‘driver’s license’ by Olivia Rodrigo, a 17-year-old Disney actor who recently starred in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, has broken Spotify records for the most streamed song in a day.
a driver’s license was won in just one week after the release of the first place on the Spotify chart. On Tuesday, it was played 17 million times, the most for a single-day song ever (17,010,000 streams, a Spotify representative confirmed to BuzzFeed News).
The song is a melodramatic pop ballad about the liberation of getting a driver’s license so the protagonist can see their partner on their own terms – only to have that dream shattered by their breakup. “Yes, you said forever, now I’m driving past your street alone,” Rodrigo crowned. Especially the dramatic crescendo of the tune transports the listener painfully to the cinema of high school life, love and sadness.
In a worldwide pandemic and terrifying threats before the inauguration, the song gives young people – and hey, even adults – permission to retreat to worry only about tropical teen drama.
The song is now one of the best sounds on TikTok, which is also growing and growing its popularity. The more Rodrigo and others promoted the song in the app, the more it forced people to listen to the full song on Spotify. The more people listen, the more it stays on TikTok and other platforms like Twitter and Instagram. And on and on.
TikTok is currently full of jokes about the gossip and the obsession surrounding the song. (Added to the song’s popularity, rumors are that it’s about Rodrigo’s real love triangle to her ex. High School Musical cost.) People online comment on the scope of the hit.
Even Taylor Swift, who has publicly idolized Olivia, congratulated her in an Instagram comment. Charli D’Amelio is expected to give it her most emotional choreography.
“Driver’s license” cuts through the mist of 2021 in an important but simple way, this is because “driver’s license”, the title of which is deliberately considered an important style detail, is a song of this particular moment. This is a moment that helps Swift carry with her own lowercase letters (always, folk tradition) who made a hard impact despite how introverted they felt.
In quarantine, Swift has created music inside. People sitting at home longed for music that was heavy on escapist storytelling and melodies that centered their emotions. Now, Rodrigo really delivered it in the most basic way, and I mean that as a compliment.
For American teens, their most formative and experimental years were violently interrupted by the pandemic. They grew up knowing economic instability, and their political consciousness was awakened by the Trump administration. They deserve an uncomplicated ballad that speaks to the smallness of their world – crushes, dreams about the future and the negotiation of freedom with their parents.
Hell, I, an almost 30-year-old adult, have trouble wrestling with the madness of our democracy, and giving ‘driver’s license’ I consolation. I immediately get back to high school, crushed, writing about my future and arguing about evening clock.
Plus, ‘Driver’s License’ is simply a very good song.
It’s a sad song, but it’s an accessible kind of sadness.
Grief is one of the most common experiences of grieving teens, and it makes joking about the shared experience on social media much easier.