How can we put it? She put this on, we even fell for her stupid love song…
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Julian Axelrod: On the off chance somebody’s coming into Olivia Rodrigo’s third album with zero context, “Stupid Song” offers a handy primer of her career so far. Classic piano balladry dips into self-consciously modern signifiers (this girl worships Carole King AND dated Zack Bia!) before falling sideways into a true-blue widescreen pop jam, with a strutting bass line that drives straight into the center of your soul. I could do with a little less acoustic and a little more electronic, but that’s really a critique of her career at large. She ends up right where she needs to be.
[7]
Ian Mathers: Along with “Drop Dead,” this song suggests that the more Rodrigo tricks me with her song titles only to reveal the opposite sentiment when they come up in the song, the more I’ll like it.
[8]
Oliver Maier: Rodrigo has never been immune to cliché, but her best songs usually contain a few glimmering turns of phrase that feel personal enough to get by on. She doesn’t bother digging for gold on “Stupid Song,” content to toss out tiresome fish-out-of-water vignettes as she builds to a chorus that’s 50% crap “You’re a this/I’m a that” metaphors. Plus, I just think “soaring” is not really a mode of hers that I enjoy.
[4]
Al Varela: “stupid song” would probably be in the lower half of my you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love ranking, but that’s mostly because of how much I like the rest of the album. It continues the arc that “drop dead” set up, entering a new relationship that makes her feel intensely infatuated. The song is weirdly unstable, interweaving between quiet reflections to bursts of emotion, and the more you dig into the lyrics, the more you get the impression that Olivia’s infatuation is more manic than anything else. It plants the seeds that this relationship is moving too fast and about to crash hard, and though other songs on the album drive that implication a little better (“drop dead”, “maggots for brains”, “my way”), this is still great.
[8]
Claire Davidson: I really appreciate how, in the narrative of You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, Rodrigo is starkly aware that her feelings for her partner—born more out of a desire to project onto someone than to wholly appreciate them—are unhealthy from the start, an inner conflict suggested in the Internet stalking of “Drop Dead” but played to the hilt on “Stupid Song.” The magic of this song is that, even while conveying that the force of her emotions really is too much, Rodrigo still manages to capture the agonizing ecstasy of a burgeoning crush in stunning color. The track is initially morose in its staid piano keys, but once the gentle violins on the first chorus open up the song’s scale, the remainder launches into a frenetic gallop, powered by a stuttering guitar whose pace seems to be actively competing against Rodrigo’s giddy meter. This perfectly matches the logorrheic emotion that she details on the chorus, an arch yet visceral depiction of a desire so strong that it makes the experience of living inside one’s body feel strenuous. It’s only right that a song about being unable to put strong feelings to words would so gleefully burst at the seams.
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Scott Mildenhall: It takes immense craft to so convincingly deny that you have any. Endlessly unfurling after leaking the quiet part loud, “Stupid Song” is a Rodrigo specialism. But while the diaristic storytelling is honed, it brings limits. The song makes its point by eschewing verse-chorus convention, but that leaves it with too few memorable moments.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Rodrigo’s singles this album cycle have been good and sometimes great, but never transcendent; it always feels like she’s holding back. Here, the lyrics go “I’m a car speeding down the boulevard without a brake,” but the arrangement sounds like it’s trying to pass driver’s ed.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Still a fan of her faster, weirder songs, I appreciate “Stupid Song” for its scream-to-a-whisper approach. The arrangement swells and crashes on shore. Of course I don’t believe for a moment that Olivia Rodrigo regards a song, even a bad one, as stupid. Loving songs is a more fulfilling kind of reciprocity than loving people.
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Nortey Dowuona: Insecurity is like poison. You start off unaware of the wider world and unaware of your limitations. Then you see the world grow beyond your control and reinforce the limits of your abilities, and then you see others who don’t seem to be bound by these limits, who seem to understand the world. At best you may assist or praise them, another screaming fan to be shoved aside by their bodyguards. At worst you become their biggest fan, ready to see them at their weakest and stab them between the ribs. Once you drink the poison of insecurity, nothing can remove it. You become a rotted husk, trudging around and breathing out those poisonous clouds to anyone who come close. Ultimately, you have to start drinking water every day and sleeping for 5 or more hours, conceding certain arguments and letting go of certain relationships. You have to repair everything inside you that has been damaged until you have only the poison your body needs to function. Pour out your bottles of insecurities and heal yourself before anyone can help you. You owe it to them and to yourself.
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Alex Clifton: “If there is a god, he’s the bond that’s between us two” is such an absurdly powerful, gorgeous lyric; I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I first heard it. You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is full of such moments, but “Stupid Song” hits like a piano dropped on Wile E. Coyote’s head. Everyone’s had a crush so powerful that it strips them of the ability to think coherently (or to quote another Rodrigo song, “my brain goes aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh”), and yet you want to use every single word you can to describe how all-encompassing it is. Rodrigo does so succinctly in the chorus with several striking images (“you’re a spark in the dark and my clothes all caught aflame”, “I’m a heart made of wax and I’m melting in the sun”) and makes it into a total banger to boot. It’s been such an honour to hear Rodrigo’s growth as a songwriter and how she’s come into her own. She doesn’t need comparisons to other female musicians at this point; she is her own, beautiful, glorious thing. I’ve added a point due to the number of bodega cats in the music video. I know it has zero actual bearing on the song, but more music videos need cats.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Starts out too slow — the fakeout ballad-to-banger move worked the first time I heard it, but after months of listening through the first half of You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, it registers as a hollow trick. Enough ink has been spilled about Dan Nigro’s production — very pretty, yes — but “Stupid Song” succeeds purely on the strength of Rodrigo’s vocal performance. Even when she’s running lines that lesser performers would play saccharine, like the pile-up of metaphors in the chorus, her poise as a singer allows her to move with grace through the rush of emotion she’s trying to communicate. And truly, what a rush! No Olivia Rodrigo single has yet been perfect, but it would be easy to convince yourself that this one is nearly there.
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