disney series — High School Musical: The Musical: The Series —Rodrigo quickly snowballed her small successes into a best selling album, also in 2021, titled SOUR. From a perfect storm of right time, right place, right upbringing, right app, it’s easy for someone older (like me) to write off this success as a fad that doesn’t reach past the kids on the internet, but that would be wrong, because Rodrigo’s music kicks ass.

Just 18 at the time of its release, SOUR is a remarkable blend of Rodrigo’s influences and of recent and current pop stars of her generation. She is a Swiftie, and her songwriting and vocal delivery really show that off. She’s a fan of Lorde, and was born into the production era that Billie Eilish has helped shape, and those two can be felt in the stylings and vibes of the whole record. But Rodrigo is absolutely her own thing, creating a new lane within all those other mainstream highways. Her storytelling is cutting and somber and internal, tip-toeing into darkness, while maintaining pop sensibilities and a broad, suburban appeal. It is music that can, and has, grab her high-school peers by the lapels and shake them into dance, and give them lyrical ammo to shout in the shower or in the car or together with friends. It’s music that has the goods beyond the kids that inhabit Rodrigo’s high school classes— it was adored by all generations and identities of critics, rightfully so.

Rodrigo is just one of many current rockers that populate my playlists, artists who are breaking through or have recently broken through, who are reaching people and moving people with their songwriting and pop/punk/rock soundscapes. Chloe Moriando’s sophomore production and first studio album BLOOD BUNNY has a handful bangers in the same genre stylings of SOUR, and is work I return to with incredible frequency; there’s Renee Rapp, following in Rodrigo’s footsteps (performing in musicals and television before singing with Geffen and releasing their own records), who just released their first album SNOW ANGEL. There’s also the previous “generation” who broke out a handful of years prior: Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, the aforementioned Lorde and Billie Eilish; the seniors to Rodrigo and Moriondo’s freshman. There’s also dozens of artists I love that are floating around this sound and style that I’m choosing to leave out strictly for brevity. All of these musicians create massively popular sounds while using clear and specific emotional songwriting that connects on an individual level. We are rich in young musical talent.

It’s not just TikTok and Spotify megastars that are fueling the out-loud fandom of (primarily) women recently: fans have been dressing up and showing up to the cinemas and the country’s largest stadiums to see Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie’s BARBIE and Taylor Swift's ERAS tour, both of which are raking in over one billion dollars (so far). Both are celebrations of long-standing American icons, and both are sparking joy in every generation of art fans. It’s been truly special to witness, and to be a part of (I’ll absolutely see you at the theaters for Taylor Swift’s ERAS TOUR concert).

This weekend’s release is the sophomore project from Olivia Rodrigo. Additionally, we were graced this past weekend with a young filmmaker also releasing her sophomore project: Emma Seligman’s BOTTOMS.

A riff-of-a-riff, BOTTOMS is the story of two high-school seniors, bound for college, who are trying to get laid for the first time, a tried-and-true American storytelling archetype. PJ and Josie, both gay women, are considered losers at their school not because they are gay, but because they are gay and untalented. To get out of trouble, and to get into the hot cheerleaders’ bubble, they start a school club — a fight club for girls. Seligman, who co-wrote the story with it’s co-star Rachel Sennott, plays with all of the tropes of the genre: the It Boy Quarterback, the Hot Cheerleader Girlfriend(s), the Big Homecoming Game, the High School Losers Who Become Cool, and plenty more. The challenge of the movie is to place those tropes into modern archetypes and modern language. Comedically, it completely works. Sennott and co-star Ayo Edibiri, who you may know as THE BEAR’s Sydney, are electric and hilarious, and lead a wonderful and diverse cast to teenage comedy classic status. Narratively, the pieces that hold all the jokes together struggle to carry the energy and the pacing, which lets some air out of the room, especially in the middle third of the movie. But the highs that are found here areworth any of its lows, and seeing this in a crowded theater was an absolute treat.

BOTTOMS is playing in theaters right now, and as a result of the Screen Actors’ Guild strike, which is important and necessary, the movie isn’t getting the fun and juicy promotion that it deserves. Please consider having a fun night for yourself and your friends, and go see this wonderful thing and support female filmmakers, female actors and writers, and support R-rated comedies, all of which we desperately need more of.

Connecting BOTTOMS to SOUR could not be easier, because their references are exactly the same: Avril Lavigne. Featured in the film’s soundtrack and Rodrigo’s interview answers, Lavigne represents a different group of young rockers who broke through before Rodrigo was even born: 2002 (deep millennial sigh). Artists like Fefe Dobson, Hayley Willams’ Paramore, Gwen Stefani, fellow Disney Channel alumnus like Demi Lovato and Miley Cyrus; they’re all pieces of the foundation that this new wave of singer/songwriters are standing on.

The real impact that these new artists have had on me is the ability to break through my typical music listening sensibilities. I am absolutely a “listen to music for the vibes” guy, compared to a “listen to music for the lyrics and storytelling” guy. You can be both, of course, but as a learned and untalented percussionist myself, I’ve always leaned into production and soundscapes and instrumentation. But I’m also absolutely a fan of talented vocalists. Voices are my favorite instrument, infinitely personal and unique and bendable and moveable, adding their own textures and rhythms to music in a way that woodwinds can only dream of. The artists mentioned in this piece so far all have powerful and effective voices that can communicate all parts of the emotional spectrum.

These kids have bypassed that filter of mine, and their fun, incisive, inclusive, sad, narrative lyrics have reached me in a way music rarely does. Snail Mail’s 2018 record LUSH was the first to break in and grab my heart and smash it on the damn ground (an experience I hope to one day be courageous enough to write about), and that has opened me up to similar voices that have found their way in. Rodrigo’s SOUR, textually aimed at 17 year olds like her, is so much fun to relate to retroactively, vicariously, and with the colored lenses of nostalgia. It makes perfect sense to me that Robert Gough, 28-33 year old American Male, has the same emotional capacity of a 17 year old American Female. she’s just like me fr

These experiences and discoveries have been one of many of my favorite parts of getting older, and of seeing the next generation age into social capacities. It’s breathtaking to experience what the next generation has found inspiration in from my generation, what they’ve stolen and maken their own. I was twelve when Avril Lavigne’s first record was released. I would be thirteen when it would have its grip on America’s youth, which places me in seventh grade. I wasn’t grabbed by the young talented women my age making incredible art back then, but the next generation would be, and they crafted that into their own art. They’re creating something for themselves, and they’re creating something for those coming up behind them, too. We all age into the world that the previous generation left for us.

It is Friday, September 8th. Today, Olivia Rodrigo is releasing her second album. It’s called GUTS, and you can listen to it right now, wherever you listen to music (I’m choosing to publish this before I listen to it for myself). Kids all over the country are in their first weeks of school, or are about to start. I’m so happy that they have this great art coming from, essentially, their classmates. I can imagine the car and bus rides to schools, the hallway and lunch room conversations, the infinite airpods filling ears and filling schools, filled with the rollicking, rocking tunes of America’s young women.

The girls have gone wild. I think we let them go.

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Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope your weekend is full of young adults yelling at you (in a musical sense, primarily). Please, if you would ever comment and clap back with feedback, give me more artists in this vein that I can add to the “girls rock” playlist. I know it’s deeper than I have currently dug.

I’ll be back next week with more words on more things. Please consider subscribing so I can reach you more easily. Until then:

TTFN,

B