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The “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” singer is honest at every turn with the smart, witty character she’s created.
Rolling out a pop is tough to nail. And few, lately, have done it better than Sabrina Carpenter.
The 25-year-old is gearing up to release her sixth album, “Short n’ Sweet,” next month, but it’s already an accomplishment — this week, she had her first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, “Please Please Please.” Some of the song’s success may be credited to its video, which stars Carpenter and her rumored real-life boyfriend, acclaimed Irish actor Barry Keoghan, as a mismatched husband, a ne’er-do-well and a remorseful partner: He robs banks, and she looks on sadly as she realizes she’s in love with a criminal . This follows the notable success of “Espresso”, which – although it didn’t quite top the charts, peaked at No. 3 – managed to carve a phrase into the zeitgeist in a way reminiscent of “Hollaback Girl” or “Wrecking Ball”. If you’ve got the song stuck in your head at some point this summer — well, that’s Sabrina’s Coffee.
The songs are powerful. But songcraft alone isn’t enough in the age of the virus, and few have recently proven themselves as adept at surfing the waves of public attention as Carpenter. Perhaps an early sign is her booking for late 2023/early 2024 as the opening act for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Latin America, Australia and Asia. The reality of the party was one thing, but Carpenter cleverly turned every night into an event. Her single “Nonsense” ends with a slightly bluesy three-line joke, and each night of the tour, she came up with a new joke, referencing the language and culture of the place she was visiting. (For example, in Buenos Aires: “When I’m in the bedroom I get all hot / He’s got a ball, he calls me Messi / Argentina, will you be my best friend?”) This was showmanship designed less for the stadium crowd than for PopCrave. It worked, and she continued until her performance on “Saturday Night Live,” where she joked about a “30 Rock hard” man.
There’s something here that’s reminiscent of what Katy Perry once referred to as her “soft sex appeal”: it’s delightfully innocent sauciness, delivered with a wink that draws everyone, including Carpenter, in on the joke. (The “bullshit” epilogues are either stupidly clever or brilliantly stupid, and always delivered with cunning and control.) But the main difference with Perry is the overall sense of strategy and coherence. Perry, at an album launch – as she is currently doing – appears in Paris in a dress with… 100 yard train Emblazoned with a lyric sheet for her next single – She’ll Try Almost Anything. (Perhaps most notable was her 96-hour “Big Brother”-style live broadcast to promote her 2017 album “Witness”: it was a spectacle that couldn’t be ignored, and ultimately seemed to do little for the music.)
And it’s hard to blame her: For those with profiles lower than Taylor Swift’s — which is to say, for every other working musician — figuring out the right angle to approach when rolling out an album is difficult. In recent months, Dua Lipa has released content, live performances and several singles ahead of the release of her new album “Radical Optimism”; By contrast, Billie Eilish withholds any singles before “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”
For Carpenter, the music has been connected so far, but the main work she has done is establishing the character and not deviating from it. Her tweet celebrates “Please Please Please” hitting No. 1 Poked at a music lover Who said she “fumbled on a second song.” While there is a power dynamic when an artist complains about their critics by name (and when their fans rally as a result), her sense of vindication is understandable, as in a world where people talk increasingly freely about celebrities, those same celebrities can and will speak back. On a lighter note, Carpenter’s team created billboards in Times Square featuring social media jokes about the singer’s (miniscule) height — this seemed more like an applause than an acknowledgment that she was aware of the joke and was working on it. Just like the album title says, it’s short and sweet.
The past twelve months or so have seen the emergence of a number of emerging stars, many of whom follow a similar playbook. In music — as mentioned in several articles already — Carpenter was joined this summer by Chappelle Rowan, whose compelling live performances and grasp of both songwriting and ornate aesthetics have made her a thriving celebrity. And in the film, the new stars, including Glen Powell, Sidney Sweeney, Ayo Edebiri, and (especially) Keogan himself seem hyper-conscious and frivolous, constantly aware of how they are perceived in order to undermine it. Picture, I remind you, it’s not that serious. This seems to be the prevailing style of the culture at the moment, and it is an attractive style — one that Carpenter, who is on track for a major career, finds intuitive. She takes writing and performance seriously: the outro, for example, always rhymes, always tracks. But she never lets it become unfun. It’s a subtraction process, all right. But it doesn’t feel like a campaign.
