Pop Shots – A False Sense of Maturity

Welcome to your weekly dose of pop world musings. Covering all things pop culture, this week I want to use this column to talk about the concept of maturity, and the ways in which young pop artists seem to be misguided about it.

I started thinking about this topic after hearing two versions of 17 year old Olivia Rodrigo’s breakout hit “Driver’s License.”

The radio version is a Grade A teen breakup song. Clearly she knows what it feels like to break up with your first love, and she expresses it beautifully.

There’s a second version of the song, however, that includes a few incredibly unnecessary f-bombs. They appear during the section of the song that begins at the 2:30 mark, and unlike the radio version, which has a beautiful flow to it, the f-bombs make it sound like she’s trying too hard to sound “grown up.”

In a bit of irony, in her effort to be be thought of as mature, she ends up coming off as less mature. That said, I think I know the source of the f-bombs, and the greater issue they represent.

Rodrigo is 17 years old, and she’s on a Disney show – High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (yes, that might be the worst name ever for a television show). You know what pretty much every teenager, and especially every child actor wants to do? Shed the image they feel defines them as a child. In an effort to be taken seriously, they want to show people they’re grown up. Unfortunately, more often than not the result is they end up looking like they’re trying too hard, which makes them seem even more immature.

I feel the same way about how Ariana Grande’s music has gone from truly excellent pop/R&B, to overtly sexual tunes. Every time a young artist does this I’m like, “OK, we get it, you just had sex for the first time.”

This kind of thing has been going on for decades – young pop stars attempting to shed their childhood image, mistakenly associating “young” with “clean.” They add unnecessary curse words to their music, and in some cases they make songs all about sex. These are things that young people assume reflect distancing themselves from their youth, and having a new level of maturity. I just have to ask – have they ever seen a promo for Teen Mom? There’s plenty of cursing, and we all know the young women have had sex, but is there anything about them that makes you think “mature?”

Maturity isn’t about using curse words, or talking about sex, it’s about dealing with adult emotions, and, in the case of songwriting, using a greater vocabulary to express them.

Now I’m not saying all cursing in music is bad, and I’m certainly not saying all sexual content in music is bad. If you’re a frequent reader of this site you know my taste. That said, the artists I enjoy who employ these things aren’t doing them in an effort to try to seem older, they’re doing them with actual maturity. Sexual content, for example, comes off differently when it’s from an artist like Sade singing “The Sweetest Taboo.”

Incidentally, Sade was 26 when she released “Sweetest Taboo.” Ariana Grande was actually a year older when she released the far less mature “34+35.” Grande sounds like a horny teenager. Sade sounds like a woman. Grande, however, has child stardom in her past, which is something she seems like she’s constantly trying to shed.

(As an aside, I think Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” is a flat out amazing song, and although it was released nearly five years ago, shows far more maturity than her current work)

The machinations young pop artists, and young people in general, feel they need to go through to be considered an “adult” are partially our fault as a society. I can see how if the images a teenager is being bombarded with are reality TV shouting matches filled with more bleeps than air-able words, and equally vitriolic social media rants, one might think that’s part of being an adult. In reality, do you know what part of being an adult that is? It’s just like when a commercial for a sugar-filled cereal claims it’s “part of a well-balanced breakfast” – it’s the unnecessary part.

Every generation of teenagers struggles with wanting to be viewed as mature, so it’s easy to understand why young artists fall into these traps. Those of us who are older should be setting a better example, even if no teenager likes listening to adults, especially when the adults don’t tell them what they want to hear. Therein lies another major issue with the desire to be viewed as mature – can you achieve maturity while simultaneously resisting it?

Maturity is a tricky subject. It’s why the unedited version of “Driver’s License” makes Rodrigo sound like she’s barely earned her learner’s permit, while the radio edit has her sounding like someone who’s ready for a road trip.

 

That’s all for this edition of Pop Shots, but come back next Monday for more shots on all things pop.