Olivia Rodrigo / official video
The clip opens the way a thousand ordinary mornings on the Upper West Side begin: a young woman steps out of a building on a leafy side street, the limestone and the London planes doing their familiar thing. Then the camera drops to about ankle height, the frame goes wobbly and warm, and you realize you’re not watching through her eyes at all — you’re watching through the eyes of a cat.
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That cat is Oliver, the resident feline of Zingone Brothers, the century-old family grocer at 471 Columbus Avenue. And the woman is Olivia Rodrigo, who picked the neighborhood as the backdrop for “Stupid Song,” the new single and music video she released Friday.The video, which Rodrigo rolled out the same week she performed the track on late night, is essentially a love letter to a few very specific blocks. It begins on West 75th Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West before moving to Central Park West in the shadow of the San Remo, the twin-towered co-op that sits between West 74th and 75th Streets.
From there it ducks inside Zingone Brothers, where the blue-and-white tiled floor and the cluttered, lived-in shelves of an old-school Upper West Side grocer become a stage. Rodrigo plays piano in the middle of the store while a drummer keeps time behind her, and Oliver — fitted at one point with a tiny camera — pads through the aisles as an unlikely co-star.
Olivia Rodrigo / official video
Rolling Stone described the video as splitting its time between Central Park and the corner store, leaning into the scruffy, romantic version of New York that the neighborhood does better than almost anywhere else. The park scenes feature ballet dancers, adding a bit of Lincoln Center polish to the otherwise deli-counter charm.
Olivia Rodrigo / official video
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The single arrives ahead of a new Rodrigo album, and the video doubles as a kind of citywide scavenger hunt for fans — except that, unusually, most of the landmarks are clustered within a short walk of one another on the Upper West Side rather than scattered across all five boroughs. Consequence noted the rollout came paired with a late-night television performance, giving the song a national spotlight in the same stretch of days.For the neighborhood, the appeal is less about the chart math and more about seeing the ordinary made famous: a side street, a stretch of Central Park West, and a grocery store that has been ringing up customers for generations, all suddenly starring in a video that has been watched millions of times. Zingone Brothers, for its part, gets the kind of cameo no marketing budget can buy — and Oliver, the cat with the camera, may be the breakout star of the whole thing.
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