By Jonathan Haynes
Watch what happens when the reviews of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album — a concept record that tracks a single romance from first date to bitter aftermath — go looking for its value. Almost without exception they find it somewhere other than in Rodrigo: in the older male band she references, in the New Wave gods her producer conjures, in the Gen X canon her sound supposedly pays its respects to. The dominant critical move is to sort the tracks into the Swiftian and the Smithian and grade each by which influence wins (Slate Magazine literally does this), and the songs that come out on top are reliably the Cure-saturated ones, praised as the moments where the record connects to something serious, something legitimate, something a man made first. I want to name this as the symptom it is, and the stakes are larger than one album. We are at a moment when pop music by young women is taken more seriously than it has ever been, and yet the reflex persists — even among women writing the reviews — to locate the worth of that music in a male precursor who authorizes it, rather than in the woman herself. The song-by-song tally is not just a clumsy method. It is the gatekeeping impulse wearing the costume of rigor: the search for the father who makes the daughter’s work admissible. And it is exactly backwards, because You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is an album about a woman who does not borrow her authority from the canon but absorbs the canon into herself, who takes the male precursor everyone is reaching for and makes him sing her words. The critics handing Rodrigo’s value upstream to Robert Smith have the current running the wrong direction. The record reverses it.
Right from the start, in the third line of the first song (“drop dead”), Rodrigo mobilizes the Cure as a narrative instrument. “You know all the words to Just Like Heaven.” The Cure is not Rodrigo’s stylistic frame imposed from above. It is his music — the crush’s — and so when the record itself begins to sound like The Cure, the sound is not homage but possession. We are listening to a consciousness being colonized by a lover’s taste, the way one absorbs a partner’s vocabulary, their sleep schedule, their way of seeing, their taste in music. This is the Annie Ernaux problematic Rodrigo named directly in her New York Times Popcast interview when she cited Simple Passion — that slim, clinical diary of an affair that consumes a whole life — as the inspiration for “stupid song”: passion as affliction, a desire that floods and saturates everything like illness or insanity. Ernaux’s achievement is a collision of registers — flat, exact, diaristic notation applied to total erotic derangement — and that collision is exactly what the album performs. The Swiftian lyric is the deadpan diary; the Cure engulfment is the derangement the diary is recording. You cannot separate them, because the lyric is narrating the sonic takeover as it happens. The title says as much before a note plays: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is not a description of a moment in the romance but the verdict on the whole of it. Darkness was inside the love from the first date.
This is why the song-by-song method fails in this case. A critic who prefers the Cure-leaning tracks to the Swift-leaning ones believes, ironically, that he is identifying her most original mode (measured against a presumed Gen Z pop-princess archetype). He is in fact charting the depth of the character’s possession, crowning as most hers the songs where she is most someone else’s. The thing the critic likes more is the symptom. And it’s a double bind for her: measured against Smith she is borrowing, measured against Swift she is belated, and either way the verdict denies her any artistic ground of her own. Variety gets closest to the truth with its line that the album “tracks the arc of a love affair: Rodrigo’s love affair with the Cure,” but means it as a witticism about influence, not as a structural argument. The album dramatizes its own sound as a love-symptom. No tally of borrowed gestures can register that, because the borrowed gestures are not influences to be scored, they are characters in the story. And the impulse to score them, to find the songs where the male precursor is most present and crown those the best, is oddly shared by the character Rodrigo has created: the conviction that value must be located in him.
But Rodrigo is too strong an artist to leave the influences as influences, and here the argument turns. She sublates The Cure — cancels it as an external source and preserves it as her own material, lifted onto a plane where it no longer points back at Robert Smith but expresses Olivia Rodrigo. The song “the cure” arrives at rue album midpoint, but it is not about The Cure — nor does it particularly sound like them. This negation is the point. This is what divides what she is doing from pastiche, which stays marked as borrowed. By the back half of the record the Cure-ness is simply her sound, the influence negated as foreign and retained as self. And then comes the benediction, the moment where the structure becomes flesh: Smith himself appears on “what’s wrong with me” — singing, playing bass, embodied inside her track. Not sampled, not echoed. The precursor walks into the song he has been haunting and takes a part, and he takes it on the diagnostic song, the one that asks the Ernaux question directly, which is exactly where an internalized voice would speak. He is not a guest star. He is the second half of her brain — the absorbed half answering the diaristic half, two voices staring down the same dread from opposing ends. This is the form of a dialectic and not the form of a love duet.
Here is a fact underemphasized or ignored in the deadline reviews: Smith is singing her words and her music, in a style that resembles his own. The man has been made to perform a Robert Smith who is now her creation — voicing her reconstruction of his idiom, handed back to him to inhabit. This inverts the entire vector of influence. Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” runs one way: the latecomer swerves from the precursor, clears space against his priority, escapes the father. Rodrigo does the opposite. She absorbs Smith so completely that she can write him, and he ratifies the absorption by consenting to sing her writing-of-him. It is apophrades literalized — the return of the dead made to seem authored by the living — except he is actually there, performing his own style after it has passed through her and come out as hers. The strong artist is not the one who escapes the source. She is the one who can produce the source as her own material and have it agree to perform her. That is the furthest claim anyone can make on a precursor, and Rodrigo makes it on the record, in his voice, with his hands on the bass. The reviews are still at “cool, Robert Smith’s on it.” The album is at “Robert Smith consents to being Olivia Rodrigo’s creation.”
But that consent is not a concession. It is the proof that what she does is additive rather than competitive. The credit-and-citation model the reviews run on knows only two roles, the original and the impostor, and it is built to adjudicate who owns what. Rodrigo is not playing that game. She does not depose the precursor. She brings the whole canon kicking and screaming into a world it has to share with her.
One last observation (finally caught up with her interview on Jimmy Kimmel the other night). The biographical Rodrigo’s father reportedly has seen the Cure thirty times; he wept when he finally met Robert Smith; his phone screensaver is now a photo of the two of them. She has said her dad spent her childhood “introducing me to all the bands he went to see when he was my age” — among them, The Cure. So The Cure is the father’s music before it is anyone else’s in this drama, the canon handed down the paternal line, and her father, as it happens, is by profession a family therapist — an analyst. Now consider the fascinating work the album’s romantic plot is doing with that inheritance. The boyfriend knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.” He loves The Cure, which is to say he loves her father’s music, the music she was raised on, the sound of the house she grew up in. And the buried logic of the infatuation, never stated outright but everywhere in the songs, is that this is why she falls for him: he loves what her father loves, he carries the paternal music, and so he arrives already occupying the place the father holds. That is the Freudian pattern, stated plainly — the daughter drawn to the man who returns to her the father, the beloved chosen because he stands where the parent stood.
So it turns out that the album itself is not only a concept album that tells a coherent beginning to end story; it’s a double plot. The story of the romance and break-up mirrors the larger one we have been unpacking the whole time — the artist’s relation to the canon she was raised inside. The main plot ends with a painful break-up. The other climaxes with the man who made the music she was raised on — idol to both lover and father — walking in to perform her recreation of him, and the world receives not Robert Smith but Olivia Rodrigo’s Robert Smith, authored by the singular genius of Olivia Rodrigo.
Published by