Olivia Rodrigo is riding high in her festival era. She’s setting a new record by headlining 18 music festivals in one year — and she’s doing it with a full-on rock show. To celebrate the fifth consecutive Summer of Liv, O-Rod’s making the rounds from Lollapalooza in Chicago to Bonnaroo in Tennessee to Governors Ball in New York. But she’s not alone. Female headliners are seizing center stage at the big summer fests, whether it’s Gracie Abrams at Outside Lands or Charli XCX headlining Glastonbury. Chappell Roan’s Lollapalooza triumph last year was just the beginning. We’re living in an age when the pop queens have taken over as the new rock gods.
When Lollapalooza first announced that Olivia and Sabrina Carpenter were headlining this summer (along with Tyler, the Creator and Rüfüs Du Soul), with Abrams also in a top slot, there was the predictable gnashing of teeth that Lollapalooza is abandoning its precious rock heritage. Duuuude, what are all the pop girls doing here? But Olivia, Sabrina, Chappell, Gracie, so many more — they’re just creating a new world-beating stadium-rock paradigm, guitars and all, going for the crowd-flattening mania that old-school rock stars seemed to give up on years ago.
Olivia introduced the world to her new mojo at her South American shows this spring, streamlining her Guts show into a headbanger rock blast. She headlined at the Lollapalooza festivals in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, facing the largest crowds of her career. This girl has always reveled in her rock moves.
But Lolla Olivia is cranking up the rockness and tossing everything else overboard. She skips the theater-kid energy — she’s not floating around the crowd perched on a crescent moon anymore. She begins with “Obsessed,” which is insane, playing up the aneurystic grunge aggro. Her killer all-female band gets plenty of room to show off. She covers “Don’t Speak,” but turns her guitar ballads into even bigger stadium sing-along anthems. It’s summed up in the great moment in “Bad Idea Right,” where she drops to her knees and crawls up the catwalk to kneel and worship her guitarist mid-solo. She’s not exactly the first rock star to bust out that move, but she milks the moment for melodrama — always an Olivia specialty — until she makes it her own.
Olivia has always flaunted her jones for the old-school Nineties rock queens, ever since she covered Veruca Salt on her first tour. This is the girl who casually told Rolling Stone that her mom used to wake her up every morning by playing the Babes in Toyland album Fontanelle. (Not even the Babes’ most famous album — an impressive deep cut.) But she’s overtly celebrating her connection to the Nineties female rock-star legacy and bringing it into the future.
On the Guts tour, she had Bikini Kill on her preshow mix and hired the Breeders as her opening act. “I remember my life in two distinct periods,” she told the crowd. “Before I heard ‘Cannonball’ and after I heard ‘Cannonball.’ ” So it’s a full-circle moment — as always, she obsesses over the details and knows her history inside out.
At Lollapalooza, Olivia’s headlining right above the nu-metal legends Korn, which is just perfect. Korn blew up in the late-Nineties heyday of MTV’s Total Request Live, where every day’s fan-vote countdown was a battle between the Britney/Backstreet Boys pop kids and the Korn/Limp Bizkit rock kids. But now Korn are opening for a girl who combines the best of Britney and Korn — a freak off the leash.
Chappell Roan’s Lollapalooza blowout last year was a real changing of the guard. It’s crazy to think that Chappell originally got booked for the small stage, until they had to reschedule her for the main stage due to unprecedented demand. But her set blew up to the point where it was bigger than the rest of the festival combined, drawing quite possibly the hugest crowd in Lollapalooza history — a true Femininomenon. Not many years ago, something like this would have been unthinkable. But that’s the era we’re living in now.
It’s a momentous change. The Nineties, Olivia’s favorite music era, was defined by a feminist rock explosion of artists making noise from the indie level to the arenas to the airwaves. But the backlash was harsh, as the radio abruptly clamped down and stopped playing these artists. Woodstock ’99 set the new tone with its misogynistic violence and nu-metal machismo. It marked the end of one era and the start of another, as the industry turned back the clock and returned to the days where all-male shows and festivals were the norm. By 2004, there was only one major rock tour all year to feature a female musician — the Pixies, on their reunion run, with Kim Deal on bass.
So it was sweet to see Kim raise hell with the Breeders on Olivia’s Guts tour. And it was striking to note that between the two bands, there was only one male musician onstage all night — the Breeders’ drummer. Sometimes it’s the tiny ironies that tell the biggest story. But the pop girls have come to reclaim the rock-star legacy — and show everyone else how it’s done. Live through this.
