Every week, The Lemur’s editors-in-chief handpick a few things worth holding onto. Consider this your quick break from the incessant pull of Instagram Reels.
This week, we have a two-person venture in music criticism. We each sat with this month’s buzziest album, Olivia Rodrigo’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. We landed on opposing feelings of belief and skepticism. Here are our thoughts.
What does this album make you feel?
AND: I think the album does a great job of digging you out of your six-foot-deep misery, rejecting these deterministic labels that read like a tombstone saying Here Lies Your Love. Olivia is daring, vulnerable, and totally carefree. It’s a different side of her than her project SOUR or GUTS. This album, I believe, fulfills her mission of trying to write live songs with joyful romance and “laced with a little melancholy.”
I’ll be honest, this is the first album I’ve attentively heard of her since “Driver’s License.” But many things that emerge from you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. Not only does the title capture a vexing reality of love, but the whole structure of the album seems to be a confession of her inability to grasp it. What hits me is the way her vulnerability, the morbid allusions like maggot brains and drop dead, and her joy mesh into a coherent narrative that says “I’ve accepted love’s pitfalls, and they have less power over me.” That’s deep.
I know the album is written as a girl’s girl album, but I think men can take away a good amount. Namely, the album’s clear message about the feminine toll behind love and caution about over-optimism and delusional thinking promoted on social media. A great piece of art nonetheless.
CE: As a YOUNG WOMAN, and therefore Rodrigo’s target audience, this album chiefly makes me feel like I’m listening to something that was purposely manufactured just for me, and thus gives me the satisfaction of engaging with something the establishment thinks is rightfully mine. It’s obsessed and sweetly tortured by the mere idea of being a young woman navigating an ever-changing, exciting world, and Rodrigo has many compatriots exploring this theme at the moment.
However, my chief gripe is that this album feels almost too milquetoast or over-processed to strike a nerve. I’d much rather listen to similar music that is less refined (or more zany), because I feel the gravity of what’s being said. When Paris Paloma wails “For someone I thought was my saviour / You sure make me do a whole lot of labour!” (“labour,” 2024); her heartbreak upon a destructive relationship is more palpable than Rodrigo’s whispery “My head is spinning and my stomach is sick / Say I’m in love, so it’s hard to admit” (on “what’s wrong with me,” a track featuring The Cure’s Robert Smith).
It may be no surprise to you that Rodrigo’s upbeat tracks appealed more to me than songs promising profundity. At its best, tracks from this album will make me feel pretty decent when they come on after Paramore on some Spotify mix or other while I’m driving on a summer morning.
This album also makes me feel spiritually 60 years old because of my inability to connect with it, so I’ll put that out there.
Why do you think the culture chose to gravitate towards this album? What implications follow?
AND: Honestly, the culture was in desperate need of an album like this. We are simultaneously the ‘rebellious’ generation and the most cautious and risk-averse generation. Speakers like Arthur Brooks have spoken heavily on this, and I do not want to sound like a broken record. In an age where getting it right matters more than just doing the thing, Olivia Rodrigo finds the silver lining for us: we are still human. We still crave that good morning text, the random gestures of affection from loved ones, and we seek humans who are willing to be witnesses to our imploding lives. In an age of social media, it seems more like a pipe dream than reality for some.
Olivia persistently reminds us to take the leap of faith, love with your heart, and accept the consequences that may come from it—good or bad. It’s no surprise her lead-off song “drop dead” has reached 300 million streams on Spotify and counting. I’ve always held the opinion that music defines eras. Right now, music is competing to see which one defines it. Justin Bieber and pop artists defined the 2010s (oh how we all dream to return to summer 2016), and now the 2020s are a similar story. Olivia Rodrigo is carving her own path of radical acceptance and conscious love. And it seems people are following along.
CE: I feel like a large part of today’s pop culture is driven by stunted millennials and older Gen Zers that defy nominally age-appropriate media. Take Disney adults, Swifties, and superhero-film obsessives. I would include a great deal of Rodrigo stans, to a somewhat lesser extent, among them.
Which is my theory of why the whispery adolescent melodrama of you seem pretty sad has resonated with so many. Some of the most popular tracks, “drop dead” and “the cure,” are among the most high-school, to put it crudely.
That said, there is some real merit. “maggots for brains” is a good song about the dangers of codependency, a buzzy relationship dynamic that has entered popular vernacular due to the influence of mental health content on social media. “my way” and “expectations” are audacious in Rodrigo’s bold, non-poetic statements about her standards for the dating world (“Let me be direct, just stop / You’re being fucking weird;” “I won’t settle for a guy with a fake job” / “They seem so desperate for loving, but baby, I’m not”) — I can’t quarrel with silly lyrics that may legitimately empower an adolescent listener. Points to “stupid song” for catchiness.
Actually, let’s go back to The Cure (the band, not the track) for a second. This part I don’t understand. Rodrigo adores Smith for some reason, and it’s cool she got to work with him, but what possible crossover in the cultural zeitgeist they could share via their collaboration is beyond me.
Do you think this album will be talked about in 100 years?
AND: I think it’s a hard question to answer, and I think Olivia stands on a pedestal of her own. There’s this fragmentation in the music scene that is hard to describe. 100 years from now, people will look into the annals of history and have a hard time describing it. There’s the soft girl/boy aesthetic defined by Laufey, beabadoobee, and Harry Styles. There’s this sense of alternative music, almost like smelling bath salts. Then miscellaneous music I can’t grasp. We got the Latino flavor by Bad Bunny, the Marias, and J Balvin. Then there’s Olivia Rodrigo. I would like to put her in this rowdy group of Sabrina Carpenter, who got a lot of flak for her Man’s Best Friend album cover, Chapelle Roan and Charli XCX. But I can’t accurately put her into any category, aside from Disney stars who grow up alongside their audiences like Addison Rae, Sabrina and Olivia.
While her performance on Bizaardvark will be sadly forgotten (she did a phenomenal job), her music will be remembered. She seems to take a little bit of each, adding in a worrying amount of self-awareness and optimism along the way, and creates smash hits. SOUR introduced her, and I believe you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love cements her status as a key player within the emerging music scene.
CE: No.
There’s your Sunday. Keep an open mind and let us (or, better yet, a friend!) know if anything resonates. No Lemur is an island. We’ll see you next week.
