Watch Olivia Rodrigo Crush ‘Drivers License’ and ‘Good 4 U’ on ‘Saturday Night Live’
Olivia Rodrigo SNL
“Are they real?” Her career stage, “Saturday Night Live”, is one of the great proving grounds – for decades we’ve seen Nirvana, Pink and Kendrick Lamar crush it and Ashley Simpson and Lana Del Rey in a grand style, five top names To give- prime example. Without setting too high a standard, it’s safe to say that fast-rising 18-year-old singer-actor Olivia Rodrigo, who already has one of the biggest hits of the year with the teen-heartbreak anthem “Drivers License”, has Knocked. Her two-song performance outside the park on Saturday night.
Rodrigo’s solo career didn’t even begin until “Drivers License” was released in January, but after three seasons a teenage musician was featured on Disney’s “BizzardWorks” and the network’s catchy title was “High School Musical: The Musical” : The Series “. (With a second launching this year) This is a role for which she has been under intense training since adolescence (with a recent public love-triangle drama with Costar). And while TV shows have been starting musical careers since the ‘50s – from Rick Nelson and Monkez to Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Miley Cyrus – Rodrigo (a Variety “Young Hollywood” honoree last year) is channeling his acting skills Creating a different kind of personality, slightly more believable and weaker than the megawatt-level superstars above. Although she has been performing songs on major television shows for a third of her life, Saturday’s “SNL” spot was the first time the world saw her performing as a character instead of herself.
Still, all the actors have a personality, and she expertly crafted it: she can express herself with facial expressions ranging from sadness to derision at the “SNL” performance of “Drivers License”, which accompanies her Began in front of the stage for a dramatic finale before sitting on the piano. But for her latest single “Good 4 U”, she was in a different guise, with Alanis Morissette and Avril Lavigne perhaps with Hayley Williams, twirling her arms and smiling and happily posing in her five-piece, mostly female band Pushing it forward.
That second performance also had a narrative: During brief pre-commercial previews of all “SNL” musical performances, she gave the camera a big smile, followed by a panicked, butterflies-in-the-belly grin – and She then cashed it (and she knew she would catch it), instead of smiling or holding a pose, while the audience cheered like most of the cast, she smiled quickly at the camera and then ran and ran to her smiling bass player. Embraced until the show was cut by one, it’s hard not to like the ad.
TV performances are a major but unreliable predictor of an artist’s longevity or “real” -ness – the ability for cameras to nail two songs doesn’t mean they have a career or even a strong concert set. Simultaneously, Rodrigo performed two-thirds of his current, three-song solo catalog on Saturday night. But his debut album, “Khatta,” drops on Friday: If this performance and these two songs, which balance anger and sadness with joy and happiness – emotions that are currently too much as the masks descend and we dream Dare to see that it’s almost over – any hint, she could be our next superstar.