The Creation of Drivers License
January is typically a quiet month for pop music with everyone is waiting for the Grammy’s. But this year, even in January, the pop music world already has a strong contender for 2021 Song of the Year. The song in the spotlight is one that is truly unexpected — a debut single from a 17-year-old from Temecula, California, previously unknown other than from a teenage Disney series. The song’s success has thus far been truly unprecedented — it broke streaming records worldwide, becoming the most streamed song in its first week on Spotify, and catapulted to the top of the Billboard 100. The song is none other than Drivers License by Olivia Rodrigo. But just how did this song become so wildly successful? In this paper, I adopt a sociological lens to analyze the creation of Drivers License. I will argue that organizational factors, such as her Disney affiliation, her music production team and the streaming industry, as well as the social processes of Tiktok and celebrity drama, combined to spark this song’s explosive success. I also explore how this song is situated in the broader social and cultural context: a modern reprise of the once-popular teenage power ballad concept that has gained renewed appeal in the pandemic era, with influences from today’s pop music icons, yet ultimately, an authentic, relatable and fresh teenage heartbreak song.
Firstly, Rodrigo’s affiliation with Disney as a teenage star is an organizational factor that garnered her a fanbase before her music debut. Rodrigo was first picked up by Disney for the show Bizaardvark, but only become popular among youths when she was cast in the role of female lead Nini on the Disney+ series High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (HSMTMTS), enabling her to get her name out to the now 95 million-strong Disney+ subscriber base. Disney is one of the cultural behemoths of the modern era, so Rodrigo being signed by the Disney to act in shows carried enormous prestige, being a validation of her musical and theatrical capabilities, and placed her into the same league as previous Disney stars like Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. It can be said that Disney was the reason why Rodrigo’s singing was thrust into the spotlight, as she was requested by the HSMTMTS producers to write a song that she would perform in a scene on the show. The resulting song All I Want was released on November 29, 2019, with the Disney marketing machinery promoting the song heavily on the Disney Music’s Vevo channel by releasing multiple videos, including a lyric video, an alternate video and a live studio performance. The song became a minor hit and even appeared in the lower reaches of Billboard 100, and led to her signing with Geffen Records in 2020, the record label that she recorded Drivers License with. Hence this exemplifies how Rodrigo’s ties to Disney served as a stepping stone for the public’s awareness of her. A side point that can be made is that the promotion of All I Want as a musical work is an example of how Disney uses the secondary market of music to enhance the popularity of its TV series, due to the obvious synergies between a musical-styled series like High School Musical and pop music.
Another organizational process facilitating this hit is the production team behind the song — her producer and co-writer Dan Nigro, as well as Geffen Records. The singer-producer relationship is critical for a successful pop song to be made, and this is one example of creative collaboration in the creation of pop culture. Nigro brings a wealth of experience writing songs with successful artists like Carly Rae Jepsen, Conan Grey and Sky Ferreira, and this experience includes the cultural conventions of how to make a pop music hit. He personally scouted Rodrigo after watching her Youtube videos, illustrating his sensibility about what is conventionally perceived to be good indie-style vocals. Additionally, his experience in song production enabled him to elevate Rodrigo’s vocal and keyboard talent to a hit-worthy acoustic quality through several embellishments, such as the synthetic washout sound at the end of the first verse ingeniously mimicking the sound of a car engine powering down, the reverb tremolo effect on the word ‘suburbs’, and the steady addition of claps and drum beats to build the energy through the song. Nevertheless, he allowed Rodrigo’s songwriting and musical prowess to shine through in the final product.
Yet another organizational feature that played a key role in Drivers License’s popularity is the music streaming industry, particularly Spotify. In an interview, Spotify’s co-head of music Jeremy Erlich listed many ‘X-factors’ that made this the perfect storm for Drivers License, but it is actually Spotify that was the true X-factor propelling into the stratosphere. Spotify accounted for 60% of the song’s streams in the first week of its release, and this was undoubtedly due to the platform’s aggressive promotion of the song after sensing its explosive organic response on social media like Tiktok. The song was initially not even placed in the top 10 newly released songs on release day, but by the next day it had been entered into 150 official playlists and was prominently placed on playlist covers and across the platform, evidently bumped up by the platform’s song recommendation algorithms. Given that Spotify is a commercially-driven enterprise, the platform’s algorithms are optimized with profit in mind, leading to the intense promotion of rising music hits that would drive streams and subscribers. With increasing numbers of listeners accessing music through streaming services like Spotify, recommendation algorithms designed by Spotify play an outsized role in determining the music that ends up dominating the airwaves.
When analyzing the top music hits of the past few years, one cannot escape the significant social phenomenon that is Tiktok. Songs such as Blinding Lights, Old Town Road and Savage form an ever-growing list of songs that have been catapulted to ubiquity by the social media platform frequented by youth under 25. Tiktok is the central driving force for Drivers License’s unprecedented success, and it is interesting to analyze how Tiktok’s features combine with the song’s characteristics seamlessly to give rise to its explosive growth.
Firstly, the sharability of Tiktoks (with share and like counts prominently displayed) creates the allure of popularity, and the discoverability of Tiktoks due to Tiktok’s For Me feed, attracts cool-seeking youths to create new trends which spread virally across the entire Tiktok-sphere as they are repeated and adapted by others. For Drivers License, one viral trend was sparked by Mel Sommers who mimicked the moment in the music video where Rodrigo looks into the camera and falls back, transitioning to the bridge. This sparked thousands of adaptations, some even involving dogs recreating the falling-back movement. In fact, Rodrigo, active on Tiktok, had designed the song with Tiktok interactivity in mind. Interviewed by the New York Time’s Diary of a Song series, she revealed that she designed the falling melodic transition into the bridge as a cue for Tiktok’s to be created from it, and felt gratified when listeners took her cue. While it’s not to say that this has diminished the authenticity of her songwriting, it portrays her savviness in utilizing the levers at her disposal to expand her song’s popularity. This shows how the distribution of culture directly affects its creation.
The ability of users to lip synch snippets of pop music via Tiktok Sounds, and pair it with a new user-generated video clip, set the stage for the song’s soundclip to be adapted for a multitude of memes and trends, introducing many to the song. One trend that has emerged is the POV (point-of-view) style of Tiktoks, in which they are shot in first-person perspective, acting out a relatable situation and hence appealing to viewers’ shared emotional experiences and cultural references. The narrative, story-telling style of the song’s lyrics complement this feature of Tiktok, leading to numerous imaginative role playing Tiktoks to be made, ranging from the perspective of the male, the other girl or even the inanimate object of the driver’s license itself. The Atlantic lauds the song as a ‘cinematic universe’, with a sense of ‘unfinishedness’ that has become a strength as it invites users to insert their own interpretations.
Rodrigo’s demographic as a fellow Tiktok-native teenager has affected how the song as a cultural product was marketed to audiences. This has uniquely allowed her to leverage Tiktok to vault to stardom in a way that is perceptibly authentic and organic. She has teased the release of her song, posting an experimental clip from the song on 27 Dec 2020 and promoting the song on the day of its release with a Tiktok that since garnered 47 million plays. Other artists have been criticized for attempting to capitalize on Tiktok to boost popularity for their latest releases, such as Justin Bieber with Yummy and Drake with Toosie Slide, while other songs that have been propelled up the charts by Tiktok have been mostly through user-created trends gone viral.
Another social factor which turbocharged the virality of the song on Tiktok is the associated celebrity drama. Rodrigo had been rumored to be dating her onscreen boyfriend Joshua Bassett in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, but recently Bassett has been seen with Sabrina Carpenter, another Disney channel star. Attentive fans have pointed to certain lyrics in Drivers License that reference this alleged relationship, and the rumor mill was only accelerated by Bassett’s own song Lie Lie Lie being released, followed by Carpenter’s Skin, which both have been speculated to be responses to Drivers License. The perfect combination of teen celebrity drama and Tiktok’s teen-dominated user base has led to viral obsessions , creating myriad alternate-reality POV videos theorizing the real-life drama that could have inspired the songs.
Hence, this song exemplifies the broader cultural context of the public’s obsession with celebrity romantic drama. Several previous chart-topping songs have also revolved around the singer’s previous relationships, such as Selena Gomez’s Lose You to Love Me in 2020 which takes aim at her long-time relationship with Justin Bieber, and Miley Cyrus’ 7 Things which was meant to attack Nick Jonas for playing with her feelings. As Professor Grazian has discussed in previous lectures on the functionalist lens of popular culture, celebrity dramas are a popular topic for public gossip as they make concrete uncomfortable, abstract issues that would otherwise be difficult to discuss, and serve as easy raw material to generate discussion. Especially these days, social media has allowed the public to gain greater access to celebrities’ personal lives, and this has led to people viewing celebrities more like friends and having a greater interest in their love life. Lastly, celebrities also serve as role models for youths to aspire to become, leading to ardent defenders of celebrities when they are involved in high-profile conflict.
Next, we must situate the song in its cultural and social context, for cultural products do not exist in a vacuum. One inescapable reality is the COVID pandemic. As music fans are unable to enjoy packed parties and live concerts, loud, upbeat party anthems are less sought after — something that producer Dan Nigro pointed out from his conversations with major record labels. In its place, the emotional, introspective songs come to the fore, especially with everyone confined to their bedrooms in quarantine. The isolation and dislocation caused by the pandemic, and the associated mental health implications, has possibly contributed to songs about vulnerabilities and emotions becoming more relatable, and the melancholic intensity of Rodrigo’s voice, especially in the bridge, is a truly cathartic experience that seems to have resonated well with many. Furthermore, the pandemic has especially heightened the importance of social media for artists to break through to listeners, both because youths are confined at home and hence spending more time on their phones, and due to artists not having tours, concerts or celebrity events to relate to fans.
We must also consider the musical context of Drivers License. Pop music follows many conventions — song length of 3–4 minutes, a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus song structure, standard chord progressions, as well as lyrical content revolving around love and sex. Many songs that become pop music hits achieve the perfect balance of fitting the tried-and-tested formula of the era’s music taste, while injecting a fresh adaptation that makes it unique and identifiable. In the podcast Switched On Pop, professor of music history David Metzer discusses with showrunners Charlie Haring and Nate Slone that Drivers License follows an established song structure of the power ballad — a song in a slow tempo dealing with love and loss, with a soft opening that gradually escalates in volume and emotional intensity. They trace back the power ballad’s roots to Barry Manilow’s Mandy, and note how power ballads proliferated in the ’80s and ’90s and dominated the charts. Mariah Carey’s One Sweet Day, which held the title of the longest running #1 hit on the Billboard, is another example. In the 2010s, power ballads have been eclipsed by hip hop in the charts, but is still present in certain singers such as Adele, Lewis Capaldi and John Legend. Hence, Drivers License is connected to a larger history of the power ballad. From a sociological perspective, following an established cultural convention that has proven to be popular reflects how artists and music producers minimize the risk of their musical creations.
Moving on to recent musical influences, Drivers License has certainly been influenced by prominent female singers of the Gen Z era. First and undoubtedly the most significant of is Taylor Swift. ‘No musician has done more to shape how Gen Z talks about itself’ than Taylor Swift, and Drivers License’s focus on teenage melodrama with its emotional intensity is similar to many of Swift’s songs. The lyrical specificity and narrative, storytelling style of the song are also Swift influences, painting very relatable scenes in the listeners’ minds of ‘red lights, stop signs and front yards’. With the characters described in the song ‘specific enough to envision, yet generic enough to customize’, such as the ‘blond girl (much older than me)’, this invites interaction with the audience in terms of speculating who the songs might be referencing, an effect that has only amplified the aforementioned celebrity love triangle drama between Rodrigo, Bassett and Carpenter. Taylor Swift herself is known for planting riddles and references in her song, making her music feel like a puzzle to be solved by her fanbase and generating buzz and speculation. Additionally, the song’s bridge with its voluminous self-harmonizing vocals reminds many of Lorde’s songs such as Royals, and the dark, melancholic theme is reminiscent of Billie Eilish. On the podcast New York Times Popcast, Larisha Paul succinctly captured the musical influences on Drivers License by calling it the ‘first song that synthesized the darkness of Lorde and Billie Eilish, yet retained the bright tunefulness of Taylor Swift’. Rodrigo herself acknowledges that she is a huge Taylor Swift and Lorde fan, and the fact that she grew up listening to such music gives her musical creations a greater sense of authenticity. As Chris Molanphy writes in Slate, ‘nothing in this song feels calculated’, and this song ‘coalesces multiple strains of post-millennial cultural output without actively stealing anything’.
Last but not least, let us talk Olivia Rodrigo the musician herself. She is an immensely talented musician, with brilliant vocals, and promising lyrical capabilities, all at the age of 17. Her vocal quality and lyrical specificity enable her to convey the melancholic intensity of the situation with a personal touch that is simultaneously and beautifully universal. Her sprinkles of inspiration, such as the song’s opening which perfectly musicalizes the car door beeping sound to transition into the repeating piano B-flat note of the verse, the unconventional 7-bar structure of the intro that subtly disorients listeners to great effect, and the vivid imagery of the bridge’s lyrics, all combine to make this song a musical masterpiece with a distinctive style that she can call her own. In conclusion, though numerous social and organizational forces, as well as complementary cultural contexts, are the fuel for Drivers License’s meteoric rise, we should not forget Olivia Rodrigo as the driver herself who drove into the hallway of musical stardom.
