Bonus! Do you get deja vu?
The uncanniness of Olivia Rodrigo's SOUR Prom and Taylor Swift's re-recorded Fearless
Welcome back to The Vibes, a fortnightly culture newsletter. This is a bonus edition! Just for a little treat! You can read more editions of The Vibes here.
Good morning!
The other day, I watched a bit of Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR Prom live concert film thing and I felt uncomfortable with it. Before you jump on me and say— she sounded so good! just like the recording! I will say I didn’t like it very much because she sounded just like the recording. Did someone say deja vu?!
For someone whose first words on the album are, “I want it to be, like, messy” why couldn’t she do the same for this performance? Make the songs messy and feral! Scream a little bit, be a little bit out of tune! Make it like her performance at the BRITS, where she was a little bit out of tune and it didn’t sound great but it was obviously live. In this film, if it wasn’t for the fact she is constantly holding a wireless microphone I would think she was lip-synching. It is pretty impressive that her voice sounds the same live as it does on record but there’s something off for me about the whole performance.
In fact, it reminded me a bit of Taylor Swift’s re-recorded Fearless, a process designed to render the original recording valueless. To do this, she and her producer needed to replicate every instrument, every note sung, every lyric written. What this resulted in was an album that you could easily replace the first Fearless with, if you wanted some technically better vocals and a higher production value.
But those better vocals didn’t exist on the 2008 album and the raw emotions propelling the original were not present on much of the re-recording. I know these things don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things because fans can still sing along, replicating the original slightly strained vocal track with their own and replacing her heartbreak with the one they feel. It does, however, leave us with this piece of art that feels like the vocals in the Olivia Rodrigo film— an eerie exercise in the uncanny valley.
The clearest example of the uncanny valley, for me, is the incredibly insane movie The Polar Express. And just so we’re all aware, I am never not thinking about how Robert Zemeckis’ original idea for this film was for Tom Hanks to play Every! Single! Character! But Tom Hanks got too exhausted so they only made him play 5!! (Yes! I did write this entire piece so I could shoehorn in this fact 😌)
These two musical artefacts become uncanny in the attempt to hit every single aspect of the original recordings flawlessly— interestingly only the Swift album needed to hit every note. The thing that unsettles me most about the Olivia Rodrigo performance is, plainly, that we see her singing into a microphone. The almost-too-perfect sound coming out of her mouth does not feel human but also doesn’t sound obviously auto-tuned or altered, so we feel uneasy. It’s not a music video where the visual and audio elements are disconnected but it feels like there’s a dissonance. u know the feeling when u see the featurette where Tom Hanks is the boy and the boy’s father and Santa and the train conductor and the hobo? Yeah— it’s kind of like that.
I was discussing this post with my brother earlier and he asked whether the whole point of the Olivia Rodrigo concert film was so that fans could enjoy and marvel at the fact that she sounds the same. To this, I say partly. Sure, the comments on YouTube are all some version of praising her talents—‘she sounds the same as the album!’—but I think there is something to be said for an artist who surprises their fans with a live performance choice. Again, I’ll bring up the BRITS performance she did where the atmospheric production of “drivers license” was replaced with just a piano and a harp. Despite not hitting all the notes (all the more apparent because of the sparse arrangement), she gave her fans a new version of the song they could return to and feel the emotions of. Apart from the mash-up of “happier” and “deja vu” (can’t believe the best song on the album was cut short) there isn’t anything new, musically, in this concert film worth returning to— it’s a glorified visual album.
In saying all of this, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with presenting your fans with something they’re going to love unconditionally (@ fans don’t dox me !!) but I think there’s something in all of us—however much we try and deny it because it is a flawed concept—that craves the authenticity of raw emotion. The moment it feels like Olivia or Taylor is just singing the words rather than the emotion behind them, they lose their USP as artists. Making something so human as a teenager singing about her first heartbreak feel so clinical is “1 step forward, 3 steps back” (lol) into the uncanny valley.
Oh and if you want my thoughts on Olivia Rodrigo as an overall artist? Not here! That’s some behind-the-paywall content! All I will say is she is giving me similar vibes—did someone say deja vu?!—to Taylor Swift in the 1989 era (squad etc.) which makes me feel like she is on the precipice of her downfall (pop stars are having more and more condensed careers) with the general public turning on her.
Next Ten Vibes is out Thursday!
Until then :)
Bianca