Olivia Rodrigo's riot pop releases righteous rage as Guts tour hits Austin's Moody Center

Olivia Rodrigo makes riot pop for the post "me too" generation. She writes music that is beautiful, vulnerable, hooky and often very, very angry. Her songs contain the rage of a generation raised under a relentless gaze. They crack open the malaise of young women caught in a “brutal” social media machine, with its dopamine-chasing demand for perfection. She flips the shame of being hoodwinked by that skeezy but suave older dude your friends warned you about into raw guitar fury. She builds bedroom confessionals into primal screamers.

On Wednesday, at Austin’s Moody Center, she led a packed crowd that skewed female and very young on an emotional journey. Backed by a six-piece female rock powerhouse, she hosted a raucous hit parade. She serenaded us at the piano, vibed warmly with her fans and floated through the arena on a glowing crescent moon.

It was triumphant, giddy and fun. It was also a collective exorcism of hurt, insecurity and the aforementioned creeper (creepers?) who did a girl wrong.

Here are a few things that happened at the show.

It was a first concert experience for many young fans

If the crowd felt somewhat light for opener Chappell Roan’s excellent set, it was because half the audience was in the merch line. By 7 p.m., the lines of fans waiting to snag Olivia Rodrigo tees, purple butterfly bags and sweatshirts near the venue’s east entrance snaked halfway around the arena. On the lower floor, there was a slightly shorter, but still very formidable crowd waiting for gear.

“Do you want to go up front and take a picture, because that’s what you do at concerts,” the mom behind me told her young daughter, who was probably around eight or nine. The child, decked in purple and sparkling like much of the crowd, obliged, scrambling down the steps with her mom to take a shot with the empty set.

Rodrigo’s youngest fans and their moms made up a good portion of the crowd, a point she acknowledged halfway through the set.

“Who came here with their mom,” she asked after an emotional rendition of the jealous hand-wringer “Lacy”? “I love going to concerts with my mom,” she said.

Was this a pander to the harried mom lobby? Probably. Did the moms scream their appreciation? Yes.

Olivia Rodrigo is a brilliant songwriter and a bonafide rock star

“Feels like my skin doesn't fit right over my bones,” is a very concise encapsulation of the awkwardness of adolescence and when she spat it out on “ballad of a homeschooled girl” two songs in, it was a solid play to the misfit in all of us. Who can’t appreciate a beautiful young woman who sits with her inner dork? In our perfection-obsessed world, how powerful is it to rock along to a song about owning your insecurities?

A grand piano rose through the floor for part of the set. As she unwound “drivers license,” a gorgeous tale of first love lost, her fingers flew across the keys. Plumes of purple smoke billowed around her, spilling from the stage like a churning sea. The audience sang every word confirming that the thousands have taken this woman’s pain and made it their own. She dropped out and let the audience sing the final chorus, while she accompanied on piano.

She segued into “teenage dream,” explaining that she wrote the song a few days before she turned 19 (she turned 21 a week before the show, she said).

At that point in her life “growing up was the scariest (expletive)” she said. She has learned, she conceded, that “life just gets better with every passing year.”

“So cheers to that,” she said, before tugging on our hearts once more as she teased the pathos out of a universal dread of losing yourself to the years while a montage of photos from her youth played across the big screen behind her.

The former TV star has an innate understanding of spectacle

Olivia Rodrigo gives good face. She understands how to play to the camera, how to create intimacy in a massive crowd. She also thinks about big stage pictures.

She sang “Vampire” alone center stage, her shadow on a moon projected on the screen behind her. The whole crowd sang along in one of many of the night’s moments of rock 'n roll catharsis. Images of women running, arms outstretched, battling waves of emotion played on the screen behind her.

She began “pretty isn’t pretty” lying on her back on a round platform, a corps of female dancers with mirrors in hands surrounding her, their bodies flaying out from the center, forming petals of a flower. With their bodies, they beautifully interpreted the immense and spirit-breaking pressure young women feel to conform to ridiculous beauty standards. Side note: “I started to skip lunch, stopped eatin' cake on birthdays” is one of the top ten Olivia Rodrigo lines that just gut me.

Purple light, ethereal vocals and lonely strains of organ ushered in “making the bed” a song about taking stock of your foibles and finding the strength to move forward.  On her back on a rising platform she sang, “I got the things I wanted, it's just not what I imagined” (another top ten Olivia Rodrigo line for me).

As the song built a starry sky appeared behind her and a galaxy of suspended stars descended from the ceiling along with a crescent moon that drifted to the stage. Rodrigo climbed into the moon. She performed “logical” and “enough for you” as it floated around the arena, spreading love to the upper decks from her elevated position.

Revenge is best served with a chorus of screaming girls

“Olivia Rodrigo and I write the best revenge songs,” Chappell Roan said before segueing into her own bruiser “My Kink is Karma” near the end of her opening set.

She is not wrong. Carrying the hurt of 15,000 people seems like a heavy weight for one woman, but Rodrigo weathered the storm with power and poise.  She spun around the stage arms out while her dancers stumble-stepped and contorted bodies on the perfect betrayal kiss off “traitor.” When a crowd of thousands screams “you’re still a traitor” every night, it must feel like the ultimate vindication.

“deja vu” and “the grudge” were both quiet songs that built to explosive climaxes. Hell hath no fury like a wounded pop star. At the end of the former song, she invited the audience to scream out their pain and a primal roar shook the arena.

With an intro of muscular guitar and flames on the back screen, “brutal,” one of the best indictments of social media ever written, was pure metal. Set closer “all american bitch,” with it’s wallop of rage and wall of sound, was so punk rock I wrote, “What if someone told Sid Vicious to smile more?” in my notes.

She closed the night with an encore of “good 4 u” and “get him back,” the latter performed with a pink megaphone and demented cheerleader verve.

The audience went wild as cannons shot confetti into the sky and young fans reached into the air to catch the paper stars that floated through the venue, souvenirs of an emotional stompdown they’ll likely never forget

As my own teen and I walked back to the parking lot where a row of dads waited in a pick up line, I thought about pressures young people face today. The constant push to be performative. With vulnerability and incisive lyricism, Olivia Rodrigo invites these kids to find their own struggles mirrored in her own. And she rallies their strength to fight back.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Olivia Rodrigo proves she's a bonafide rock star at the Moody Center