Ask Olivia Rodrigo in 2021 where her teenage dream is, and she will apologize for not enjoying her youth. Ask her in 2023 and she will ponder whether life gets better beyond your teenage years, despite them being marred with controversy, political unrest, and a growing sense of dissatisfaction.
Olivia Rodrigo is often hailed as the Queen of Gen Z by the media, but I believe that her connection to Gen Z goes further than just her aesthetics, humor and musing on life. I think she is emblematic of Gen Z’s growing nihilism.
Generation Z (generally classified as being born between 1997 and 2012) is a generation largely born after 9/11, and into a world of chaos that was no longer putting on a mask of perfection as it had in the decades directly before if.
Between the pandemic, many different social justice movements (including Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, to name just two), our teenage years were experienced through social and political upheaval. We only know a world filled with fake news, climate change, widespread debates about whose lives and identities matter, the growing dependency on technology, cancel culture and a pandemic that stopped the world for years and robbed us of years of our youth.
Zoomers have adopted nihilism as a way to cope with our immense distrust and unease with the world around them.
With pandemonium being the accepted norm for our generation, there has been a growing trend towards nihilism (particularly sunny nihilism). This mentality can be summarized as: “Nothing really has meaning so we have carte blanche to live our meaningless existences however we want and laugh as we do it”.
It is worth noting that all generations have had their cross to bear regarding social and political turmoil, and every single generation has experienced its own unique set of hardships. However, for much of Gen Z, there’s been a distinct lack of hope and optimism, leading to a generation that largely doesn’t see the world getting better. They see the state of the planet and are aware of the ramifications of every action and inaction that has led the world to the precarious point that it is at now. There does not seem to be a better version of the world out there in our eyes, despite desperately hoping for it.
Zoomers have adopted nihilism as a way to cope with our immense distrust and unease with the world around them.
So, where does Olivia Rodrigo come into it? Some might view her through the tired misogynistic lens that young women in the music industry are always regarded with the themes of their songs being chalked up to boys, heartbreak, and dating. She, however, is a 20-year-old woman of color who is writing and singing about her experiences with heartbreak, jealousy, disillusionment, and betrayal in a tongue-in-cheek manner that incorporates elements of intertextuality and pop culture (with GUTS referencing the likes of The Craft and Joan Didion).
She reached unimaginable heights of stardom with her first song “Driver’s License” largely due to the speculated love triangle at the center of it, but she has remained one of the faces of Gen Z.
On her debut album SOUR’s opening track, “Brutal,” she sings, “where’s my fucking teenage dream” and humorously laments on the misleading promise of youth. This idea of disillusionment in youth is explored again in her sophomore album GUTS when she sings in her album’s closing track, the fittingly titled “Teenage Dream” that people will insist that things get better the more you grow, but ultimately she is uncertain that it ever will.
Gen Z relates to this as, growing up, we were fed conflicting narratives about youth, with society promising that things get better as life goes on, but also that your teenage years are the best days of your life. Zoomers are a generation of people who feel as if we never got our teenage dream as we had to grow up too quickly in a world of societal upheaval.
Olivia Rodrigo speaks to Gen Z in the same way that Nirvana spoke to the disaffected and apathetic youth of the ‘90s. It seems preordained that a performer would come along and set Gen Z’s sense of unrest contrasted with our zany humor to music and have them dance to it and make TikToks about it.
In the opener of GUTS, “All-American Bitch,” Rodrigo bemoans the inherent dichotomies and unattainable standards that young women are subjected to in America and the Western world. She speaks on the hyper-sexualization of young girls, particularly women of color, and the pressures that they experience to uphold many contradicting values “all the time.” Awareness of the prevalence of the objectification of young women has skyrocketed since the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements of 2017 and women are more aware than ever of how political our bodies and existence are. Gen Z has been fighting against sexualization for much of our conscious lives and despite society being made more aware of its issues with the objectification of women, not much has changed, with the Barbie movie even joking that the world is still doing patriarchy very well.
Olivia Rodrigo’s discography is the perfect embodiment of a generation that has experienced many severe collective traumas in the first part of our lifetimes. They are dubious whether things will ever get better, or if they will “die before they drink” as she sang so eloquently in “Brutal.” One thing Gen Z can be thankful for, though, is Olivia’s new album as we can listen to it while the world goes down around us.
This story first appeared on Refinery29 Australia.
