Girl pop, resentment, complaint, rivalry & the paradox of feminism
Olivia Rodrigo is out for blood & Taylor has entered her tortured poet era
In recent months, as my daughter hovers on the edge of tweendom, we’ve been listening to more girl pop. Her third-grade teacher is a sweet, kind-hearted Swiftie. I’ve been encouraging more angsty women artists like Olivia Rodrigo. Because it’s my personality to resist anything that feels like it’s everywhere, I’ve never really been into Swift’s music, but because of my daughter’s interest, I’ve been forced to listen to Swift’s entire discography and grapple—while driving around town with my kids singing in the back seats—with what exactly people love so much about her music and with my pull toward darker pop artists.
Which means I’ve also been unraveling the complex feelings that come with introducing my daughter to the language of feminine complaint and feminine anger.
What I’ve found, in the most general sense: Rodrigo’s songs are a valve, whereas Swift’s tend to be part catharsis, part balm. Where Taylor’s vibe is a hangover of country storytelling, Rodrigo is moving further toward the provoked backbeat of rock. My kids love both artists, so this has all spurred many conversations about emotion and why we listen to music—to express sadness, anger, happiness, annoyance; to tell a story, share an emotion. What’s a breakup song, why are there so many of them, what is a breakup, what exactly are all these feelings and what’s gender got to do with it.
For me, it’s clear that these two artists betray some of our default sensibilities about women, artistry, sexuality, and power.
So imagine my surprise when I found, while scrolling Grammy news earlier this week, that Swift and Rodrigo have had a rumored feud for years, and that Rodrigo’s “Vampire” is rumored to be about Swift! Yes, I’m behind on this news. But so are my kids, who I promptly followed around the house while pointing to my cell phone, explaining what gossip is and the possible origin story of the explicit song they love!
Then I realized that perhaps this was a better space to discuss my new findings. Such as that rivalry rumors between the two have swirled ever since Rodrigo retroactively gave Swift co-writing credits for one of her songs, sparking rumors that she did so to avoid accusations of plagiarism.
In light of this history between the two women, this week, amid the general Swift pile-on, the internet has been meticulously deconstructing Swift’s dance-along to Rodrigo’s “Vampire” performance, speculating whether this is a sign of the feud’s resolution, or… what.
The good girl/bad girl rivalry isn’t new to pop music of course—remember Britney Spears as good girl v. Christina Aguilera, the bad girl? There’s a bit of a classic mean girls/cat-fight misogyny plot here, but this kind of gossip is also usually steeped in racism. Spears’ and Swift’s legible whiteness certainly plays a part here.
As
wrote this week, Swift’s unprecedented power has also given rise to discussions of “discourses of girlhood in general: who’s allowed to have it, who’s given the assumption of ‘innocence,’ and how all of that connects to whiteness, thinness, and class.”The 90s pop I grew up on was always posed for the male gaze, which came with its own blatant misogyny—for example, what we all did to Britney, who of course later morphed into a “bad girl” when her image couldn’t be contained. Because this is what a bad girl is—disorderly.
Pop today is surely more posed for the girl gaze. But to suppose that the girl gaze does not bring with it its own internalized misogyny and racism misses how femininity is constructed. Girl culture can be, as I’ve written, a threat to the status quo disempowerment of girls and women, as it hovers around the site of patriarchal socialization and a desire to redefine womanhood. But the way we use girlhood to make meaning, especially when we’re talking about the emotions of girls, also reflects the wider state of affairs on femininity and feminism.
Swift and Rodrigo—and the supposed rivalry between them— are the perfect example of this. The vestiges of the girl boss are certainly clear in Swift’s iconography, along with all the complicated politics of ambition and power and self-promotion it’s left us with; the fetish of grrly punk rock rage is central to Rodrigo’s work, even if her lyrics often circle back to the cliches of teen pop.
Swift has made a career trafficking in such cliches—this is not a dig, just a fact. If anything, this has been Swift’s professional genius and what makes her music so appealing to a wide audience: she took the formula and ran with it. For proof of Swift’s symbolic predictability, we need look no further than the title of her next album: The Tortured Poets Department.
She’s innovative in other ways, yes, but Swift’s lyrics tend to move within the realm of complaint—the classic unrequited love kind—and girl power. Hers is an oeuvre that at times seems to suggest that girls can only be wounded by love or impenetrable—or caught somewhere between these feelings, never quite outside. And there’s a truth to that for many girls and women; there’s a need for that storytelling. But it also means that within her work, and within pop more generally, there’s an attachment to men and romance and heterosexual belonging, even if Swift’s image kind of refuses that mentality.
Rodrigo, on the other hand, is becoming an icon of feminine anger. With her second album, she has moved from the pining of “Driver’s License” into full-on ressentiment, which in the Nietzschean sense isn’t just resentment based on a single betrayal, but a more all-over, chronic identification with being wronged, and with a somewhat impossible form of vengeance. In the 90s, this definition resurfaced in some feminist writings that explored the degree to which feminist politics had become enmeshed with a kind of victim mentality.
Since then, many feminists have argued for reclaiming women’s scorn as a moral and political emotion, and for seeing especially “tangled” resentments (vs. “productive” anger) as a metric for understanding our own complicity and participation in systems of domination. Others have argued that resentment is inherently regressive—fitting for girl culture— and is a weak critical position in and of itself, but that because it signals a crisis, it can be a door to understanding how we might “address the social structures that enable, necessitate, and nourish ressentiments.”
In the realm of pop culture, the Rodrigo-esque ressentiment against boys and men is a popular one: from Promising Young Woman to Bad Sisters to trauma plots in literature. As Alexandra Kleeman wrote recently about the return of provocative sex in film, sometimes these plots simplify the complications of desire and power, such as in the recent film Fair Play, which ends with an unsatisfying rape-revenge twist.
Which brings me back to Rodrigo’s blood-soaked “Vampire” performance, certainly a spectacle in its own right, and no doubt meant to position her further as a bad girl. It wasn’t her best vocal performance, and the blood may not have had the impact it was supposed to, but it tapped into a history of feminist art that has sought to restore the unruly body as crucial to feminist politics. Blood theatrics signal a dangerously sexual femininity. When a woman plays with blood and flesh (throwback to my 2010 Ms. piece on Gaga’s meat dress!), prey turns predator in a Plath-like eating of men. From Carrie to the avant-garde, bloody women signal a disruption of the presumed hierarchy, and an abject break with containment.
Was she just-bitten or rising from the dead? In a position of power or pain? I’m not really sure! But I like the messy frustration of Rodrigo’s work.
And I also recognize there’s a reason we pit these two women against each other, if only in fantasy— they represent two ends of a spectrum girls feel forever caught between.
It’s more than a good and evil dichotomy. By dividing women along these lines, we forget that, in truth, feminism lives squarely within the paradox of contempt and release.
This all reminds me of the ways culture tried to brush aside Alanis Morissette when Jagged Little Pill came out. At the time, I dismissed her too, deciding that Ani DiFranco was more authentic (now I love them both), which of course is a how far we have or haven’t come point of reference.
I will add that the continuum (Swift on one end, Rodrigo on the other) that girls have to reconcile with is real, but speaking as just one queer girl, I never felt like I was ON it, but instead watching it as an outside spectator, where the “real” girls (read straight, or even bi) lived and (attempted to) received love.
Thank you for writing this piece. It hit me in a few places (and likely more as I reread and let it simmer). I have almost 10-year-olds who are huge Swifties and Olivia Rodrigo fans. I had no clue about the feud, but I will look into it. Okay, but on to TS. I am a long-time indie rock fan who always prefers small batch to mass production. In addition, I am a fiend for a good song, whoever writes and records it. And this is where I got caught up in the TS mania. We can argue the topics about which they are written, but she is a songwriting wizard. There is immense full-body joy in her music for me. Is she a white cis heteronormative wanna-be-townie? YES. As you've said, the issues go way beyond Taylor, Olivia, Beyoncé, and SZA. That's all for now.