The Number Ones: Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Nobody wants to lose the breakup. Just by itself, a breakup is bad enough. Except for those occasional magical situations where you dump somebody else and then suddenly feel beautifully unencumbered and free, both parties are probably going to just be kind of unmoored and bummed, at least for a little while. But if you're still unmoored and bummed and you notice that your ex seems to be doing great? That's the fucking worst. At least when you're both depressed about it, you still have that in common. When the other person is fine and you are not fine, you might start to think that there's something manifestly and innately not-fine about you. It's infuriating to even consider that possibility. If you're young enough and good at music, you might want to make a theater-kid pop-punk tantrum about it.

Olivia Rodrigo couldn't wait for the chance to do exactly that. That's my big takeaway from "Good 4 U," her third single and second #1 hit. In 2021, Rodrigo told Variety, "I literally wrote breakup songs before I’d ever held a boy’s hand or even remotely dated someone." She spent her lifetime in training for her first real breakup. On the surface, Rodrigo was merely one more talented and fresh-faced teenager acting in children's sitcoms made by the Disney corporation. But when the right breakup-related inspiration struck, she transformed into something else. She used what easily could've been the first heartbreak in her life as the fuel to become a superstar, and she avenged her hurt feelings many times over. "Good 4 U" is a song about losing the breakup, but Olivia Rodrigo didn't really have that problem — not for long, anyway.

Rodrigo's debut LP Sour, easily the best big-deal pop album of 2021, is basically an entire record of breakup songs. It's a 34-minute suite of melodramatic woe-is-me freakouts, a speedrun through the stages of grief that you experience upon the first time you convince yourself that you might die alone. The exquisite self-pity of "Drivers License," Rodrigo's blockbuster debut single, presented one of those stages. "Good 4 U" presents another: the ecstatic and almost euphoric anger that might surge through you upon realizing that your ex isn't as sad as you. It's childish, and that's the beauty of it. Nobody looks to a pop song for nuance. We, the public, want big feelings, presented in big ways, and "Good 4 U" gives us that.

If you read my column on "Drivers License," then you already know the whole backstory. The teenage Rodrigo, already a veteran of the children's entertainment industry, was cast as one of the leads on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a Disney+ series that aimed to do self-reflexive mockumentary things with the company's established intellectual property. Rodrigo's main co-star was a floppy-haired cutie pie named Joshua Bassett, and the two of them reportedly dated in real life for a little while, though neither of them has ever confirmed that. Legend has it that Bassett broke up with Rodrigo and then almost immediately started dating Sabrina Carpenter, another Disney-sitcom star who will eventually appear in this column. That's how we got "Drivers License." It's how we got pretty much every other song on Sour, too.

That's an oversimplification, of course. Every pop-star origin story is an oversimplification. I would not be so cynical as to suggest that Rodrigo engineered a scenario where she could take advantage of a breakup or a public love-triangle situation among children's-entertainer celebrities, leveraging that to achieve her dreams of pop stardom. She's a human being, not a corporate business plan, and anyway she ended up mostly generating money for a non-Disney company. (Geffen, her label, is a Universal subsidiary.) I will merely say that when she went though a very public breakup and became one point of a children's-entertainer love-triangle situation, she was ready. She knew what to do.

In the aforementioned Variety feature, Rodrigo says that she came up with her "Good 4 U" chorus when she was in the shower: "Good for you, you look happy and healthy! Not me! If you ever cared to ask!" At that point, she was already working with producer Dan Nigro, her main collaborator for the entire time that she's been recording her own music. Nigro and Rodrigo worked on the track with Nigro's friend Alexander Glantz, known professionally as Alexander 23. Alexander comes from suburban Chicago, and he signed to Interscope in 2019. He's made a few records as an singer-songwriter, including "IDK You Yet," a single that came out in 2020 and went platinum two years later, but he's never had a chart hit as an artist. Instead, Alexander is mostly known as a writer and producer for artists like Reneé Rapp and Joe Jonas. "Good 4 U" is easily his biggest credit.

Even after "Drivers License" went supernova, Olivia Rodrigo knew that she didn't want to make an entire album of downcast ballads. She grew up listening to her parents' '90s alt-rock records, and she wanted to make music that was fun and alive, stuff that you could dance to. In that Variety profile, she says, "Writing ‘Good 4 U’ was really satisfying because the song is upbeat and high-energy and people can dance to it, but I didn’t have to sacrifice being honest and authentic in order to write it." While still mining her post-breakup moment, Rodrigo tapped into a whole other feeling — a transcendent, fizzy anger that can be so ecstatic that it almost feels like joy.

Do you know that feeling? Maybe you're in a fight with someone else, and that person apologizes, but you don't want to accept the apology yet because you're enjoying being angry too much. It's dumb and petty and childish, but everyone has to be dumb and petty and childish sometimes. Lots of people have turned that feeling into art. The entire pop-punk genre basically couldn't exist without that feeling — a dizzy sense of endorphins-popping lovelorn aggression that only marginally shifts as it passes down from one generation to the next.

The source material for "Good 4 U" is '00s MySpace Warped Tour jelly-bracelet swoopy-bangs emo, right down to the ultra-processed guitars and the adrenalized-bray vocal delivery. Around the time that Rodrigo recorded "Good 4 U," that style was going through a weird little revival, mostly in the rap world. It came in through guys like Lil Peep and Juice WRLD, both of whom died extremely young, and it reached its pop apex when 24KGoldn and Iann Dior scored a huge crossover hit with "Mood," a quasi-rap song that got played on rock stations. Rodrigo didn't approach that sound from a rap perspective, though. Instead, I think that sound came to her by way of Taylor Swift.

Let's back up. When Taylor Swift first came into the game, she was almost certainly the first mainstream country figure to understand the power and appeal of that type of Warped Tour emo, the way it could be fused with assembly-line country songwriting. (Non-country pop stars figured out something similar a year or two earlier; that's what someone like Ashlee Simpson was doing.) Over time, Swift made the connection more and more clear. In 2011, she played an acoustic cover of Fall Out Boy's "Sugar, We're Goin Down" at a tour stop in Chicago. ("Sugar, We're Goin Down" peaked at #8 in 2005. It's a 10.) A year before that, she released "Better Than Revenge," which was basically her version of a Paramore song. ("Better Than Revenge" peaked at #56, and then the Taylor's Version version peaked at #28 in 2023.)

Swift never made any secret of her Paramore admiration, and she formalized it in 2023, when Hayley Williams appeared on Swift's re-recorded vault track "Castles Crumbling" and Paramore opened some dates of the Eras Tour. ("Castles Crumbling" peaked at #31.) But Swift and Williams go back a lot further than that. The two of them, who are about the same age, have been acquaintances since 2008. They broke into the music business as ultra-precocious Nashville-based teenagers in the '00s. I'm sure they had some of the same influences, since there were traces of emo and pop-punk on Swift songs going all the way back to her self-titled debut. ("Picture To Burn," for instance, peaked at #28 in 2008.)

I don't think Olivia Rodrigo necessarily learned about MySpace emo through Taylor Swift. I just mean that there was precedent for ultra-specific and brilliant young pop singer-songwriters to use the lyrical and musical tropes of MySpace emo to frame their own angriest bangers. But Swift never leaned into that version of gleaming guitar-pop as hard as Olivia Rodrigo did on "Good 4 U." Neither did Juice WRLD, for that matter. With "Good 4 U" and a few other songs, Rodrigo went all-in on it.

"Good 4 U" is such a fucking blast. It starts with an evil little bassline, a few notes repeating like a car engine that's trying to turn over. We hear a chorus of multi-tracked Olivia Rodrigos sighing in the background like the less-important members of a '60s girl group, and then the main Rodrigo comes in, singing with quaking clenched-tight fury. She sounds like what she is — a pissed-off teenager who doesn't want her anger to be dismissed, so she lays it all out as logically as she can, like she's defending her emotional position in court. Her voice drips with condescension, but you can tell that she's only deploying it to mask pain. As the verse progresses, the clicky new-wave guitar in the background gets a little louder, and so does the anger in Rodrigo's voice. Then we hit the chorus, and everything explodes.

The quiet-to-loud alt-rock song-structure has been done to death, and it's been a cliché for basically my entire conscious life, but goddamn, I love it. When the drum-cracks and the guitar riff hit, when Rodrigo's voice goes from strained mutter to melodic yelp, fireworks go off in my brain. Rodrigo's "Good 4 U" chorus melody is bright and sticky and mathematically sound, but she doesn't deliver it like the pop song that it is. Instead, it comes out in a desperate yowl, as if that's the only way she can even think to sing it. Rodrigo is an actor, so she knows how to project emotions so that even little kids can properly read them, but that doesn't make them any less genuine. As with "Drivers License," I feel that shit.

"Good 4 U" is powered by dozens of tiny little pieces of ear-candy, like the guitar counter-melodies on the chorus or the drum fill that drops out just as the second verse starts. The track builds with grace and assurance, and you might not even notice the tiny little echoing drum-machine claps or the way the hi-hats dance on the bridge until you're on your millionth close listen. But this thing is tight. It's sealed shut. Dan Nigro and Alexander 23 played every instrument on the song, and they built it into a perfect little vehicle for Rodrigo's voice, words, and sentiment.

The sentiment is this: "We broke up, and now you're fine?" It takes a certain kind of psychosis to take someone else's contentment as a personal slight, but that psychosis is an extremely teenage sensation and, not coincidentally, an ideal concept for a pop song. I love the idea that Rodrigo worked hard to fix this guy up and make him functional, and now she's seething on the sidelines while some other girl benefits from her makeover: "Good for you, I guess that you've been working on yourself! I guess that therapist I found for you, she really helped! Now you can be a better man for your brand-new girrrrrrl!"

Ultimately, "Good 4 U" is a song of self-recrimination, but it's not framed that way. Rodrigo's narrator sees her ex enjoying life, and all she can think is, "God, I wish that I could do that!" The ex, she notes, is living some kind of charmed life. He bought a new car, and his career is really taking off — baby, what? The fuck? Is that? (The music does a staccato stop-start thing right along with Rodrigo, as if to underline every word.) Meanwhile, Rodrigo is spending nights crying on the floor of her bathroom, which doesn't sound comfortable or sanitary. Nevermind that her career is really about to take off. Nevermind that the ex's entire public image is now "guy who dumped Olivia Rodrigo and she wrote all these great songs about it." Rodrigo couldn't know that. That would take some kind of freaky sense of vision, and when you're feeling sorry for yourself, you don't have that.

Rodrigo also didn't have the freaky sense of vision to know how many people were about to accuse her of ripping off Paramore. Specifically, the consensus, at least in some circles of the internet, was that "Good 4 U" was bald thievery of Paramore's 2007 breakout hit "Misery Business." The two songs are similar enough on the surface. They both have deliberate-gallop tempos, seesaw guitar riffs, and vocal deliveries that start out seething and grow explosive. They're both songs of gloriously immature teenage romantic resentment, except that Hayley Williams is mad at her crush's girlfriend, not at the ex who seems to be doing fine. They're both good songs! ("Misery Business" peaked at #26. Paramore's highest-charting Hot 100 hit is 2014's "Ain't It Fun," which peaked at #10. It's a 7. Williams also guested on former Number Ones artist B.o.B.'s "Airplanes," a #2 hit in 2010. That one is a 6.)

Olivia Rodrigo released "Good 4 U" as a single in May 2021, just a week before her Sour album came out. The weekend that the song came out, Rodrigo performed it on Saturday Night Live. (Host: Keegan-Michael Key.) This was only the second time that Rodrigo ever performed live. She blew up mid-pandemic, so that part would have to come later. She also made a very fun "Good 4 U" with director Petra Collins, who would become a regular collaborator.

The "Good 4 U" clip is full of movie references. Rodrigo wears the cheerleader uniform from The Princess Diaries and the long leather gloves from Takashi Miike's Audition, and it shows a lot of cinematic range to shout out those two movies in the same video. In the clip, she's a jilted teenager who gets mad enough to burn down her ex's house, and the best parts are when she's in a grocery store, buying a gas can and some popcorn, trying to look non-demonic. It's funny! She's not exactly the wronged party in the video, and I think that betrays a little more self-awareness than the song does.

"Good 4 U" did huge first-week numbers, especially on streaming. Considering that future Number Ones artist J. Cole released his album The Off-Season and crammed a bunch of his songs onto the Hot 100 that week, Rodrigo's streaming totals were especially impressive. (Cole's biggest Off-Season song, the 21 Savage/Morray collab "My Life," peaked at #2 behind "Good 4 U." It's a 7.) But as soon as "Good 4 U" came out, Rodrigo was the target of videos that went viral by mashing that song up with Paramore's "Misery Business," implicitly accusing Rodrigo of plagiarizing.

That happened to Olivia Rodrigo a lot. She was a brand new, fully formed teenage superstar with a bunch of hits to her name, and you could hear her influences in her work. She was always going to get hit with allegations of being a biter, especially in the case of Taylor Swift. Rodrigo always cited Swift as one of her key influences, and she even gave Swift and Jack Antonoff songwriting credit on "1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back," a ballad that owed a melodic debt to Swift's 2017 song "New Year's Day." ("1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back" peaked at #29. "New Year's Day" never charted on the Hot 100.)

After Sour came out, though, some funny things happened. After a few months, people noticed that Swift had been awarded retroactive songwriting credit on "Deja Vu," the single that Rodrigo released in between "Drivers License" and "Good 4 U." ("Deja Vu" peaked at #3. It's an 8.) At some point, someone made a very dubious decision that "Deja Vu" used enough pieces of a certain Taylor Swift song that'll eventually appear in this column, and Swift and her collaborators were awarded those writing credits. Soon afterwards, the same thing happened with Paramore and "Good 4 U." In July, Hayley Williams and ex-Paramore guitarist Josh Farro got writing credits on "Good 4 U."

I find this shit to be unbelievably wack. This cloud of parasitic legal bullshit surrounds way too many big songs, and it flies in the face of what's supposed to happen, which is artists influencing and iterating upon each other's work. This all happened a few years after Paramore announced that they would stop playing "Misery Business" live because Williams didn't relate to the version of herself that wrote the song anymore. (They've since started performing it again.) Williams also later admitted that "Misery Business" was about her co-wroter and bandmate Josh Farro. She had a crush on him, and she hated the fact that he had a girlfriend. Now, the two of them get a big chunk of "Good 4 U" royalties. I have nothing whatsoever against Hayley Williams, who seems like an extremely cool human being, but she didn't earn that "Good 4 U credit. As far as I know, Williams' only public comment on the whole thing was on her Instagram Story at the time: "Our publisher is wildin rn."

Maybe that's all it was. Maybe it was different artists' publishers negotiating with each other and the artists had nothing to do with it. But there are other ways to approach that kind of situation. Olivia Rodrigo opened Sour with "Brutal," an extremely fun anthemic tantrum that transparently bit its riff from Elvis Costello & The Attractions' 1978 new wave classic "Pump It Up." ("Brutal" peaked at #12.) Costello is a hugely successful musician who has never made Taylor Swift or Paramore money, and he easily could've gone after Rodrigo for a songwriting credit of his own. I wouldn't blame him if he did. To my ear, Rodrigo's "Pump It Up" quote is way more blatant than anything she might've taken from either Taylor Swift or Paramore. But Costello didn't do that.

When someone asked him about getting a "Brutal" writing credit on Twitter, Costello spelled it out. With his "Pump It Up" riff, he was doing his version of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," which itself was Dylan's version of Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business." To Costello, that's what's supposed to happen: "It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That’s what I did." That's why Elvis Costello is a real one. (Costello's highest-charting Hot 100 hit is 1989's "Veronica," which peaked at #19.)

Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift don't say nice things about each other in interviews anymore. They don't say anything about each other. Lots of people have theorized about a beef between these two generational figures and tried to figure out which songs one of them might have written about the other. Nobody has done the same thing with Rodrigo and Paramore, but the same principal is at work with those "Good 4 U" credits. I hate the narrative that Olivia Rodrigo is a ripoff artist. She is not. She is merely an extremely good pop star who does the same thing that every pop star does. She works within a tradition, which is not the same thing as stealing other people's original ideas.

Olivia Rodrigo doesn't need me to cape up for her. She's doing fine. Great, even. The "Good 4 U" single went platinum seven times. The Sour album went platinum six times. Every song on Sour charted on the Hot 100, and "Traitor," another melodramatic power ballad in the "Drivers License" mold, peaked at #9. (It's a 7.) Rodrigo won the Best New Artist Grammy, beating a field that included Lil Nas X, Lizzo, Rosalía, and Maggie Rogers. Aging critics like me flipped our fucking shit for a pop star who did relevant things with the '90s alt-rock influences that we loved. Stereogum named Sour the 13th-best album of 2021, and plenty other publications put it somewhere in that range, as well.

Olivia Rodrigo became a public figure, or more of a public figure than she was when she was a Disney star. She appeared at Joe Biden's White House to promote the COVID vaccine. She filmed another two seasons of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, though she was only in a recurring role by the end. In 2022, she finally went out on tour, playing theaters even though she probably could've filled arenas. She didn't even have a full set of her own songs, so she covered songs like Veruca Salt's "Seether" and former Number Ones artist Avril Lavigne's "Complicated." Sometimes, '90s rocker types like Alanis Morissette or Natalie Imbruglia would pop up and make surprise appearances with her.

In the time since Sour, Rodrigo has not fully graduated to pantheon-level pop star status. She has not challenged Taylor Swift for the crown, and neither has anyone else. It could still happen. For now,. Rodrigo is merely very, very popular and successful. I'm sure it's painfully obvious by now, but I am all the way in the tank for Rodrigo. I think she's one of the best pop artists working right now, one of the best in a long time. She sometimes seems like she's pandering pretty specifically to me, or to people in my generation. I appreciate it, but I think she's really, really good for reasons that go beyond the pandering. Her new single? Fucking banger. It could debut at #1 when this week's Hot 100 comes out later today. I hope I get to write about that song in this space one day. Whatever happens with Rodrigo's current album rollout, she will definitely appear in this column again.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's Beavis and Butt-Head doing commentary on the "Good 4 U" video on a 2022 episode of their rebooted TV show:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's the Swedish star Tove Lo reimagining "Good 4 U" as a slinky-reverby synthpop track in a 2022 live session:

(Tove Lo's highest-charting single, 2014's "Habits (Stay High)," peaked at #3. It's an 8.)

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: "Good 4 U" is practically already a Me First And The Gimme Gimmes cover of itself, but that didn't stop the actual Me First And The Gimme Gimmes from giving a pop-punk makeover to a pop-punk song, doing a Buzzcocks riff on the intro and everything. Here's the cover that the Gimme Gimmes released in 2024:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: The aforementioned Ashlee Simpson is a previous generation's idea of how an emo-pop crossover star might sound. Just a few weeks ago, Simpson sang "Good 4 U" on The Masked Singer. Here she is, pre-unmasking, in her Galaxy Girl disguise:

(Ashlee Simpson's highest-charting single is 2004's "Pieces Of Me," which peaked at #5. It's an 8. Masked Singer judge Robin Thicke has already been in this column, and he's probably the main reason that pop stars have to keep ganking retroactive writing credits from one another.)

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I thought about how you might not already own a copy, and I lost my mind and spent the night cryin' on the floor of my bathroom. Don't be so unaffected. Buy it here.