olivia rodrigo sets a record

"Jealousy, Jealousy" is indeed a cool jam

This is pretty much what I was expecting – some solid songs, some ok songs – though maybe a little restrained overall... I wish they swung for the fences a little more, and got even more enjoyably straight-faced cheesy.

(though I can apparently barely write a coherent sentence, so who am I to talk)

omfg "brutal"

yeah that's the best new track

As for the rest: the relentless of the hysteria is its own attraction.

i wish the whole thing was like "brutal"

same, it *rules*

I found this to be kind of a chore and turned it off before the end

"Traitor" and "Happier" are basically the same song, no?

I like "Favorite Crime" a lot...

Kid played me "Brutal," sounds like Elastica.

Someone sent me this, which I suppose is meant to support Murgatroid's comparison above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB-rn6f--XY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMEiL3lLRqg

I love how teenage this record sounds.

The run from Brutal to Good 4 U is *chefs kiss* but it’s got way too many ballads at the end. They’re good ballads! But it needs more upbeat, louder tracks

Yeah, that’s kind of what I (clumsily) was trying to say

I wonder if they rushed it a bit, to capitalize on the success of Driver’s License(?) It feels a track or two short, like they could have recorded one more banger but were out of gas…

(Of course, this could also just reflect the limitations of a young artist who’s still developing her voice, etc. It was originally supposed to be an EP and they fleshed it out, which tracks with the overall feel.)

all of the above

it definitely feels a bit rushed. and as good as they are I can't picture any of the album tracks becoming hit singles

Millennials listening to Olivia Rodrigo today pic.twitter.com/3FzN5k2Qv8

— Ben Yahr (@benyahr) May 21, 2021

“Brutal” is such a jam

I’ve also come around to “Deja Vu” being a truly great song… Its lyrics are so “on the nose” that I think I didn’t give it proper credit at first, but that’s exactly what makes it work.

(It’s also really smart how the opening verse sounds like it’s the narrator talking about doing these various things with the guy herself—but then the final line of the verse twists that around, and introduces the theme of the song.)

it's the best of the singles by far imo (haven't heard rest of album yet)

It's probably just the Taylor Swift influence, but "Deja Vu" feels so Nashville in the way it lays out its metaphor, the structure of its lyrics.

"deja vu" is the best single yeah and one of the best on the album

Olivia sets a few new records: "Good 4 U" debuts at #1 on the Hot 100, making Sour the first debut album in history with two singles to debut at #1; as well as the first debut album to generate two Hot 100 #1's before the album hits the Billboard 200.

Is "good 4 u" the first song written/produced in a pop-punk format to hit #1 on the charts since, like, the 2000s?

nah 24kgoldn "mood"

Or that juice wrld song that interpolates yellowcard

2021's hottest stars actually both very cold pic.twitter.com/l5CgFFf1sK

— Caitlin Rose (@TheCaitlinRose) May 24, 2021

that song only got to #2, i think xp

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/998842657/olivia-rodrigo-sour-drivers-license-debut-album-review

Lowercase girls tend to fly under the radar by design, but once you start looking you'll see them everywhere. For one thing, they've been all over the streaming charts in the past few years: folklore, evermore, "thank u, next," girl in red, mxmtoon, dodie, beabadoobee, how i'm feeling now, "drivers license," "deja vu," "good 4 u" — to name just a few recent, femme-forward musical phenomena that wouldn't even think of imposing the tyranny of capital letters on the listener's imagination.

But lowercase girls have been there forever, in the back rows of classrooms and the corners of parties, daydreaming, doodling, stockpiling vivid details and observations in the marble notebooks of their minds — waiting for the precise moment to launch them like a carefully crafted dart that punctures everybody else's apathy and proves just how sharply she has been paying attention. Some of the best of them never grow out of it. ...

That was marvelous, thanks.

finally, people are seeing and appreciating the former star of two Disney TV shows

xxxxxxxxp I don't really think of "Mood" as pop-punk(?) – but I'll let 2011nostalgia be the judge

I had Mood in mind when writing that but it doesn’t go as full-on pop-punk as good 4 u does. So maybe it counts? Maybe it doesn’t? I dunno!

More records: good 4 u has bigger week on spotify globally than drivrs license or any other track

good 4 u is so excellent and I wish more of this sounded like that. Also I was surprised to see Jam City credited in the production notes!

i was a little surprised too, but he's been showing up in pop production credits a bit more lately, like he was on the (quite good) troye sivan album a few years ago, on a conan grey song (with dan nigro, like on this album), and a few other places over the last few years

weirdly i just found out he played on david byrne's american utopia too

the Dan Nigro thing is amazing too - like, how many of the most perfect songs of the past ten years can he have credits on?

I feel like the hypothetical missing track should come between Favorite Crime and Hope Ur OK… that transition feels particularly soft, and the album could use a final energy bump toward the end.

That said, it’s still a front-to-back listen to me… and I guess better to leave it feeling a little light than beef it up with a weak tune!

.@Olivia_Rodrigo has three songs in the top 10 of this week's #Hot100.

She becomes the first artist in history to chart three concurrent songs in the top 10 all from a first LP.

— billboard charts (@billboardcharts) June 1, 2021

Anyone else read this, about fans gaming the charts?

https://www.stereogum.com/2149730/bts-butter-hot-100-billboard-chart/columns/sounding-board/

Relevant graf:

Here’s the thing, though: “Butter” is not the most popular song in America right now. Billboard figures out its charts through some arcane combination of streaming, sales, and radio play. “Butter” made it to #1 almost entirely based on sales of discounted digital singles. “Butter” did get a lot of streams, but it didn’t get as much as any of the three most popular songs from Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album. At radio, the biggest song in America right now is “Leave The Door Open,” the retro-soul soul ballad from Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s Silk Sonic project. There, “Butter” isn’t even a factor.

Fans spending money to buy a new release is not gaming the charts. Including free download codes with concert tickets or hats and counting them as an album sale... now that's gaming the charts.

"Of the 39 titles that went to No. 1 last year [2018], at least 18 were sold as part of ticket or merchandise deals." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/billboard-charts-bundles.html

i did read that stereogum column and definitely agree w/ it, tho he could have gone into much more detail about what these organized stan groups are actually doing nowadays, which is far worse than 'oh the group just sold a lot'. ftr a fan purchasing dozens of copies of the same digital file, then doing the same for each of its remixes, instrumentals, clean versions, etc. etc. etc., contributing to an organized fund of other fans doing the same, meticulously ensuring that not too many copies are ordered per transaction so they'll all 'count' + so forth... IS 100% 'gaming the charts'. like, let's be real, these ppl absolutely would not be engaging in such blatantly wasteful behavior if not for the prospective charting benefit for their 'faves'. yes, more obsessive fans have purchased multiple copies of their favorite artists' releases for a long time, but recently it's gotten to the point where some weeks the MAJORITY of a top-selling title's unit sales are coming from mass-purchasing behavior, which has absolutely never been the case until recently. i honestly do not understand how billboard is not extremely alarmed by the prospect of their flagship chart's significance being diminished to the level of an online poll, as more and more of the chart's top 10 and #1 'hits' nosedive off the list within a month of their debut. whatever gets traffic, i guess!

and honestly, it is almost entirely their own fault, as they've been weighing digital sales far more strongly than their actual (paltry) relevance in the marketplace for years. they started doing this, i suspect, because it seemed 'weird' to them (and interested parties in the industry) that the white pop artists enjoying their advantage in airplay were still frequently being outperformed, because of streaming, by songs w/ comparatively little exposure -- so even tho the unit sales were pathetic, why not give a little extra help to those artists who can still rank well on itunes, i suspect the thinking went.

other factors contributing to this mess: an entire ecosystem of chartwatchers and stans (obviously there's substantial overlap) generating increasingly elaborate (and rather accurate) predictions of forthcoming billboard charts by aggregating publicly available data, then publicizing these forecasts to surprisingly large audiences on social media (twitter accounts adjacent to, like, @chartnews and @popcrave and such). organized stan groups can and do watch these quite carefully to get a sense of what charting outcomes are feasible, then react accordingly (streaming parties, mass-buying, etc.). labels are also well aware that hyper-engaged fans are more than willing to piss their money away by these means, and have thus increasingly offered digital downloads directly through artists' websites to enable fans to purchase as many units as they'd like. (a typical digital download store will only let a user purchase one copy.)

oh sorry i meant @chartdata -- @chartnews is the original that the former account ripped off (and never acknowledged in its media interviews (lol))

i worked adjacent to billboard for a few years & conversed in meetings on a few occasions w/ the ppl (which is like 3 dudes) who run the charts & they take their jobs as stewards of music history very seriously -- it's possible there is meddling from above them at the corporate level that effects the charts but i think that mostly manifests itself in how the charts are presented to the public (paywalls, obtrusive ads etc) as opposed to "we're going to let BTS fans run the charts for traffic." i mean, the rest of billboard does grovel for every crumb of BTS traffic they can muster, so i do understand the suspicion, but in my experience there was a sort of church & state relationship that inoculated the chart team from the rest of editorial there. and that was under a far less journalistically minded leadership than billboard's current owners, i think.

i'm not sure how much of that church & state dynamic is out of some moral obligation to preserve history, honestly, and how much of it is simply because the tabulation of the charts is extremely complicated, and involves various sources/interests that go beyond just billboard (i.e. nielsen). and i think that's really what the issue is here -- changing the way the charts are tabulated is less flipping a switch and more like building an entire new subway line. and dealing w/ stan armies is similar to, like, companies trying to combat ransomware -- the hackers are always going to be quicker, more creative and more nimble than your large institution is able to be. and the stans are essentially engaging in a form of social hacking. billboard can plug one hole (i.e. curtailing the impact of ticket & merch bundles) and another is going to open up. it's a reactive instead of proactive dynamic and the reaction from the charts is always going to be a laborious process given how complicated the tabulation math is for even a single chart

I've seen some of Olivia's stans (aspiring stans?) on Twitter recently, like when she did an "AMA" thing – it struck me as almost cute/quaint that (despite her success/profile) she would have fans using her pic as their avatar, calling her queen, and the whole bit. I guess because she has such an unassuming, "girl next door" image... she's far from a fearsome diva. But I guess every artist deserves a stanbase (for better or worse).

the charts in America are so weird to me, all your different formats etc are so confusing!

Breihan writes, "Organic popularity, once the driving force behind pop music, barely feels like it exists anymore." But before the current era (and especially in the pre-digital days), the charts were driven largely by record companies and radio stations; isn't it better, in some ways, that actual fans have more control than they used to?

The real difference is that the *result* of a big radio push is that a song could become *broadly* popular, familiar to anyone who regularly listened to Top 40, whereas a fan-army mobilization to juke the charts does nothing to extend a song's popularity beyond the artist's fan base. It used to be that anyone could tune into a Top 40 station for an hour and get a pretty good sense of what's ruling the Hot 100; perhaps that's no longer as possible as it once was.

boy do we miss mediation