She started the show with “Bad Idea Right?” I was not ready for that. In her short career, Olivia Rodrigo has released two albums, and both of them have near-perfect opening tracks. “Brutal” and “All-American Bitch” are both revved-up, energetic statement-of-intent ragers. Both would’ve made great openers for Rodrigo’s first-ever arena tour. But no, she went with her best song.

“Bad Idea Right?” wasn’t a giant hit, but it was an instant 10/10 classic, at least to my ears. I was always going to be in the tank for a circa-now gleaming pop single that sounds like Veruca Salt or Letters To Cleo. That’s absolute bait for a gen-X rock critic like me. But “Bad Idea Right?” is brighter and catchier and funnier and more fired-up than that description implies, and its lead riff immediately charged the atmosphere in Washington, DC’s Capital One Arena last Saturday night. The crowd — overwhelmingly young, probably 90% female — instantly came unglued. Olivia Rodrigo can afford to open her show with a song as good as that. She’s got great songs to burn.

Culturally speaking, Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts Tour is old news. It started way back in February, and it’s already on its second North American leg after wrapping up a European jaunt earlier this month. Rodrigo’s sophomore album, which gave the tour its name, is nearly a year old. Rodrigo hasn’t been a big factor in the so-called Pop Girl Summer, except to the extent that Chappell Roan, the year’s biggest emerging star, got a major boost from opening the tour’s early dates. At this point, Roan could probably launch an arena tour of her own.

The major storylines from the Guts Tour — the Breeders opening the New York shows, the guest-appearances from ’90s stars like Jewel and Sheryl Crow, the abortion fund that was disallowed from handing out Plan B to concertgoers — have already come and gone. Sabrina Carpenter, once best-known as the alleged blonde girl on “Drivers License,” is now a full-on star in her own right. In a pop marketplace that runs on storylines and conversation, Olivia Rodrigo isn’t currently at the center of attention the way that Roan, Carpenter, and Charli XCX are. But fuck a storyline. The Guts Tour is fucking awesome, and few pop stars have ever restored my faith in the form quite like Olivia Rodrigo.

OLIVIA RODRIGO is the chosen one sent to save guitar music Lisan Al Gaib @oliviarodrigo

— Colin Young (@ColinYovng) May 20, 2024

I took my daughter. Obviously. She’s 15 now, and I’ve taken her to see a bunch of her favorites when they’ve come through the region. Shows like this hit different when you get to bring your kids, and an Olivia Rodrigo show — a scream-along singalong ritual that’s deeply rooted in ’90s alt-rock and pop-punk aesthetics — is right in our Venn-diagram overlap. I half-expected a huge gen-X dad contingent at the show, and there were definitely a few of us. (Shout out to the guy in the B-52’s shirt.) There were more moms, though. We were seated in between a couple of mom-daughter configurations, and when Rodrigo asked the crowd who’s come with their moms or their dads, the roar was loud. For the record, Clara ranks Olivia Rodrigo at #3 on her all-time live-show ranking — behind Taylor Swift and boygenius but ahead of Chappell Roan, Lana Del Rey, Ariana Grande, Beach Bunny, and everyone else who played on our day of last year’s All Things Go fest.

Missed Mindforce and End It to take my kid to see Olivia tonight, only slightly regret it pic.twitter.com/lKazIHF8Yh

— Tom Breihan (@tombreihan) July 21, 2024

Olivia Rodrigo is basically still a kid herself. Three days before the Guts Tour began, Rodrigo celebrated her 21st birthday; she can buy brews now. Rodrigo’s music is stuck in extremely teenage feelings of heartbreak and anger and confusion and exhilaration, and she communicates that stuff with a great combination of polish and intensity. She still looks like a kid, too. When Rodrigo first appeared in the mainstream radar early in 2021, she was already a terrifyingly sophisticated songwriter, and she’s only grown sharper since then. Now, she’s headlining arenas after two short albums — the same sort of insane trajectory that her hero-turned-quasi-rival Taylor Swift was on when she dropped Fearless. Both of Rodrigo’s albums are straight fucking fire, and if she disappears tomorrow, she’s already earned a place in history. If she continues to grow, it’s almost scary to think about what she could become.

Lord help whoever scorned Olivia Rodrigo. If the public ever finds out who it is, they’ll have to go into witness protection.

— Ace (@AceXEdge) May 22, 2021

For me, part of the intrigue of an Olivia Rodrigo arena show was the question of how she’d translate her relatively intimate songs into the gleaming spectacle of the arena tour. A guy like Zach Bryan can just go out and play his songs with his band, but female pop stars are expected to put on entire Broadway-ready productions — costume changes, backup dancers, props, the whole bit. Rodrigo could play an extremely satisfying frill-free live show, and it was a lot of fun to just see her stomp around the stage in her enormous black boots for the first few songs on Saturday. But then a crew of dancers came up on a stage-elevator, and the spectacle was on.

The spectacle worked for me. In all of its aesthetic decisions, the Guts Tour plays to Olivia Rodrigo’s strengths. The members of her ultra-pro backing band are all punk-presenting women, as are her backup dancers. Those dancers dress and move like more animated versions of the cheerleaders in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — sometimes doing zombie shuffles, sometimes surrounding Rodrigo and just pogoing around. Rodrigo rarely joins in with the choreography, since she’s not much of a dancer. Her vocals are solid but never earth-shattering. She plays piano and guitar onstage, but she never does anything virtuosic with either instrument. Instead, Rodrigo has songs, and she has presence.

There were all sorts of cool little production touches during the show. The big screen behind Rodrigo messed around with different effects from song to song — black-and-white film-noir stock, comic-book panels, a montage of baby-Olivia footage during “Teenage Dream.” I liked the blanket of dry-ice fog during “Vampire” and the beautifully timed deployment of confetti cannon. During two of the ballads, glowing stars descended from a rig over the crowd, and Rodrigo rode a crescent moon around the arena, waving to everyone while she sang. This was all pretty low-tech compared to the theatrics of a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé stadium tour, but as someone who delights in big-budget whizjets, there was plenty of sparkly stuff on display.

Olivia Rodrigo is riding on the moon pic.twitter.com/8enguV3d8O

— Tom Breihan (@tombreihan) July 21, 2024

Still, the show’s greatest special effect wasn’t anything that a production crew might load into the truck. It was the crowd. People love Olivia Rodrigo, and they love those songs. For me, there’s a big gulf between Rodrigo’s fired-up rockers and her ballads, which are sometimes transcendent but more often forgettable. That’s not how those kids felt, though. The audience was loud all night, but when the music was quieter, you could really hear 20,000 or so people roaring out every line. The DC show sold out months ahead of time, and these young women were fully ready for the opportunity to wail every line from “Traitor” or “Logical.” In a room surging with that much energy, those songs hit a whole lot harder.

I’m old enough that I saw plenty of the ’90s and ’00s artists that inform Olivia Rodrigo’s music when they were still at their peak. (The pre-show playlist was full of stuff like Bikini Kill and No Doubt, as if to underline a sensibility that was already plenty obvious.) Those shows were often great, but they never had Rodrigo’s high-level production values or her loud, passionate fans. It’s striking and gratifying to see someone turn that stuff to fuel a majestic arena-sized spectacle. It’s not easy to do.

PinkPantheress, who opened the DC show, is similarly rooted in an aesthetic that’s older than her. In her case, it’s the UK garage and drum ‘n’ bass-addled dance-pop of Y2K London. PinkPantheress got famous during the pandemic, so she didn’t have time to get her live reps up before she started playing big shows. Early on, the knock on PinkPantheress was that she was a sloppy and indifferent live performer. She’s gotten a lot better since then, but her opening set wasn’t the kind of thing that’s likely to lead to a Chappell Roan-style explosion. Instead, she was calm and casual, and she might’ve gotten her biggest response for the piped-in Ice Spice verse during “Boy’s A Liar Pt. 2.” It was cute, but there was nothing visceral about it. The arena made her look small.

It’s not fair to compare an opener to a headliner, but the arena did not make Olivia Rodrigo look small. The rigors of a huge pop tour don’t allow for much spontaneity, and I could tell that we were getting the same setlist and stage patter as every other show on the tour. It didn’t matter. One of the main jobs of a pop star is to channel and reflect the excitement of the crowd. On Saturday, the people in that arena were absolutely giddy to be there, and so was Rodrigo. That, along with the sheer overwhelming quality of the songs themselves, made for a glorious show. You should go see Olivia Rodrigo when you get the chance. When applicable, you should bring your kids.