Olivia Rodrigo's Unraveled Tour rolled into Columbus last night for the first of two shows at Ohio State University's Value City Arena. Five quick thoughts on that:
1. This week Rolling Stone put out its list of the 200 greatest rock songs of the 21st century so far. It's ridiculous ragebait, but they weren't wrong to rank "good 4 u" so highly. Olivia Rodrigo is a rock artist at least as much as she's a pop artist. It was apparent on her tour supporting 2023's GUTS, which vacillated wildly between the guitar-powered explosions and bleeding-heart ballads. It's even more apparent on this tour, which follows June's you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. The setlist is a little more coherent, which is to say it mostly grouped its loud and quiet songs together into bunches. That meant the night began with eight straight high-energy numbers, most of them powered by booming drums and walls of guitar distortion, a few veering closer to the new wave vibes that factored into the new LP. Some trappings of a pop production remained. There were several outfit changes and video interludes. The stage was covered with fake flowers. She often sang directly into the camera. And in the night's biggest moment of pageantry, the climactic performance of "the cure" on the auxiliary stage concluded with water raining down on Rodrigo, washing one dress off her and revealing another. On the other hand, there was no choreography and no lip syncing. It was mostly just a powerful singer and her equally powerful band rocking out. She even crawled toward her guitarist at one point, then leaned back on her knees, reveling in the six-string heroics. It feels a little old-fashioned to praise a young woman for prioritizing rock over pop, especially coming from a fortysomething dad who attended the show with his daughter, so I'm not doing that. I'll just note that her creative output and professional associations keep growing in this direction, and that it's fun and interesting to have a figure like that in the mainstream.
2. Maybe it's because I saw You Can See Everything two nights earlier, but the performance of authenticity was on my mind. Rodrigo is still an entertainer first and foremost, and with that comes the performance of emotion. She smiles during the happy songs, looks distressed during the sad ones, gets her audience involved with sing-alongs and group scream sessions. The media-trained Disney Channel pedigree doesn't just go away, nor does the ingrained influence of that lady who sang about how she can do it with a broken heart. Rodrigo could be going through a personal crisis and we'd never know it because the show must go on. But I found her relative lack of ego interesting on Thursday night. A bunch of white confetti meant to resemble snow fell on her during "honeybee," the first in a stretch of ballads she performed seated at a piano late in the set. I was intrigued by her decision not to whisk the bits of paper out of her hair for the next two songs, to allow herself to appear less than flawless. Even more noteworthy was the decision to perform her last three songs with wet hair after the stunt in "the cure." You can end up in a recursive spiral trying to figure out whether she's doing this because she's beyond the bounds of artifice or because this is what someone beyond the bounds of artifice would do, but the fact is she did it when many of her peers would never dare.
3. Another thing many of her peers wouldn't try: playing a guitar solo. Rodrigo played instruments several times throughout the night, mostly just strumming a guitar or plinking out piano chords, but at the climax of "maggots for brains" she ripped off a Strokes-ish lead line she's been doing at all of her gigs lately. She's not exactly Annie Clark up there, but it's cool that she aspires to be, and even cooler that she risks flubbing it rather than waiting to try it until it comes off as naturally as the glory notes on "cigarette smoke." (By the way, those glory notes were glorious. Don't let this woman's hip credentials distract you from the fact that she can really sing.)
4. Rodrigo has not evolved as an artist so much that she needs to leave her teenage ballads behind, at least not yet. At 23, she's entering her mid-20s, which has me wondering how long her earliest material will hold up within the context of her evolving canon, especially the brokenhearted outpourings sung from a decidedly adolescent perspective. But those songs mostly still make sense in her live show for now. The SOUR cut "traitor," with its vitriol for an ex who found a new girlfriend suspiciously quickly, seemed maybe a pinch juvenile. But that album's deep cut "favorite crime" boasts one of the most potent climaxes in Rodrigo's catalog, when her voice shoots up to its highest range to lament, "All the things I did/ Just so I could call you mine/ All the things you did/ Well, I hope I was your favorite crime." Thursday night, that moment remained electrifying. She followed it with "drivers license," a song so huge that it somehow transcends my concerns about Rodrigo aging out of it. I can imagine her continuing to perform that one well into her old age as sort of youthful vignette, like Alex Chilton singing "Thirteen." Still, it was encouraging to see her close out the show with "expectations," the new wave "No Scrubs" that stands as her current single, teaching her young fans to maintain high standards rather than wallow in longing for a loser.
5. At the end of the show, Rodrigo put on a T-shirt supporting the campaign of Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor in Ohio. Earlier, she told us the best part of her day was mailing in her ballot. There was a voter registration table in the lobby. None of this was surprising because Rodrigo has regularly spoken out for causes she believes in. Her recent Daisy Chain Fields festival raised $20 million for women's rights organizations. She was present at Tom Morello's concert-as-political-rally a few weeks back. She could keep her show apolitical, but she's forcing her audience to reckon with issues that extend beyond personal love and heartbreak. You can't miss the activism, yet it doesn't drown out the entertainment value of her performance. If anything, the two components strengthen each other. They contribute to the sense that she's giving you, if not her whole self, at least her actual self. Good for her.
SETLIST:
"drop dead"
"u + me = <3"
"so american"
"good 4 u"
"my way"
"serena joy"
"bad idea right?"
"ballad of a homeschooled girl"
"vampire"
"purple"
"stupid song"
"maggots for brains"
"traitor"
"pretty isn't pretty"
"begged"
"cigarette smoke"
"honeybee"
"favorite crime"
"drivers license"
"less"
"the cure"
"deja vu"
"all-american bitch"
"expectations"
