This might make some people super uncomfortable (just hear me out), but I genuinely feel like the negative reaction to Lacy has homophobic, biphobic, and lesbophobic undertones. Like, oh no, why did Olivia write this ✨confusing✨ song that is clearly not about a man?!
If it was made clear in the song that Lacy were a man, I think the backlash would have been cut in half at least.
But no, it’s clearly and boldly about a feminine entity. So, naturally, everyone is overanalyzing the lyrics.
Yes, it’s true that the lyrics are really fun and interesting, but she has lots of lyrically complex songs. There have been a staggering number of conversations about whether Lacy is about jealousy, or romantic feelings, fictional, biographical, about a specific person, about a collection of several people, about a concept, or just about drugs? Is the song too poetic, too soft, too well out of her comfort zone, boring, overproduced, underproduced? And wait, she said it was poem written for a class, that absolutely has to mean it’s fictional (because of course no one writes about their own life in English class ever), so we don’t even have to worry about the lyrics anymore, right? Right??
I’ve been a fan since Sour and I haven’t seen this community wondering back and forth that hard about any of her other songs (except maybe some instances arguing Vampire and The Grudge are about Taylor Swift). So, what does this song have that none of her other songs explicitly do? A feminine muse.
As a bi person, the song reads as obviously queer, regardless of whether it’s fictional or biographical on Olivia’s end. Queer women often mistake attraction for admiration and/or jealousy because of internalized misogyny. This may come as a shock to the straights amongst us, but we actually don’t know for sure that her songs about Bassett are about Bassett and her songs about Bia are about Bia either. Wild, right? And yet there’s no heated debates about those! Because they’re about men, and that’s normal, so people are busy simply enjoying the songs with all their complexity.
Somewhere, she and her team are looking at this mess and shaking their heads, fully unsurprised. I hope she’s not taking the backlash to heart, because it really is a beautiful song and as good as anything else she’s made. She’s even hinted at being queer on her socials, so it feels unfair that her fans (who are supposedly mostly young people) can’t just accept and enjoy the song for what it is. I never knew exactly how much I needed a homoerotic hate-ballad from Olivia Rodrigo, and honestly maybe we didn’t even deserve it.
