0.26.1 - He said he's six foot two, and I'm like "Dude, nice try" / she said "See ya later boi"
This is how I ended up listening to Olivia Rodrigo.
I'm not sure how ahead of the curve I was in her climb to established pop sensation, but I'd seen her name pop up organically in a couple of places and had sought out and listened to Sour before I heard Driver's License in the wild. I recommended her album to my friend Matt and he'd not heard of her then either so I am going to give myself the credit for not just being swept along by her rising tide of popularity once 2021 drew to a close.
I was going to say that its not hard to see how that success came about - she's a charismatic force of performance who has a talent for fun and emotional and self deprecating lyrics which makes her immediately engaging - but really, that's not true. When I think about the musical landscape for the past few years, no-one was making Pop Punk For Teen Girls. As a genre it seemed like a relic of the past, just a phase which had been swept away by the rise of the confessional balladeer and the dominance of slick electropop. Before Olivia resurrected a genre and created a fanbase around her who had been aching for their cool, angry, emotional queen to lead them to the promised land, who else was out there?
I think the answer is Paramore and that's the end of the list. I even checked with my friend Georgie to make sure I wasn't missing another Girl Pop Punk titan from my own musical catalogue. Without doubt, whether I have missed critical contributors to the Pop Punk Teen Girl canon over the years, the closest analogue to Olivia's music has to be the songs of Avril Lavigne two decades beforehand*. And for different, stupider reasons, I ended up thinking about Avril a lot over this weekend.
Before I get too lost in the esoteric sauce of my own fevered train of thought, lets talk about the less stupid side of why I wrote this article, which is that last night I went to the Co-op Live in Manchester with Catherine to see the second night of Olivia Rodrigo's sold out Guts tour. I've had mixed results at live shows over the past few years and writing about them for this blog has helped me think more critically about the outcomes based who and when I am seeing them. I talked about the experience of seeing Pink Floyd and feeling that connection between an arena of fans and a group of musicians and how I'd spent years chasing a version of that experience only to never quite reach it until I went to the Era's tour in 2024; well, add Olivia Rodrigo to that list because I've been at the Co-op live three times this year and the crowd for Olivia Rodrigo were three times louder than they were for Nine Inch Nails two weeks ago, and as we drove back across the peak district in the darkness, I thought about why that was and reached a pretty obvious conclusion in hindsight.
When I see bands, it is motivated by several things, but amongst them is a sense of nostalgia. "I remember this band and what their music meant to me" has a powerful allure, but it comes with all the baggage that always follows our nostalgic impulse; I am much less inclined to jump around, scream and lose my mind at the age of 48 than I was when I was 24 seeing Nine Inch Nails for the first time, and I like live music and go there for the experience. For many, I fear, the concert ticket is an attempt to pay for the chance to feel like you are 24 again, which for a lot of british concert-going audiences involves drinking constantly through the show, staring blankly at the band you remember from your youth who now all look older, and more tired, and you are left wondering why you don't feel like you are 24 even though you paid £80 for this concert ticket.
Do you know who is not yet haunted by those feelings? Teens going to see Olivia Rodrigo. Do you know who is locked in, knows every word like it was etched into their soul, and who can't wait to sing at the top of their lungs for two hours? Teens going to see Olivia Rodrigo. If you want to know where the real arena live experience is in 2025, I'm going to suggest you find out what teen girls are into and start getting real into it as well. But really, truly, you should just listen to Olivia Rodrigo and the next time she is touring you should make it your mission to be in the same room as her. Her live performance is absolutely masterful; she knows the audience are there to eat out of her hands and she feeds them generously. She's unbelievably high energy, arch to the point of high camp, funny and self deprecating and she is in total command of the room from the moment she appears to a chorus of screams louder than anything I've ever heard to her final goodbye. It was an incredible performance and I'm sorry you all missed it.
I did spend the entirety of the concert sat down, however, which I think made me perhaps the only person in the entire arena who did. Imagine if you will the scene. The lights go down, the spotlight falls on the stage, and as one, the audience rises to their feet, me included. If you don't know me, or have never met me, I am 6 feet and 2 inches tall (despite Ms Rodrigo casting doubt on that fact for all men who claim to be 6ft 2") and with my long hair down I am a tall, opaque pillar for anyone unlucky enough to be behind me. As I stand up, I hear a cry of despair, and look to see stood directly behind me a girl who I estimate was no more than 11 years old, with her white dress and black fingerless lace gloves and curly blonde hair, and all 3ft 10" of her is facing into the possibility of spending the night looking directly at my back instead of the stage. I hit the seat of my chair again like there were lead weights in my back pockets. Catherine said "you can't stay sat down, you'll miss the show" as I contemplated my eyeline now being exactly shoulder height of the couple stood in front of me, and I angled myself to see into the middle of the stage between them, but readers I would not have got up from that chair for all the money in Ms Rodrigo's considerable bank account. I can't be an advocate for the power of live music while also knowingly ruining potentially the first and most formative live music experience this young girl was ever going to have; I couldn't look at myself in the mirror in the morning. So I sat in my chair, saw as much of the show as I could and sang every word to every song like it was etched into my soul along with everyone else, and still had a good time.
Before I move on, I should ostensibly do what this blog is about and talk about the records I listened to. Sour and Guts by Olivia Rodrigo are incredible pop punk records produced into a musical landscape with no apparent appetite for them and singlehandedly recreated the genre. From the first notes of brutal on Sour it launches into raucous guitars and pounding drums while she perfectly outlines the frustrations of a being a teenager**. I think if you were a cynic, if you had nothing but a black void in your soul you'd dismiss this music as pandering to an audience, but if you can't believe that the lyrics to these songs are straight out of the lived experience of her and her peers I think you lack empathy and you've forgotten what it was like to be an insecure teenager. I, on the other hand, have a long memory and some people might make the case I've never stopped being an insecure teenager all the way through to the age of 48. The majority of the better-known songs on Sour reference the love triangle between Olivia and Sabrina Carpenter which I talked about the other side of in January, but the entire record is such a fantastic collection of moody torch songs and kick-ass pop punk fist-in-the-air screamalongs that it's nearly a perfect album.
Guts had the potential to find Olivia out as a one-trick pony, but instead it takes the formula and expands its frame of reference out to a wider musical palette. She seems to have great reverence to the musicians who came before her and who formed the building blocks of her own musical style, and instead of the diary of an insecure teenager, we get instead stories of the endless mistakes which accompany young adulthood, and the position of young women in society in general. It's as good as the first album while not being a slavish repeat of it. She's genuinely one of my favourite modern musicians and if you've been avoiding her because you think she's just for teen girls you have been letting yourself down.
OK, that's the serious part of the article done. Now lets go down the rabbit hole a little.
I've obviously known we were going to Olivia this week, but over the weekend before, my friends had been talking about playing new tabletop RPG Slugblaster, which is about interdimensional skateboarding teens disappointing their parents and doing neat tricks. Matt, who is running the game for some of my friends, posted this on Bluesky.
And because I am not adverse to a cheap punchline from time to time, I replied with this:-
But do you know what struck me when I was sat on our sofa, making a playlist of covers of Sk8er Boi for a cheap punchline? It was the ease in which I found those covers. Obviously, when you have a song title as distinctive as Sk8er Boi, you can be sure this isn't just a case of two songs which coincidentally having the same title, like New Year's Day by U2 and New Year's Day by Taylor Swift. Anyone naming their song Sk8er Boi instead of, for example, Skater Boy is doing an Avril cover or they are outside of their mind,. So I plugged in the song title into the Spotify search and added every unique artists rendition of that song to a play list.
That playlist has 43 covers of Sk8er Boi on it and is two and a half hours long. It took me no effort at all to make it that big and I am sure there are more that I missed. I couldn't stop thinking about that, how this song which feels like everyone is laughing behind their hands at it could attract so many cover versions. If it was bad, how has it remained inside our public consciousness for so long? If it's great, if it's memorable, if it's amongst the most prominent songs of the early 20th century, if you can say to someone "He was a boy, she was a girl, can I make it any more obvious" and have them know exactly what song you are referencing, why does it feel like an easy punchline?
What compelled so many bands to cover and release it on your streaming platform of choice?
Is Sk8er Boi good actually? Does it deserve better recognition?
I couldn't stop thinking about these questions and so, when I needed to spend time mowing the lawn and picking the fruit from our raspberry bushes, I did the only reasonable thing and spent two and a half hours listening to every single cover version of Sk8er Boi I could find to try and answer that question.
If you too want to listen to 150 minutes of Avril Lavigne covers of the same song, you can find the playlist link here.
Before I talk about Sk8er Boi for another 5 paragraphs, lets cover off the project part of this first. In order to feel like this time was in some way used towards my 1000 albums in a year goal, I did actually listen to in full the Avril Lavigne albums Let Go and The Best Damn Thing. I was younger, and stupider, and less open minded when Avril first entered the music scene. It wasn't until I was much older and wiser that I came to the conclusion that a large part of my automatic rejection of things was my fear of being gatekept, from being told that I couldn't be a true fan of Radiohead or TOOL or R.E.M. or any other band I loved at the time if I also had other, less 'critically approved' music I also enjoyed. So I made the right noises, rolled my eyes, made snarky jokes whenever she was brought up while at the same time not being able to get Complicated and I'm With You and later Girlfriend and When You're Gone out of my head after hearing them.
Once I realised that fearlessly admitting to the things that you enjoy in music because the people who tell you when you are and are not a 'real fan' are the people whose opinions you can absolutely freely ignore was the path forward, I just started not having guilty pleasures in music, secret shame albums no-one should know about, and just had pleasures. I like these two Avril albums only slightly less*** than the Olivia Rodrigo albums and for much the same reasons.
It's interesting to me that I instinctively think that Avril feels more 'manufactured' than Olivia does when the latter is literally a product of the Mickey Mouse Club Road To Stardom which gave us Britney, Justin, Christina, Miley and Selena Gomez amongst others, and Avril ground her way through a life of music, got noticed, got signed, and only then did the music industry do the thing it does with all young stars - try and match them with a production and songwriting team that can build a sound that fits them. Maybe that's it, the comfortable idea that Olivia's songs are written in moments of inspiration in a hotel room somewhere and hastily recorded on a voice note on her phone instead of carefully constructed in a studio. My strong suspicion is that the marketing teams just got better, but before the accusations of being an 'industry plant' were thrown at every successful new female artist(s), Avril lived through it as a reaction to her meteoric success at 17. But time and perspective have been kinder to these albums than most, a as generation of millennial music critics look back with more forgiving and fonder memories than the people writing about music in 2002. I like these albums, I have no problem with Avril, I think there were far duller bands making much worse music to bigger audiences in 2002 and they never got half the shit that she did.
Let's talk about Sk8er Boi.
- This is kind of a modern day incel anthem depending on your perspective; girl is bad match for boy who makes no concessions to her social position or personal tastes; fortunately, he immediately gets a different hotter girlfriend and they make the girl who rejected him come and watch him be an awesome rock star and also him and his new girlfriend have sex, a lot, and she makes sure to make that clear to everyone listening.
- There's enough narrative in this three and a half minute song to count as an elevator pitch for a teen rom-com. In a world where all movies trade on nostalgia because original stories make everyone nervous, how is this not already a mediocre romantic musical comedy?
Then, in order to start this section, I thought I should go get an image from the Sk8er Boi music video and in the process of doing that discovered these immediately.
Yep...
...and of course she is.
So I'm just going to link you to the medium article which I am certain is smarter and more thoroughly deconstructed than my ham fisted attempt, and while the Sk8er Boi film may not have seen the light of day yet, I'll spare you all my spec script for what I would do with it.
So far, however, I've not run across anyone who has listened to 43 different covers of the song yet, so we're at least still in the clear there. Having established what the song is, what would incentivise you to cover the song? It's kind of a meme, so I guess there's a certain kind of tongue in cheek, oh-look-we're-so-whacky tomfoolery you can use as an excuse; and while there are a couple of those on here (one, I think, from some kind of podcast which has a bunch of goofy and hilarious dialogue**** around and through it) most of the covers seem to be relatively earnest attempts to recreate the song in some form or another.
First, there's the covers which are just..its Sk8er Boi, exactly the same as the original, but its us doing it, a different band. These baffle me the most. I'm aware there are some bands which do good work on Youtube making their views performing song covers. I'm fond of First To Eleven, who have a cover of Welcome To The Black Parade I'm partial too when I am digging through Youtube music; I like Alex Melton who does interesting genre flips of well known songs - I particularly like his cover of Taylor Swift's Lover, for example. There are many more. Walk Off The Earth are cool. I like German brass band Meute a bunch. But there's a First To Eleven cover of Sk8er Boi on here which might as well just be the original song. I don't understand what purpose it serves.
Next up, many bands answered the question no-one was asking "What if Sk8er Boi was also a 3rd wave Ska tune?" which seems to be code for "what if we played Sk8er Boi slightly faster and put Gary playing his trumpet in it also." Whatever your tolerance for ska is (and I can't have spent this article talking about not gatekeeping music and turn around and say that ska is trash), all of the multiple Ska covers of Sk8er Boi on here don't do much apart from put a brass section on it - the restrictions of the form means there's not much translation from Pop Punk to Ska and so they feel very, I dunno, samey.
There's also some padding on this playlist; There are some Karaoke tracks on here, and some basic instrumentals which I assume are for music practice/choir singalongs and the like*****; talking of which, there are a least two choral versions of Sk8er Boi on here which honestly, that's fine, but its not a great choral song - there's no natural parts or harmonies, it's pretty up tempo and if you are a capella singing the instruments, they're all pretty one note as well. Bad choice, choir masters, pick something more interesting next time. The String quartet arrangements are a slight step up, but they still don't make me excited; if you are a string quartet, am I supposed to be impressed that you can play the same 4 chord progression that Sk8er Boi is built on on your Cello and Violin? Please. I do like the Pizzicato Confetti string arrangement because they've actually done something interesting with it at least.
I'm not going to pick apart all 43 songs on the playlists, even I have finite patience for my own nonsense, but outside of those exceptions, the rest of the songs more or less try and do something with the song; their level of success is variable, but in the spirit of trying to find a way to bring this plane in for a landing, I'll give you my five favourite cover versions from the playlist and then you, the reader at home, can decide what you want to do with that information. Here goes, in no particular order.
Sk8er Boi - Minnesota Wooly Baby & Cici Ward
I don't really know what genre to call this; I guess 'modern indie blues' is close but it's recognisably the song but transformed and elevated and its a pleasure to listen to.
Sk8er Boi - Tengger Cavalry
This has throat singing and metal blast beats and sounds absolutely wild but is still fundamentally Sk8er Boi and that's great
Sk8er Boi - Living Dead Girl
I kinda like Living Dead Girl anyway because they do female led melodic metal and it's really good but I didn't know this cover existed (I've only ever listened to Exorcism of theirs) but this has great metal growls in it, incredibly cool guitar parts and feels most importantly like it's not some kind of winky pastiche but a genuine tribute to the song.
Sk8er Boi - Scott Bardlee's Postmodern Jukebox
I almost felt like it was cheating put this on the list because everything Postmodern Jukebox does is so effortlessly stylish it was bound to be good. If you've never experienced Postmodern Jukebox before, please seek them out and lose yourself in their back catalogue, their lounge/jazz/swing/blues interpolations of modern classics are joyful.
Sk8er Boi - Thanasis Vaharelis
This is a one-man acoustic guitar, down tempo cover and you would think those would be a dime a dozen and you are right but Thanasis is the only one of all these songs that chose to reinterpret the narrative to tell it from the perspective of the guy in the song. It doesn't always work but you get a lot of points for making an effort to do something different in my book.
I know, exhausting. Just a couple more things. Remember when I said that you could reasonably add every song called Sk8er Boi to the list because who else would name a song like that unless they were referencing the Avril song? Well, it turns out the answer is Chicago musician 'just johnny' who released a 90 second long instrumental guitar groove and called it Sk8er Boi because he's deliberately trying to make me look stupid. There can be no other reason.
Finally, I asked myself what the future holds for Sk8er Boi? Is there a new generation of musicians coming up, infected with the pop-punk melodies inflicted on them by their now 40 something parents, who will carry on its legacy into the next generation? Will there be another 40 covers of this song by the year 2030? Well, I decided to go directly to the source, and contact my teenage niece who is musical, talented, and who I could trust to give me the real answers.
* There's some No Doubt for sure but Tragic Kingdom is before Avril's time; I've mentioned Paramore, maybe you could argue for Evanescence but really it feels like Avril owned it, there was silence, then Olivia resurrected it 20 years later. I also checked with my Pop Punk Teen Girl sensitivity reader and she assures me that I haven't missed anything obvious.
** It was the line "I'm not cool, and I'm not smart // and I can't even parallel park!" that convinced me this was both genuine and incredibly funny and well written.
*** The elephant in the room here is the presence of Dr Luke and his career of being an awful and exploitative human being; his fingerprints are all over The Best Damn Thing but Avril along with P!nk co-signed and supported Ke$ha's case against him and I don't think Avril deserves to have her album negatively impacted by the presence of a terrible dirtbag.
****I miss the sarcasm tags from the SomethingAwful Forums a lot.
***** There's also a kind of chiming lullaby version which sounds like the kind of tunes mobiles and nightlights play above baby cribs. What would make you think that playing softly chiming bells in the rough musical shape of Sk8er Boi is something that would be good for your child I will never know, but I am not a parent and I'm not here to judge.
