Recently, my service as a faculty member took me on the road with the TCU Speech & Debate team. During the long drive, we listened to this album. I was grateful that the student copilot (who has excellent music taste) in the seat next to me knew to crank the volume when Olivia belts, “BONE-DRY, BITTER AND HOLLOW…” in the “cigarette smoke” bridge. The whole album builds to the pain of that moment of acknowledgement and reflection. Most times when I listen to this song, tears come to my eyes.
But we’ll turn back to that bridge in a moment. In some sense, “cigarette smoke” looks back on the whole album (such as name-checking “honeybee”). Here, I will focus only on the tie between “drop dead” and “cigarette smoke.” Three tensions animate the connection between the songs.
First, the songs are introspective, largely addressing what is happening in Olivia’s head. In “drop dead,” that mental activity is oriented toward the future. She “always had a vision of us standing like this”; drawing on her “feminine intuition,” she imagines their relationship coming to life.
But by the time we reach “cigarette smoke,” we know that feminine intuition failed, even to the point that she sings, “I regret you.” The closing song emphasizes Olivia’s wish that “the memories go dark,” and indeed, those are the final words of the song, with “go dark” repeated six times in the song’s outro. The two songs both consider Olivia’s internal sensemaking of the relationship. “Drop dead” looks to the future and an exciting vision of what could be, even invoking the grandeur of Versailles. “Cigarette smoke” looks to the past, seeing the relationship and its destruction, as Olivia crawls through painful fragments of memory.
One of the most popular interpersonal communication theories brings the second tension into focus, and that is the tension between shallow and deep self-disclosure. Social penetration theory imagines human personality as if it were an onion. Why? Because onions have layers, and self-disclosure is like cutting into those layers. The top layers of our personality ‘onion’ represent those things we disclose easily and quickly. They tend to be lighter and informational, such as your hometown, your job, what movies you like, and whether you’ve “ever been to Japan? Or taken that Eurostar to France?”
As a relationship progresses, we peel back the layers of the onion and reveal those things deeper down, things that might be painful, difficult, or embarrassing. We might speak about our deepest dreams, our biggest fears, or most agonizing experiences. In “cigarette smoke,” Olivia isn’t asking about the kinds of surface-level details she wanted to know in “drop dead.” Instead, she only wants one piece of self-disclosure from him: “Tell me something honest so the memories turn dark.” The listener isn’t told what that “something honest” is; maybe it’s “I never loved you,” or “I cheated on you,” or “I never want to see you again.” Whatever it is, surely it is something at the core of his personality onion.
The third tension brings us back to that devastating bridge: “bone dry, bitter, and hollow.” This is language about death. Whether intended by Olivia Rodrigo or Dan Nigro, it is imagery that resonates with a famous Bible passage, as the prophet Ezekiel experiences a vivid vision of a valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37). But unlike that passage’s description of those bones coming back to life, in “cigarette smoke” there is no hint of resurrection. We are a long ways from the opening track, where Olivia was “the most alive I’ve ever been.” Yet the prophecy of that song has come to pass: “Kiss me and I might drop dead.” Kiss her he did, and emotionally, now she feels dead.
The connection between the first and final tracks runs deeper than a common mention of beer and bathrooms (though those are both significant details). After what feels like a long journey through the 11 intervening tracks, Olivia and the listener have returned to where we started, with Olivia alone at night, lost in thought about her relationship. The optimism of “drop dead” seems naive now, and “expectations” told us, in upbeat synth, about the lessons learned in the journey. In complement and contrast, both the lyrics and the labored guitar of “cigarette smoke” tell us those lessons were learned at great cost.
I might include one more post about the network structure of the songs on the album, akin to what I published regarding the Taylor Swift discography. We’ll see…
Other posts:
7 thoughts on ““drop dead” (track 1) & “cigarette smoke” (track 13): what are my thoughts about this relationship? (Olivia Rodrigo’s YSPSFAGSIL, analyzed)”