It’s been two years since pop star Olivia Rodrigo broke onto the music scene when she was just 18. Since then, she’s raked in Grammy and Billboard awards and comfortably found her place amongst other young singers lyrically lamenting over heartbreak.
This is where her talent lies: telling the scathing truth about ex-boyfriends and baring her soul for listening ears.
And that’s something she’s still doing with her latest track, “Vampire.”
Rodrigo often likes to begin her songs with dreamy, mesmerizing sounds fueled by piano chords that lead, eventually, into a beat drop and a punching chorus. And this track falls right in line.
It’s both soft and aggressive, fueled with a seething rage over an ex-boyfriend who took his time tearing Rodrigo apart emotionally.
It’s positive anytime someone realizes that they’ve been manipulated and confesses their error in judgment.
Manipulation is a tricky thing, especially when it’s tied in with love, and Rodrigo confesses that she was naive and that this ex-boyfriend of hers manipulated her: “Six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise/I loved you truly/You gotta laugh at the stupidity…/And every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news/You called them crazy …I hate the way I called them crazy too.”
While it’s positive that Rodrigo can now clearly see that her ex-boyfriend lured her in (“You’re so convincing/How do you lie without flinching?”), it’s clear that this man was a predator (“Can’t figure out just how you do it, and God knows I never will/Went for me and not her/’Cause girls your age know better”).
Rodrigo is now realizing that his behavior, and her naivety, was a huge red flag. And she expresses all that with not just a lot of just anger, but with harsh profanity that could have been excluded, but wasn’t.
This track reminds me a lot of Taylor Swift’s “Dear John”, but with a whole lot of profanity. And like “Dear John,” this is wildly popular. (Within its first six days, this song reached 22 million people on YouTube).
The idea, as was true in Swift’s song, is that Rodrigo is working through her naivety and the choice she made to get involved with a guy that everyone warned her about. A man she thought she could fix. But it didn’t work out that way.
Instead, this man, who seems to be older than Rodrigo, took advantage of her, lied to her and “bled her out” like a “vampire.” Behavior that is predatory and chilling.
The content issue here doesn’t necessarily lie in what happened to Rodrigo (although it’s unfortunately common), but in the language she uses to describe her experience. She uses the f-word harshly, as part of the chorus, as well as elsewhere. She also misuses God’s name.
And she describes her pain as being “sold for parts” by a man who should have known better–and by a young woman who should have chosen better.
Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).
