“Bad Idea, Right?” by Olivia Rodrigo, Thursday, May 30, 2024

When I scored my top songs last year, the second single, “Bad Idea, Right?” from Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album GUTS ranked at #8 in my top 25 of 2024 list. I didn’t write about this song last year, though. Instead, I wrote about Rodrigo’s lead single, “Vampire.” The lead single is a moody rock fantasia. “Bad Idea, Right,” though, is a valley-girl punk rock song in the style of The Waitresses with its sing-talking. While GUTS didn’t quite match the success of Rodrigo’s debut SOUR, the singles and the album develop Rodrigo’s sound as a pop artist who is fluent in rock music, building on the previous album and second single “good 4 u,” a single that brought rock back into upper reaches of Billboard’s Hot 100, unseen since the ‘00s. And while "Bad Idea, Right?" didn't top the pop chart like "good 4 u," the song did top the Modern and Alternative Rock Chart.
 

CAN’T HEAR MY THOUGHTS. In 2021, Olivia Rodrigo scored an unexpected number-one hit with “driver’s license,” leaving Rodrigo and producer Dan Nigro scrambling to follow up the song with what would become SOUR, Rodrigo’s debut full-length album. SOUR had two main sounds: sad-girl pop like Rodrigo’s first hit and bitter heartbreak rock, like “good 4 u.” The story came out that the singer’s inspiration for the “brutal” album and its singles was a breakup with her High School Musical: The Musical -- The Series costar Joshua Bassett. In 2023, Rodrigo returned with Nigro producing, this time spilling her GUTS about more pains of growing up, particularly the transition between adolescence and young adulthood. Rodrigo said of the time between the albums: "I feel like I grew 10 years between the ages of 18 and 20." After recording SOUR, Rodrigo took six months off from songwriting to “live a life to be able to write about it.” The album is more rock-influenced than the previous one and doesn’t seem to be themed on a particular relationship or point in her decade-in-two-year development. 


FUCK IT, IT’S FINE. The GUTS lead single “vampire” seems to be about a real relationship Rodrigo was in with someone who took advantage of her in some capacity. Fans have pointed to Olivia’s relationship with Adam Faze as the potential vampire. Some listeners theorized that Rodrigo spoke about the same relationship in “Bad Idea, Right?” but the song seems more likely to be satire. The character that Rodrigo plays in “Bad Idea” is insufferable. She’s the friend making bad decisions, justifying them to herself and to those who would hold her accountable. It’s easy to call out the speaker of the song when it’s a friend or an acquaintance, but yet somehow I found that I’ve made those same stupid decisions that I have judged others for and I had my own set of rationalizations for those decisions. It’s like my heart pulled me in the opposite direction of where my head told me to go. Why does toxic love burn hotter when you’re in your own quarters, away from the voice of reason? Rodrigo captures those lies we tell to ourselves when we make bad decisions, and Dan Nigro gives us a Tom Morello-styled guitar solo to celebrate those bad ideas. Are bad decisions inevitable? Or does listening to songs like today’s song make it easier to make them or less likely because we hear about how ridiculous we sound when we rationalize them?


Read the lyrics on Genius.





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