Olivia Rodrigo's favourite crime

Olivia Rodrigo is the Nostalgia Pendulum closing in. The 30 year gap is shrinking. We’re now reviving cultural moments from 15, 10 years ago. 

Olivia Rodrigo is the Nostalgia Pendulum closing in. The 30 year gap is shrinking. We’re now reviving cultural moments from 15, 10 years ago. 

It’s barely been a year since Olivia Rodrigo entered the pop culture psyche with her girl-looking-forlornly-out-the-passenger-window ballad ‘Drivers License’, though she’s been dogged with a lifetime's worth of plagiarism allegations.

Following the release of her debut record, Sour, Rodrigo was accused of knocking off everyone from Elvis Costello to Taylor Swift. Teens, foaming at the bit to bring her artistry and originality into question, flocked to TikTok to plead their case.

Rodrigo is not guilty of plagiarism - more on this shortly. The obsession with questioning her originality feels mean-spirited and besides the point of pop music. Isn’t pop gratifying and beautiful because it’s comfortably familiar?

Rodrigo’s music succeeds because it taps into an uncanny, liminal zone that feels too recent to be truly nostalgic, yet evokes a sentimental teenage wistfulness. 

In his blog, The Patterning, Patrick Metzger diagnoses a cultural phenomenon he calls the ‘Nostalgia Pendulum.’ Metzger argues that pop culture is obsessed with nostalgia, resurfacing art in a 30-year-cycle. He writes: “the driving factor seems to be that it takes around 30 years for a critical mass of people who were consumers of culture when they were young to become the creators of culture in their adulthood”.

Rodrigo is the Nostalgia Pendulum closing in. The 30 year gap is shrinking. We’re now reviving cultural moments from 15, 10 years ago. 

Nostalgia is pop’s dominant mode, think of all the beloved pop albums of years past: Dua Lipa revived disco with Future Nostalgia, as did Carly Rae Jepsen with Dedicated, The Weeknd conjured up the ghosts of 80s nu-wave with After Hours, and Rina Sawayama’s debut SAWAYAMA coalesced Y2k pop and nu-metal.

It’s the same nostalgia that has its claws sunk in fashion. TikTok has declared the 2010s Indie Sleaze is back, the revived garish 90s Von Dutch caps have had us in a cuckold for longer than their initial reign. Time is a fat circle. Apparently enough of it has passed to warrant a pop-punk revival. It feels weird, 21 year olds probably shouldn’t have anything to feel nostalgic about, right? 

To get into the nitty gritty of the plagiarism accusations: Weeks after the release of Sour, Rodrigo and album producer and co-writer Dan Nigro added retroactive songwriting credit to two songs on the album — a move that cost them millions.

Half the royalties on ‘good 4 u’ were given to Paramore’s Hayley Williams and former guitarist Josh Farro over similarities with their 2007 breakout single ‘Misery Business’; Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent also got a half split for an interpolation Rodrigo used on ‘deja vu’ taken from Swift’s ‘Cruel Summer.’

Let’s study the case of ‘good 4 u’ vs. ‘Misery Business.’ Music theory is terminally boring, apologies in advance.

First, it’s important we acknowledge that Paramore were given an interpolation credit on the song, not a co-writing credit — two very different beasts. An “interpolation” is in the same family as a sample. Where a sample directly lifts from a previous recording, an interpolation recreates a motif or phrase in the studio. 

Interpolation has been in vogue for years: Doja Cat and SZA’s ‘Kiss Me More’ borrows the melody from Olivia Newton John’s ‘Physical,’ Ariana Grande paid homage to The Sound of Music with ‘7 rings’ and, Taylor Swift’s use of Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’ on ‘Look What You Made Me Do.’

The Miz Biz debacle is interesting because ultimately it’s not really an interpolation at all, rather, an appropriation of a “vibe.” The two songs sound similar because they share the same chord progression (D A E F#m) and feature a similar melodic contour in the chorus. 

Nobody can claim ownership over a chord progression. In this particular case, the chord progression used is the “axis progression” (I–V–vi–IV), one of the most commonly used progressions in pop music.

‘good 4 u’ feels like a copycat of ‘Misery Business’ because the two songs are spiritually akin: teen girls setting their anguish against a backdrop of blistering pop-punk. When we look at the songs through a technical lens, they’re fundamentally different. The only crime Olivia Rodrigo is guilty of is mining nostalgia from a cultural memory that feels uncomfortably within reach.

I remember when the Sour plagiarism discourse was first unfurling. Haters on my (predominantly Australian) feed were quick to allege that the opening riff of ‘brutal’ copied The Rogue Traders ‘Voodoo Child.’ 

Insane. Hilarious. In what universe is the song machine powering Olivia Rodrigo ganking the riff from a mid-noughties Australian song that made no overseas impact?

It turns out that ‘Voodoo Child’ lifts the riff from Elvis Costello’s 1978 song ‘Pump It Up.’ The Sour audience failed to recognise this, and why would they? 1978 is comfortably removed from the current cultural memory because enough time has passed. Rodrigo’s audience, however, were able to recognise that familiarity of the Rogue Traders riff from the incessant, traumatic blasting Mix 106.5 gave it back in 2005. (Note: Elvis Costello himself defended Rodrigo against these plagiarism accusations, "It's how rock & roll works.”)

How you choose to receive nostalgia in art is entirely up to you.

You can take the cynics standpoint. Fret that art is an ouroboros and pop music is eating itself. There is no future! Music is an evil product of capitalism! Songs are being churned out with the heart and soul of a factory assembly line! The industry is serving us what it knows we already want!

In many respects, you’d be right. A 2014 study by the Medical University of Vienna found that music is becoming increasingly homogenised – that genres that increase in popularity become more generic and formulaic. We know this! Though I don’t think there’s much value in moping about it. If you want to listen to challenging, outre music, there’s an excess of boring, impenetrable prog music out there for you. Some of us just want to have a good time.

Alternatively, you can breeze by in a blissful, dissociative fugue and enjoy Olivia Rodrigo for what she is: A nostalgic callback to a time where things felt a little more hopeful. When the world didn’t feel so unrelentingly crushing, and the only thing that mattered was an unrequited teenage crush.