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Livia Rodrigo envisions punk as how it appeared in your childhood: loud, enraged, tuneful, gleefully feminine, the type of music that was featured in Lindsay Lohan’s Freaky Friday and used by Josie and the Pussycats to rouse the world from a state of bubblegum-pop-induced trance. Rodrigo’s dynamic second album, Guts, pulls inspiration from beloved pop-rock artists from both the past and present – Liz Phair, Courtney Barnett, Weezer – but it is most influenced by this Hollywood portrayal of punk, which somehow felt more aggressive and sarcastic than anything in reality.
Guts is Rodrigo’s follow-up to 2021’s world-beating Sour, the kind of once-in-a-blue-moon debut that turns someone into an A-list megastar overnight. On that record, Rodrigo often cast herself as a scorned ingenue done wrong by a shitty guy and, occasionally, the world at large. Guts, as a title, is a statement of bravado and one of fallibility: on this album, Rodrigo is more brazen and far less sure of herself, scaling impossible heights before reminding herself, often callously, that she’s human. She goes to parties and word-vomits other people’s secrets, before screaming bloody “social suiciiiiiideeeee!” She laughs off a crap guy to her friends then leaves the sesh early to meet up with him. She saves her most vitriolic ballad for another woman, mere moments after acknowledging the pressure of being “a perfect all-American bitch”.
The central track of the album is “All-American Bitch”, Guts’s opening song and a highly intense and biting rock track. It sets the tone for an album in which Rodrigo struggles between her feminist principles and her natural impulses of desire and jealousy. In the track “Bad Idea Right?”, her friends act as a sarcastic Greek chorus, as Rodrigo’s breathy vocals are contrasted with a sense of guilt. One of the most impactful moments on the album is in the breakup ballad “Vampire”, not in its powerful chorus but when Rodrigo confesses, “Every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news / You called them crazy, God, I hate the way I called them crazy too.”
Rodrigo, who is 20 years old, was raised during a time when it was common for popular musicians to identify as feminists, but rare for them to fully understand the complexities of the label and confront the fact that being strong and empowered does not exclude one from having cruel or ruthless tendencies. She briefly acknowledges this idea on her song “Vampire,” but it is on “Lacy,” a slow and brutally honest ballad, that she fully delves into it, openly admitting to a female rival, “I just despise you lately.” Speculation online about who Lacy could be about overlooks the brilliance of the song: it is both vengeful and loving, with clever lines like “skin like puff pastry,” while also expressing deep emotional pain.
Rodrigo’s cleverness as a songwriter is evident in the fact that Lacy is the most impactful song on Guts. Unlike Taylor Swift, who used to mentor her, Rodrigo doesn’t view romance as a life-or-death matter. However, losing a friend or sacrificing one’s own identity just to bash her may be just as serious. Meanwhile, men are simply seen as a means to an end: the high-energy peak of Guts, “Get Him Back!”, is likely to be the closing song of Rodrigo’s live performances for years to come. This catchy, anthem-like tune – comparable to a “Girl Weezer” for the era of “girl dinner” and “girl math” – also resides in a grey area between seeking revenge and finding reconciliation. It perfectly embodies the essence of Guts: toxic, tumultuous, and an exhilarating rush.
Source: theguardian.com
