Olivia Rodrigo, latest queen of teen angst, ready to rage and rock into Rupp

How did you celebrate your 21st birthday? With a newly legalized libation? With an arsenal of friends kissing goodbye to the long stretch of discovery and impatience that comes with being a kid?

It’s a good bet that Olivia Rodrigo did some or most of that when she turned 21 in February. Festivities, though, were likely brief.

A mere three days after the big event, the singer known for such generation-defining pop/rock chart-toppers as “Drivers License” and “Get Him Back!” found herself at the onset of an even bigger event — specifically, the opening night of her Guts World Tour, an eight-month stretch of concert dates that marks Rodrigo’s first full-blown run of arena shows.

The majority of her summer performances, including a Rupp Arena outing on July 24, are sold out.

Having already conquered Europe during May and June, the tour finishes off its North American dates in late August before stretching on to Thailand, South Korea and Japan. It wraps in October with four dates Australia.

Welcome to adulthood.

Rodrigo’s ‘Drivers License’ moment

Artists experiencing such a meteoric rise to megastardom are perhaps not the collective novelty they once were, especially among females. Miley Cyrus, Hillary Duff, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and, of course, Taylor Swift were all celebrity acts whose careers ignited during their teen years.

Rodrigo’s ascension to popularity, though, was especially expedient.

A May 2021 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” was one of her first high-profile performances. In an episode hosted by Keegan-Michael Key, Rodrigo sang “Drivers License” and “Good 4 U” — tunes from her debut album, “Sour,” which was still a week away from release at the time. Both were break-up songs, perhaps expected fare from a then-18-year-old songstress, but each reflected radically different emotional perspectives.

“Drivers License” was a torchy lament, a postcard of teenage heartbreak that was at first hushed in its delivery and then anthemic in its unfolding pop luster. The wreckage was just as profound in “Good 4 U,” even though its attitude sought retribution (“I guess the therapist I found for you, she really helped”) while its musical setting was decidedly rockish.

Neither instance typified the usual teen-pop phenom strategy — in other words, music designed, even in its dourest hours, for dance floor consumption or cry-in-the-night radio reflection. At this early age, Rodrigo appeared a rocker at heart, even when that heart was placed on open display.

The singer returned to SNL last December in a holiday episode hosted by Adam Driver. Two-and-a-half years on, the thematic disparity between the two songs offered from her just-released sophomore album “Guts” was considerable. The stylistic gap was positively huge.

Rodrigo performed the first tune, “Vampire,” alone at a piano — a rarity for a show that usually rides with the pace of a freight train that’s running late. Though quiet, “Vampire” was a pensive work outlining a ruined relationship with an older, parasitic and possibly abusive lover.

Then the singer took a trip to the Twilight Zone and performed “All-American Bitch” as a music video come to life. With an abbreviated version of her band around her, Rodrigo performed, seemingly demurely, at a table adorned with cakes, coffee and all the inoffensive delicacies of someone who was “light as a feather, stiff as a board.” Then the music took off with Rodrigo smashing glasses, pulverizing dessert trays and causing a general dining room melee. “I know my place, I know my place,” she screamed. “And this is it.”

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Where Olivia Rodrigo’s career started

So how did this all start? Where did all the heart-busting, cake-smashing girl power emanate from?

As with so many out-of-nowhere singers who became stars before being able to legally buy a beer, the answer is television. She acted in a commercial at age seven and in a direct-to-video movie at 12. In 2016, the homeschooled Rodrigo wound up in the Disney Channel series “Bizaardvark.”

Three years later, she found herself in the somewhat redundantly titled Disney production “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.” In late 2019, a song she penned and performed for the show, “All I Want,” became a modest hit and served as an official introduction to Rodrigo as a formidable recording artist. Unlike her teen contemporaries, she would go on to co-write all of her own music, most of it with New York producer/songsmith Daniel Nigro.

Real life and live performance seemed to go hand-in-hand from that point forward. The first music festival Rodrigo ever attended was also the first one she played — the 2022 Glastonbury fest in England that placed her onstage with famed Brit song stylist Lily Allen.

“At the time, I didn’t realize how strange it was but, looking back, it’s a unique way to grow up,” Rodrigo told the BBC’s Mark Savage in September.

“She’d simply captured what it was like to be 20,” wrote Jia Tolentino in Vogue two months earlier, “an age when you’re sometimes blazing with ridiculous lust, thrilled to be seen as beautiful and enraged by other people’s expectations.”

If you’re still new to the Rodrigo phenomenon, then check out a pair of performance clips from the past eight months readily available online.

The first takes us back to February’s Grammy Awards where Rodrigo sang “Vampire” with commanding uneasiness against screen projections that slowly oozed blood as the song progressed — part pop, part Gothic horror. Among the audience attendees visibly cheering the song on was another female artist who knew a few things about addressing stardom at an early age — Taylor Swift.

That clip reflected the depth of Rodrigo’s commercial appeal. The other very effectively spoke to her fanbase — primarily, kids. Her music may not necessarily be G-rated (she drops F-bombs and other spicy modifiers in her songs on a frequent basis), but the sense of youthful abandon and the way her songs approach age-specific shifts in emotional growth have unquestionably contributed to the singer’s following. As such, expect to see a plentiful representation from the teen-and-younger ranks at Rupp on Wednesday.

(Reminder: No unaccompanied minors are allowed at the show, so fans who are 12 or under must have a parent or guardian. There will several “fan activation” activities including a photo booth and a tinsel station where fans can get sparkly tinsel braided into their hair before the show.)

The other clip was featured in October 2023 on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” It showed the comedian/host and his wife driving their two children to school, only to pick up a hitchhiker that 9-year-old daughter Jane instantly recognized as Rodrigo. It’s an honest and astonishingly touching segment of a direct artist-to-fan connection.

“Have a great day,” Kimmel’s wife, Molly, tells her kids as the ride with Rodrigo ends and their school day begins. “It’s all downhill from here.”

Olivia Rodrigo with Pink Pantheress

When: July 24, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Rupp Arena, 430 W. Vine

Tickets: Sold Out

Online: ticketmaster.com

This story was originally published July 23, 2024 at 4:59 AM.