Olivia Rodrigo, the pop star who rose to fame with “Drivers License” before releasing the chart-topping albums SOUR and GUTS, is already in full-promo mode for her upcoming album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. Though we’ll have to wait until June 12th for the LP, Rodrigo has already given us not one, not two, but three music videos for the album’s first single, “drop dead.”
The official music video, available to watch on YouTube, was filmed in the Château de Versailles itself, with several visual nods to Sofia Coppola’s iconic 2006 film Marie Antoinette. Directed by Petra Collins, who previously worked with Rodrigo on “good 4 u” and “brutal,” the music video opens with the singer in a nightclub, wearing a minidress inspired by Jane Birkin in the 1975 movie Catherine et Cie. It then cuts to Rodrigo (dressed in bloomers, knee socks, and a romantic ruffled Chloé top) dancing through the halls of the Versailles with pink headphones on, ecstatic over a new crush. The choice of venue is quite on the nose—part of the chorus goes, “’Cause I always had a vision of us standing like this/All pressed up in the bathroom line/You’re lookin’ like an angel on the walls of Versailles.”
In a nod to one of the other lyrics in the song (“Have you ever been to Japan/Or taken that Eurostar to France?”), Rodrigo released a secondary music video that can only be watched on Spotify, titled “drop dead – taken that eurostar to france.” The lofi video starts in a London pub, before following Rodrigo as she takes the train to Paris, singing in front of the Eiffel Tower, leaning out a car window driving by the Arc de Triomphe, and popping up in various other destinations within the City of Light.
There’s even a third music video, titled “drop dead (stalked you on the internet),” available to watch on Apple Music. This version was also shot in Versailles, but uses a webcam-inspired framing device to create the anachronistic aesthetic that appears to be the visual language for Rodrigo’s forthcoming album.
Considering how hard of a location Versailles must have been to book (and the fact that Rodrigo’s film crew only had nine hours in which to film), it’s not surprising that they wanted to use as much of the footage as possible. After all, if you’re going to play queen for a day, you might as well go all the way.
Catherine Rickman is a writer, professional Francophile, and host of the Expat Horror Stories podcast. She is currently somewhere in Brooklyn with a fork in one hand and a pen in the other, and you can follow her adventures on Instagram @catrickman.
