NO. 7 (ON VILLAINY)
2021 may have begun with Olivia Rodrigo controlling the narrative, but it may very well end with Joshua Bassett at the wheel.
I’ll put the usual disclaimers--I don’t know any of these children personally, and I don’t know what actually went down behind the scenes at the turn of the last decade when a supposed love triangle supposedly fractured the hearts and egos of all involved and led to some midlevel Internet drama which ultimately took a backseat to the genuine article--Sour, the 18-year-old Rodrigo’s record-shattering debut LP. In case you missed it: Rodrigo and Bassett started dating in secret while playing an onscreen couple in a Disney+ High School Musical spinoff, Bassett broke up with Rodrigo because of their age difference - he’s almost 21 - and in a suspiciously short amount of time began dating and cutely posting with 22-year-old Sabrina Carpenter, another artist and Disney alum. Teenage digital sleuths searched for Easter eggs in the style of Rodrigo’s biggest influence, Taylor Swift, while I became consumed with the parallel’s between Rodrigo’s experience and my own--feeling disproportionately large affection for men who can never reciprocate, drowning in insecurity over the Eurocentric beauty standard that makes being cast aside in favor of a fair-skinned blonde take on an extra sharp edge, splashing the thinly veiled narrative of my heartbreak across the web. That, instead of the logistics and timeline of the real people involved, was my Met Gala.
The culture-defining “drivers license” was Sour’s lead single, and its chokehold on the popular imagination has persisted even though it dropped way back in January. Perhaps the only narrative powerful enough to displace was the tale at the center of Taylor Swift’s Red rerelease, the storied ten-minute (and explicit!) version of “All Too Well” that did its own record-breaking and spawned an endless scroll of TikTok speculation about what the scarf really means and what Jake Gyllenhaal’s publicist must be doing right now. Again, I’m less concerned with what actually happened--it’s none of my business anyway--and more with what it means for every young woman who’s ever fallen for a withholding, condescending older guy. (Admittedly though I’m concerned with the scarf. I totally thought the scarf was a metaphor. Apparently it’s a real scarf and he actually stole it AND THEN WORE IT? AND WAS PHOTOGRAPHED IN IT? Dude. Major party foul.)
It’s worth noting that Taylor Swift, like many songwriters of her ilk of all genders, has dated fewer songwriters than non-songwriters. Even though John Mayer famously used “Paper Doll” as a late retort to “Dear John,” there are few examples of musical rebuttal to the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe. Frankly, I don’t have strong feelings about that either way. While I’m ravenous for “Style (Taylor’s Version) (feat. Harry Styles),” I will be able to go on living if it doesn’t happen. I’ve come to expect that musical explorations of relationships will flatten and distort the facts; I accept them as autofiction rather than pure autobiography; I listen knowing I will never understand the story that inspired it completely.
Enter Joshua Bassett, on the precipice of dropping a three-song EP that seems to be the auditory equivalent of a “reply all.”
Bassett has been teasing each of the three tracks on TikTok; the first one I saw opened with the line “my label said to never waste a crisis.” Clearly he’s going for directness. The songs seem to tackle hate, regret, defiance, fear--it’s a sort of anti-apoplexy, choosing to write instead of fight or fly. It’s apparent that he wants to have this conversation on his own terms. When Saturday Night Live spoofed “drivers license,” Bassett took the sharpest line at his own expense and turned it into merch (if you look up “my bitch ex Gina is Joshua Bassett,” a link to a long-sleeve bearing the slogan on his website appears). But aside from that admittedly hilarious marketing move, and posting vague messages of support about Rodrigo’s success, he’s remained quiet. His own release earlier this year didn’t seem related to Rodrigo’s aside from timing, and his public persona has been more about Harry Styles than his relationship status. Sabrina Carpenter, the “blonde girl,” released her own confusing addition to the chaos with “Skin,” which, in addition to being bizarrely braggadocious, lacked the precision and pathos of Rodrigo’s work. But now, Joshua Bassett has decided it’s his time to speak.
Bassett is much harder to paint as a villain than Gyllenhaal. The main reason is that the couple split apart on Rodrigo’s Sour is comprised of two young people, whereas the narrative on Red is about an older man who should have known better than to get involved with a girl who was newly 21. Additionally, Sour seems to traffic in gray areas--“you didn’t cheat, but you’re still a traitor,” “and I just can’t imagine how you could be so okay now that I’m gone,” “I guess the therapist I found for you, she really helped.” Compare that, then, with the details unraveled by the ten-minute version of “All Too Well” - “I’ll get older but your lovers stay my age,” “you call me up again just to break me like a promise,” “any time now, he’s gonna say it’s love, you never called it what it was.” In my view, part of the enjoyment of Sour was how much pain you can feel even if the other person isn’t an outright villain. It’s about how there is no way good or fair way to break someone’s heart, how seeing your ex with someone new can sting no matter how much time passes. What’s compelling, then, is Bassett writing his half of the story, grappling with the guilt of breaking the heart of someone he genuinely cared for, the limits of grace when you, too, are a child trying to love and be loved, and the world is hell-bent on calling you the problem. Admittedly, I thought back to a failed almost-relationship of my own, when my subtweets about the grief wounded the person who left me. Time has passed and we are friends and we both finally see each other for who we are--not egomaniacs, not dreams or ideals, but people.
I don’t know what I’ll ultimately think of the new Joshua Bassett project. But I think its entry into the cultural zeitgeist will force a conversation about relationships that we’ve been unable to have. For so long, people--largely women--were manipulated, abused, and broken by traumatic relationships, and the people carrying out that abuse were left unchecked. With the #MeToo movement, it has become a lot harder to dispute the pain caused by those kinds of relationships. But now the collective consciousness is failing to imagine anything beyond the binary of abuse vs. not abuse, criminal vs. legal. There is pain outside of trauma; there is trauma at scale; there is regret and there is harm and there is heartbreak. Maybe, just maybe, one day we will have room in our hearts and our culture for people to fall and to fail and then, eventually, to try again.