Seven times nominated for the Grammy Awards, will Olivia Rodrigo reproduce this April 3 the feat accomplished by Billie Eilish in 2020? During the ceremony, held in Las Vegas, will she win the four queen awards for the best album, song, recording and revelation of the year?
The evening should have taken place in January. Olivia Rodrigo would then have been 18, the age of her colleague in 2020. That year, Billie Eilish, praised for her first album, When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go ?, had, with his pass of four, set a record for precocity.
2021, sparkling year
But the Covid-19 pandemic forced a postponement of the ceremony, and Olivia Rodrigo has meanwhile blown out her 19 candles. She will therefore not be the second youngest artist to win the four major awards. And to get the coveted prizes, the competition promises to be tough. In the best album category alone, the singer-songwriter of Sour will find on his way Billie Eilish (for his second album, Happier Than Ever), Lil Nas X (Montero), Jon Batiste (We Are), Taylor Swift (Evermore) or Kanye West (Donda), among others.
Still, these seven Grammy Award nominations finish setting Olivia Rodrigo’s crown at the end of a sparkling year 2021. In twelve months, the young woman has indeed gone from the status of “Disney princess” to that of “queen of pop”, as summarized by Los Angeles Times in a portrait published last December. Ultimate consecration, it was designated, at the end of 2021, “best artist of the year” by the prestigious American magazine Time.
A former Disney starlet
Born in 2003 in Murrieta, California to an American-Filipino father and a mother with German-Irish ancestry, “Rodrigo started singing and writing songs even before he was 10 years old”, tell it Los Angeles Times.
In 2013, she joined the Disney stable and became one of the headliners of Frankie and Paige (bizaardvark, in its original version), a Disney Channel series about two teenage blogger apprentices. Then, in 2019, she landed a role in High School Musical. The musical, the series, a variation of the successful Disney+ franchise.
Having come of age, making people forget their Disney stamp becomes the new challenge to be met. It’s no easy feat, as former child stars Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus can testify.
The singer of broken hearts
Olivia Rodrigo’s career begins a turning point in January 2021, when Drivers Licence. The heroine of this melancholy song roams the streets at the wheel of her car. She dreamed of getting her driver’s license so she could go to her boyfriend’s house alone. The big day has arrived, and there are no more boyfriends.
Loopback on social networks, Drivers Licence instantly imposes itself as “a pop phenomenon”, remind him Los Angeles Times. Twelve months later, it will be the most listened to song of the year on the Spotify platform.
The success of Drivers Licence propels that of the album Sour, released in May. It highlights an artist-composer-performer gifted in expressing “the pleasures and torments of first love”, and inclined to tap into her personal life and romantic disappointments to “to reflect something of his generation”, decipher it again Los Angeles Times. The young woman excels in grasping what makes the charm of adolescence, this age when hearts can break with a crash and then shudder and throb even more.
Songs as current as they are timeless
“But even when they tackle the most intimate subjects, the texts of ‘Sour’ are part of a very present social backdrop”, continues the Los Angeles Times, which continues:
“Rodrigo always seems to be in direct contact with the systems and institutions that define his behaviors and tastes – the movies, websites and magazine covers that sell an often unfulfilled romantic dream.”
So the song Jealousy, Jealousy, which explores the toxic effects of the Internet and social networks on young girls and their relationship to their bodies.
Very quickly, the media machine is carried away. the venerable New Yorker, reference reading for left-wing American intellectuals, enthroned the beautiful “pop’s brightest new star” and salutes his talent for staging himself in songs that are as current as they are timeless. In July 2021, Olivia Rodrigo was invited to the White House, requested by Joe Biden as part of a campaign to encourage 12-18 year olds to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
Voice of a Generation
“One of the things I’m most proud of is that [mon] album expresses emotions that are difficult to share or not always socially acceptable, especially for girls: anger, jealousy, resentment, sadness”, confides for her part the interested party, interviewed by the British daily The Guardian.
Olivia Rodrigo imposes herself as the embodiment of a prowled youth to decline the various facets of her personality according to social media and circumstances, she points out The New York Times, also conquered. “He’s a pop star tailor-made for an era of personalities, sub-personalities and meta-personalities; fake Instagram accounts; the temptation to try new identities and let go of them as you go.”
For the New York daily, the eleven songs of the album formulate, in the 2.0 era, the games of building a personality between adolescence and maturity:
“‘Sour’ deals with the capacity to accept different outcomes, to assume the person that one becomes when one has to substitute point-blank an image that one had of oneself with another, while keeping the smile and without compromising one or more careers.”
The weight of the labels
Of course, Olivia Rodrigo’s acting past is never far away, notes the Los Angeles Times. “One of her strengths as a singer comes from her experience as an actress: she knows how to embody the lyrics of her songs, as in Déjà vu, where she punctuates a verse about an ex recycling old jokes with a bitter chuckle that says more than any words.”
On the site of the Californian daily, several music journalists give their predictions for the Grammy Awards. If they think that the price of revelation of the year should not escape Olivia Rodrigo, they are skeptical about her chances of succeeding the grand slam. Again, the young woman’s past as an actress is not far away. “Her status as a little Disney protege could do her a disservice, speculates reporter Suzy Exposito. Selena Gomez has worked hard to get rid of this image, and it is only now, in 2022, after having released several albums, that she gets her first nomination, in the Latin pop category.
Verdict tonight.