Can Disney Girls Curse in 2021?
Though 2020 will go down as one of the worst years in recent history, one glimmer of positivity appeared at its tail end: Aly & AJ - a pop duo that got their start on Disney Channel - finally released an official explicit version of their hit, "Potential Breakup Song".
Just a few weeks later, Olivia Rodrigo, a singer known for her role on the Disney+ series, "High School Musical: The Musical: The Series'', released "drivers license", another explicit track that has quickly broken all sorts of streaming records.
These songs have a lot in common: they’re both cuss-featuring songs by women of Disney fame that have gone viral on Tik Tok. They do, however, have one drastic difference: one of them took 13 years to make.
In 2007, Aly & AJ convinced preteens all over the country that they, too, had an emotionally abusive boyfriend to get mad at, all without having to drop any F-bombs. “Potential Breakup Song” is the perfect song to angrily shout in your bedroom. Its infinitely danceable beat provides a great backdrop to air out your grievances in a wholesome and productive way. Like Disney-sponsored moshing. Perhaps one of the reasons this song has found a second life over the past few months is because angrily shouting in bedrooms is all we’ve been doing as of late.
In retrospect, when Aly said “except for the fact it was my birthday, my stupid birthday”, it’s pretty obvious what word she was actually trying to say. In fact, many Aly & AJ fans have been singing the explicit version of this song ever since the original version first came out. So what stopped the song from becoming explicit in the first place?
The biggest reason was that the song was originally released on Hollywood Records, a label owned by Disney. Aly & AJ had been cultivating their brand on Disney Channel for years through shows like “Phil of the Future” and movies like “Cow Belles”. This brand didn’t really leave much room for saying things like “I want my shit back”.
While the curse-free nature of their music was almost certainly contractual, they also must have felt plenty of societal pressure to keep their music as clean as possible, mainly as a way to appease the parents of their fanbase. Society has been historically slow to accept the idea that the girls on Disney Channel might grow up to be women who want to curse, rebel, and have sex. That became clear when Miley Cyrus released Bangerz, her hedonistic take on hip-hop-inspired pop. It becomes clear almost every time Selena Gomez talks about sex. No matter the case, it seems to take years before we decide that a Disney star is allowed to experiment with adult themes and words, much longer than it takes for those themes and words to become a part of the artist’s actual life.
This leaves 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo as a singularity. “drivers license” is her first song devoid of any attachment to her Disney show, and rather than using her Disney fame as a way to make more kid-friendly pop, she instead launched her solo career with a visceral, melodramatic breakup ballad in which she loudly declares “I still fucking love you!” I’m imagining the backlash Vanessa (Anne) Hudgens would have received in 2006 if she had done anything remotely similar. We all remember Spring Breakers.
Why did Rodrigo get to be the exception? What insights can we gain from the fact that "Potential Breakup Song" and "drivers license" got to put the coveted "E" next to their track titles within weeks of each other, despite having been originally released over a decade apart?
To be clear, this is in no small part due to the fact that “drivers license” was released through Interscope and Geffen records, which have no ties or obligations to Disney. Another factor worth considering, though, is the difference between Rodrigo’s 2021 audience and Aly & AJ’s 2007 audience. On paper, they’re the same: emotionally vulnerable, Disney-watching preteens. However, in actuality, they’re worlds apart. Compared to millennials, the preteens of Generation Z have much more control over the music that gets fed to them. Social media, Tik Tok especially, has allowed them to curate their own musical experience, ordaining certain songs and trends as worthy of virality. Not only that, but they get to do this largely without their parents serving as gatekeepers, censoring what music their kids are exposed to. This means that they can pick the music that best reflects their reality, and the reality is: preteens curse. Their idols should be allowed to as well.
So perhaps 2021 is the year we finally let young women swear. After all, Taylor Swift, an artist that Rodrigo claims as a huge influence, has finally started making explicit music; Miley Cyrus has recently released one of her most critically-acclaimed albums of her career, an album whose opening track is “WTF do I know”; Selena Gomez is gearing up to release her follow up to Rare, her first album to feature explicit language, albeit only on one song. Perhaps the music of Aly & AJ and Olivia Rodrigo is a bellwether of what’s to come.
Listening to the explicit version of “Potential Breakup Song”, it feels like Aly & AJ have been saying “fffffffff-” for 13 years, and are now finally able to say “-ucking!” Never before has cursing felt more cathartic. But the truth is, they could have done this a while ago. After all, the duo left Hollywood Records in 2010 and have been independent ever since. Perhaps the reason songs like the explicit version of “Potential Breakup Song” and “drivers license” have found their audience at this particular time is because, at an age where the world is normally at their fingertips, members of the younger generation are stuck in quarantine. They feel robbed of the youth they would have otherwise had, and are in desperate need of an outlet. Music and social media offer them a way to express who they are, what they can do, and what they really want:
They’re young, they’re in control, and they don’t want their “stuff” back… they want their “shit“ back.
