Olivia Rodrigo & The Enduring Appeal of Teen Girl Culture

On Having The Guts To Be Vulnerable

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve seen or at least heard of Olivia Rodrigo, the breakout act of 2021 whose debut single “driver’s license” went viral on Tiktok and launched her post-Disney music career as a solo artist to new heights. At the ripe age of 20, Rodrigo already has 3 Grammys under her belt. She spent the majority of last year on a sold-out world tour performing and recently announced her second studio album “guts” set to be released on September 8th of this year. Although her widespread commercial success has sparked some debate on the authenticity of her artisty - an all too common criticism spewed at young female artists the moment their sudden rise to fame starts sowing seeds of doubts of their talent in the public eye; thinly veiled misogyny masking under the guise of viable critique - there’s no denying that Rodrigo is here to stay. The angsty pop-punk flare of today’s attempts at a viral hit can be traced back to the initial success of her now ubiquitous sound: a blend of Riot Grrrl aesthetics, Swiftian diaristic lyrics and a soaring, emotive vocal delivery courtesy of her theatre kid background. With the recent release of her cheeky second single from guts “bad idea, right?” and its accompanying music video directed by frequent collaborator Petra Collins, Rodrigo once again taps into that lucrative well of creativity we can’t seem to get enough of: teen girl culture.

Although the depiction of teen girls has shapeshifted throughout the decades, they have always been an integral part of popculture: from the Beatlemania of the 60s to the John Hughes/Molly Ringwald movies that defined the 80s to the ex-Disney act to global teen superstar pipeline of the 2000s, teen girls have not only been at the forefront of era defining media but also contributed to it by way of fangirl culture. But why is the ever enduring appeal of teen girls and the corresponding teen girl culture so ripe for cultural production?

Loosely defined teen girl culture refers to that distinct cluster of behaviour, aesthetics and customs collectively shared and expanded upon by teenage girls through social exchange. It’s reflective of the overarching cultural landscape they’re a part of without necessarily being exclusive to it, a feat made all the more clear with the rise of social media and the recent trend of girlblogging. There are countless Instagram accounts with handles like girlhoodstudies or girlblogger2008 dedicated to documenting and memefying the seemingly universal plights of girlhood; expressing the abject horrors of coming of age through a markedly feminine lens that juxtaposes pastel pink babydoll dresses and cursive Lana Del Rey lyrics with existentialist passages on death. Finding the balance between the maidenly and the macabre; the girly and the grotesque. But these visually cohesive accounts of “girlhood” more often not reduce teen girldom to a one dimensional parody of itself, the message getting muddled and lost somewhere between the gender essentialism of “girls being girls” and the gender performance of presenting oneself as inherently “girly” through grainy photos of designer makeup, silk stockings and ballet flats. This aesthetically constrained representation of “girlhood” is partially due to the limitations of social media as a medium: notorious for commodifying any semblance of self-hood to an instantly recognizable series of hashtags and niche -cores. But it’s also due to a fundemantal misunderstanding of what the teen girl archetype represents.

The term teenager as we know and use today is fairly new, the post-World-War-II economic boom and the subsequent increase in birthrates giving emergence to a newly defined younger consumer demographic. One that perches on the cusp of adulthood, not quite ready to take on the demands of the adult job market, but has money to spend like one nonetheless. Tracing back the term’s adoption into the mainstream lexicon to the late 1940s, it’s hardly any wonder that “The Teen Girl” has been a recurrent reference point in media ever since: one that symbolizes the confluence of innocence and desire. She serves as a tabula rasa of childish ignorance and sexual immaturity, stuck in limbo between girlhood and womanhood, unaware of her sexual agency and yet seemingly wise beyond her years when it comes to her prowress as an object of desire. Or as Britney Spears put it : she’s not a girl not yet a woman.

The unique vantage point of The Teen Girl - at once emotionally intuitive enough to take stock of how she is perceived in the world yet unable to fully make sense of it - is ostensibly the reason why she has been a recurrent subject in art that seeks to critically examine contemporary womanhood: The tacit internalization of the Madonna-Whore complex, the gender socializiation through patriarchal beauty standards, the complex power dynamics of strained mother-daughter relationships… Think Hole’s seminal album Live Through This, Brian De Palma’s horror classic Carrie or the cult of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. All of these pieces of media co-opt the idiosyncratic point of view of the teen girl as one that is uniquely vulnerable to the phallic powers that be of the outside world. They evoke and deconstruct sterotypical teen girl imagery (i.e. The Prom Queen) to give artistic expression to what is lurking beyond the surface: that teen girls are more than just precocious wit and misplaced libido in knee socks and pleated skirts. That they’re multifaceted, complex people albeit with developing personalities who bear the weight of the world on their shoulders: One that is structurally designed to invalidate their feelings and ridicule their potential. In short it takes real guts to be “just a girl in the world”.

So it’s no surprise that Olivia Rodrigo is so adamant about wearing her artistic influences on her sleeve. She doesn’t shy away from frequently paying tribute to female trailblazers of mainstream pop music who have paved the way for her to make history in her own time and who, in response, have co-signed on Rodrigo as an artist: a kind of symbolic passing of the musical batton to the next generation. As the leading internet philosopher - or as I like to call her: girlosopher - of our times Rayne Fisher-Quann put it oh-so-wisely:

I think girls on the internet are the most fundamental arbiters of culture, and the most interesting people in the world.

And Rodrigo is no exception: Following in the footsteps of the likes of her idols Alanis Morisette, Courtney Love and Fiona Apple, she is continuing the legacy of affecting, emotionally honest music made by and for The Teen Girl; defining the genre anew for the online generation.