/ Since its release last April, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Déjà Vu” has garnered more than 750 million streams on Spotify. And at least a dozen of those have come from my trying to untangle one particular, perplexing verse.
Here’s the setup: “Déjà Vu” laments the end of a relationship. Actually, “laments” is the wrong word, like calling the end of the world a “disruption.” At the heart of Rodrigo’s tremendous appeal is her proximity to the teenage experience; she writes about high-school love with the same raw-nerved intensity Ingmar Bergman brought to “Scenes From a Marriage.” For her, a breakup is nothing less than the death of love itself — because that’s what having your heart broken at that age feels like. Rodrigo’s teen audience understands this implicitly, and her adult listeners are afforded an angsty contact buzz. Read More
