Days after earning six Grammy nominations, Olivia Rodrigo has earned another accolade. This morning, TIME announced that they had chosen the pop star as their 2021 entertainer of the year. As explained by TIME, Rodrigo’s “uninhibited, confessional album captured the tone of a turbulent Year.”
“Rodrigo has a gift for picking the best of the past—whether a well-worn shirt, the faded feedback of a guitar or the intensity of first love—and finding just the right way to situate it in the present. Her songs have hit with audiences of all ages, in large part because she renders adolescence so viscerally: she’s resentful, seething, crushed, itching to just grow up already,” TIME’s Lucy Feldman writes.
“Her rise to pop stardom was swift and definitive:it started on Jan. 8, when Rodrigo, already a Disney actor with an audience, released her first single, ‘Drivers License,’ a torch song that took off on TikTok and stirred up theories about who inspired it. By Jan. 23, she became the youngest solo artist ever to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where her song stayed for eight weeks….Halsey sent Rodrigo a cake, Cardi B shouted her out on Twitter, and Taylor Swift offered her props on Instagram.”
Rodrigo’s latest magazine cover preps her for the new year which will include an appearance at the 64th Grammy Awards and a tour. At 18 years old, Rodrigo is seemingly poised to control the world of pop for a decade or more.
