My mates gave me a little bit of grief for the headline of considered one of my latest articles: “The ‘Espresso’ Idea of Gender Relations.” The title, admittedly, was a bit heady for a narrative a few catchy music filled with beverage-related puns. Was I overintellectualizing pop, which is meant to be the dumbest music of all?
Nah. Sabrina Carpenter, who sings the smash “Espresso”—and its follow-up hit, “Please Please Please”—deserves to be taken critically. She’s a part of a crop of girls who’ve made the previous 12 months or so one of many liveliest, and flat-out smartest, mainstream-music eras in latest reminiscence. Her new album, Brief n’ Candy, is a salvo in opposition to the lunkheaded stereotype that girls, blondes, and pop don’t have so much to say. And her lyrical themes seize so much about what’s occurring between guys and women on this nation proper now.
From a distance, Carpenter appears straightforward to put. She’s a golden-haired coquette wearing outfits that evoke Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, and Betty Boop. She’s a sex-positive radio conqueror with a spry, breathy voice, like Britney Spears and Madonna. She’s a former Disney Channel actor, succeeding a technology of onetime little one stars—Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez—who helped deliver therapy-speak to the charts. These are superficial comparisons, which isn’t to say they’re not vital. In pop, floor issues.
However Carpenter’s most vital affect is her pal Taylor Swift: Beneath a shiny facade lies a multidimensional, confident storyteller and wordsmith. Generally Carpenter is slapstick humorous, as when she breaks into faux Shakespearean verse on “Mattress Chem”: “The place artwork thou? Why not uponeth me?” Generally she’s punch-line intelligent, as when she tells a pseudo-enlightened dirtbag to “save all of your breath on your ground meditation.” What’s finest is that her music is hilarious in the way in which that solely music could be, arising from stunning clashes of sound and sentiment. Take into consideration “Espresso.” Earlier hot-and-heavy songs of summer season have had sappy, strident choruses, comparable to Katy Perry’s “You make me really feel like I’m dwelling a teenage dream.” Carpenter, nevertheless, has us all singing alongside to a sigh: “I assume so.”
That sigh expresses the core emotion of her songwriting: the exasperation of being younger, feminine, straight, and single in 2024. On “Slim Pickins,” Carpenter sings about setting her requirements low and nonetheless being disillusioned: “A boy who’s good, that breathes / I swear he’s nowhere to be seen.” When she does land a suitable mate, the competitors to maintain him is fierce—see the grotesque “Style” video, through which she and a rival chainsaw and flambé one another. “Coincidence” painstakingly captures the sinking feeling of dropping a man to a scorching lady on the web. “With out her even bein’ right here, she’s again in your life,” Carpenter sings, earlier than backing vocalists begin jeering “Nah nah nah.”
These tales actually do comprise a idea of gender relations. At a time when women and men aren’t hooking up as a lot as they as soon as did, are reaching diverging charges of tutorial success, and positively aren’t seeing eye to eye ideologically, how higher to sing about romance than with sarcasm and detachment? However Carpenter can also be aggravated about sexual tensions which are older than Gen Z. On “Dumb & Poetic,” she insults a pretentious ex who pleasures himself to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen. That music is the most recent instance of feminine singers getting fed up with condescending rockers: Chappell Roan raging on TikTok at “indie-pop boys,” Swift in 2012 negging an ex who’s into data which are “a lot cooler than mine,” Boygenius additionally mentioning Cohen’s title in considerably disrespectful trend on its album final 12 months.
Why all of the shade for the Godfather of Gloom? He’s a straw man for the post-Swift pop wave—which incorporates Carpenter, Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish—because it makes a forceful, witty reply to the music-snob custom of portraying male emotion as deep and feminine emotion as trifling. Within the course of, these ladies are making a new, hybrid subgenre with the assistance of “indie-pop boys” comparable to Dan Nigro (the emo guitarist who produces Roan and Rodrigo), Finneas (Eilish’s Radiohead-worshipping brother), and Jack Antonoff (Swift’s most important artistic associate, who labored on 4 Brief n’ Candy songs). The purpose is to specific feelings in a approach that’s extra direct, extra legible, than traditional Pitchfork fare—but additionally extra suave than the groaning male rockers who’ve thrived on the Scorching 100 of late.
The sound of Brief n’ Candy faucets into one other previous canon as nicely. The album’s producers and co-writers have assembled a soft-rocking collage of musical references to Dolly Parton, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Carly Simon, and Lana Del Rey—feminine songwriting greats who needed to combat to be revered. Carpenter even makes some extent to encode linguistic precision as female: In fastidiously constructed verses layered with double meanings, she teases bimbo bros who don’t “even know the distinction between ‘there,’ ‘their,’ and ‘they’re.’”
Now, Carpenter’s not close to the identical stage of brilliance as Mitchell or Parton—partially as a result of her music, like a number of music today, depends approach an excessive amount of on pastiche. Even so, Brief n’ Candy is way more advanced than the canned breeziness that “Espresso” marketed; take a look at the important thing change on “Please Please Please” and the interaction of Spanish guitar with hip-hop rhythms on “Good Graces.” Carpenter is at base a commercially savvy celeb, working with the file trade to present folks what they need proper now: intelligence hidden in silliness, and confidence that avoids drained empowerment clichés. On the standout ballad “Deceive Ladies,” she sings, “I’m silly / however I’m intelligent”—a couplet that neatly, and possibly knowingly, sums up the enchantment of the most effective pop music.