The opening moments of Olivia Rodrigo’s seventy-seven-date Guts World Tour—which began in February and arrived at Madison Square Garden for four sold-out nights in early April—feature a video of the pop star sprinting down a dumpy hallway, then rapping her knuckles on a purple door. Anyone attuned to Rodrigo’s musical disposition knows that whatever is waiting on the other side is probably not virtuous, exactly, but is almost certainly a good-ass time. Last Saturday, as her band slammed out the opening chords of the night’s first song, the punkish, frothing “Bad Idea Right?,” Rodrigo appeared onstage in a silver sequinned miniskirt with a matching bralette and black combat boots. The crowd was instantly united in a kind of lawless exuberance. The feeling in the room was: Let’s give ourselves something to regret in the morning!
Rodrigo, who recently turned twenty-one, is funnier and less fussy than the other pop stars in her echelon. She is not apolitical (she has invited abortion funds to set up information booths at Guts shows, and is donating a portion of the tour’s proceeds to a fund supporting women’s reproductive health), and she has not cultivated an image of sexlessness, piousness, or self-seriousness. She appears, instead, to revel in pleasure—even when she knows that whatever it is she’s thirsting after will probably get her into trouble.
Rodrigo’s best songs feature her clowning on herself—“Everything I do is tragic/Every guy I like is gay,” she sang while charging around the stage during a performance of “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” a raucous song teeming with excellent one-liners—or meditating on a choice made in pursuit of fleeting bliss. That sort of thing might not seem radical—who among us has not muttered, “f*ck it, it’s fine,” and run directly toward the wrong person, as Rodrigo gleefully recounts doing—but, in an era in which a woman’s desire is still often thought of as inherently dangerous, Rodrigo’s unself-consciousness about what she wants can feel nearly revolutionary. She never projects superiority, and her relatability—perhaps the most powerful cultural currency of our time—doesn’t feel overly engineered. She knows that true yearning is always a little humiliating. “God, love’s f*cking embarrassing,” she sang in the middle of “Love Is Embarrassing,” before turning one of the song’s more defeated proclamations—“How could I be so stupid?”—into a blithe punch line. This is another recurring theme of Rodrigo’s writing: the indignities of growing up when you have to learn everything the hard way.
The Guts tour is the first time that Rodrigo has consistently played arena-size venues. (For her last major tour, in 2022, she booked theatres and concert halls, telling Billboard she didn’t want to “skip steps” in her career.) Rodrigo was a Disney Channel star in the late twenty-tens, beginning when she was thirteen. She rose to global prominence in January of 2021, with the release of “Drivers License,” a gentle but devastating ballad about a relationship gone awry: “Guess you didn’t mean what you wrote in that song about me/’Cause you said forever, now I drive alone past your street.”
The song, which Rodrigo co-wrote with the producer Daniel Nigro, destroyed an array of streaming records. Rodrigo’s first album, “Sour,” which arrived that May, débuted at No. 1, was nominated for seven Grammys, and eventually went quadruple platinum. She released “Guts” in September of 2023. Rodrigo’s voice is substantive—on her burlier songs, there are moments when she reminds me of Adele—but it contains a tiny tremble that gives her work heart. “The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying,” David Byrne once noted; Rodrigo gets this, and never grasps for perfection. At M.S.G., she performed “Drivers License” seated at a piano, while fog rolled across the stage. “I still f*cking love you, babe,” she wailed on the bridge. If she’s over the heartbreak now, it was hard to tell. In the crowd, people held one another and swayed.
Though tours of this magnitude tend to be impeccably coördinated, down to breaks for banter, Rodrigo was appealingly low-key and natural. The Guts show has five costume changes, which felt modest compared with Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour (nine) or Taylor Swift’s Eras (sixteen). At ninety minutes, it is also far shorter than both of those. Rodrigo, a stronger singer than dancer, avoids elaborate choreography, though she is preternaturally good at galloping across a stage, knees high, waving an arm around. A scrum of talented dancers sometimes followed behind her like a swarm of bees. It feels odd to call a run this ambitious “small”—and, to be fair, at one point Rodrigo sailed above the arena on a crescent moon—but I appreciated the sanity and the precision of its scope. Rodrigo’s performances are true to the arrangements on her records—she is not Bob Dylan on his Never Ending Tour, boldly reinventing a vast and varied catalogue—but the evening still felt spontaneous, even intimate. When she performed “Favorite Crime,” a wounded acoustic song from “Sour,” about (what else?) behaving badly while in the throes of love, she sat cross-legged on the stage with her guitarist. For a few minutes, the vibe felt more coffeehouse than world-tour.
The crowd was largely female and very young—a good portion was under twelve, I’d guess, and though I wasn’t quite expecting retirees, I was still startled by the median age, particularly considering the candor of Rodrigo’s lyrics and her jocular comfort with certain expletives. Her fans sang along the entire time, loudly and persistently enough that it was often impossible to hear Rodrigo. Midway through the show, she paused to ask, “Did anyone come with their mom or their dad tonight, maybe? I love going to concerts with my mom and dad! Hey, guys! Hey, sweet families!”
The kids were exquisitely dressed. A time comes in every grown person’s life in which the fashion of her adolescence becomes cool again. For anyone who came of age in the late nineties and still recalls the moment in which grunge (fading) and pop-punk (ascendant) had a brief but potent sartorial collision, the look of the Guts tour, both onstage and off, will feel deeply familiar. It’s X-Girl-era Kim Gordon meets Ashlee Simpson circa “Boyfriend”—high-school cheerleader, but make it goth. Last summer, I committed the grave mistake of rolling up to an Eras performance in Levi’s, Converse, and a T-shirt (in my defense, the concert was in New Jersey), and received myriad looks of pity from the crowd. “We must dress,” I texted my companion (male, thirty-two) before the Guts show. I picked out a vintage Marc Jacobs dress with a Peter Pan collar, and pulled my hair into a high ponytail tied with a black bow. He wore a Megadeth T-shirt. I am not sure we fully assimilated, but at least no one whispered “narc” when we walked by.
Though Rodrigo’s voice feels engineered for big, swooning ballads, she is also unusually good at the sort of bratty, frenetic delivery immortalized, in the early to mid-two-thousands, by such pop-punk acts as Avril Lavigne, Sum 41, and Blink-182. “I wanna get him back/I wanna make him really jealous/Wanna make him feel bad,” Rodrigo sings on “Get Him Back!,” a prickly song about hating and wanting someone at the same time. It was her final encore of the night, and she performed it wearing sparkly hot pants and a crop top with the phrase “And just like that...” scrawled across the front. (The previous night, in another allusion to “Sex and the City,” her shirt had read “Carrie Bradshaw AF.”) She sang the first verse through a red megaphone, her handheld microphone tucked into her waistband. “I wanna meet his mom,” she purred, her voice tender, vulnerable. A beat. “And tell her her son sucks!” (We contain multitudes.) Rodrigo held out the microphone to let the crowd take the song’s best lyric, and, in a kind of deranged unison, we stood and bellowed, “Maybe I can fix him!”♦
