Six years ago, while still legally a child, Olivia Rodrigo left her career as a Disney Channel actress with the intent of becoming a pop star. This is a tale as old as time, or at least as venerable as Annette Funicello’s singing career, and the blueprint for success is well understood: sign with a first-rate production team, let them handle pretty much everything but the TikTok videos, while you tour and promote past the point of exhaustion. Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, and a half-dozen other actor-entertainers have followed this recipe with varying degrees of success, producing music that is listenable but not memorable, profitable but not persistent, seductive but not particularly authentic. Think early Monkees, but for today’s short-attention-span audience.If Carpenter, the former Disney star and current pop phenom, is the modern equivalent of Davy Jones, then perhaps we will have to reluctantly crown Rodrigo as her generation’s Bob Dylan. Since debuting with the surprise hit “Drivers License” in 2021, she has relentlessly curb-stomped every unwritten rule of the Disney pop star, from “don’t seriously discuss sex in your work” to “keep it light or else” to “avoid collaborations with older musicians.” For the past five years, she’s worked a reliable seam of teenage-confessional vocal-fry rap-pop that, like Dylan’s early catalog, taps into an angsty zeitgeist while carefully camouflaging a certain lack of vocal incandescence.In a business where people often pretend to be younger than they are, Rodrigo, now 23, has fearlessly and ambitiously engaged with adult themes, unsentimental perspectives, and enough foul-mouthed invective to make a young Liz Phair blush. This material has enabled her to break multiple records for streaming sales and chart position. It has also made her remarkably wealthy because Rodrigo, unlike many of her contemporaries, owns the master recordings of her work.