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\n Man\u2019s Best Friend is one of the breeziest, silliest, and rudest event-pop albums of the year.
\n Photo: Sabrina Carpenter via YouTube\n <\/p>\n
Sabrina Carpenter<\/a> is, sometimes accidentally but more often on purpose, a lightning rod, the kind of pop star whose art and humor consistently get hoovered up into the overarching fights over women\u2019s promiscuity and desirability. She has long been a familiar face, a 26-year-old industry vet with credits everywhere from the Disney Channel\u2019s Phineas and Ferb to Netflix\u2019s Tall Girl, and a singer-songwriter who has journeyed through genteel folk- and dance-pop. It took her five albums to land on a sound that made her music career feel like the main focus. Connecting to the masses was as much a succession of colorful controversies and nontroversies as it was a timely marriage of folksy Americana\u2019s peanut butter and randy pop music\u2019s jelly. It is widely assumed that Carpenter is \u201cthat blonde girl\u201d who stole Joshua Bassett from Olivia Rodrigo in 2021\u2019s \u201cdrivers license,\u201d and in 2023, a Brooklyn Catholic bishop was relieved of his duties for letting Carpenter film a tantalizing dance routine for her \u201cFeather\u201d video<\/a> in a real church. She continues to catch flak for touring last year\u2019s successful Short n\u2019 Sweet in a blue teddy and regaling audiences with sexually suggestive but often unserious lyrics and dances.<\/p>\n A troll simply riffing<\/a> on that heat \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m 17 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter when she\u2019s performing\u201d \u2014 can get blasted across the internet, instantly minted as comical copy pasta for pop fans. Her history, our ballooning interest in her more overtly sensual work, and the very contours of her face<\/a> have all been fodder for intensifying debate. Many who\u2019ve observed Carpenter\u2019s trip from 2016\u2019s Adventures in Babysitting remake to songs like 2024\u2019s sweetly villainous \u201cTaste\u201d \u2014 \u201cYou\u2019ll just have to taste me when he\u2019s kissing you\u201d \u2014 hold her new persona up as proof that sex sells. Behold the wholesome, impressionable child star from Pennsylvania who went from placing third in The Next Miley Cyrus Project in 2008 to molding art and body to meet an oversexed societal mandate.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m 17 and AFRAID\u201d had legs because millennials feel zoomers are laughably sex-negative. Ideological skirmishes over the motives and obligations of Carpenter\u2019s music include both sincere interrogation<\/a> of its feminism and smirking counteractive reprisals<\/a> to that scrutiny. It\u2019s easy to ignite a smoldering batch of think pieces and podcast rebukes in the year of conservatives making Sydney Sweeney an emblem of imagined liberal outrage. Trained to look for darker, deeper meanings in media in a dizzying authoritarian rush that sees sway over entertainment as a trophy, we are uniquely susceptible to the wiles of any trickster pushing buttons toward a larger theatrical takeaway. This is Sabrina Carpenter\u2019s wheelhouse. In June, she released the artwork for her seventh album, Man\u2019s Best Friend: a grainy still that shows the star crouched like a cat staring blankly before the silhouette of a man grabbing her hair. The photo attracted an angry response that the album\u2019s lyrics suggest is misguided. Really, the album is about tiring of mothering men who are great in bed but lack crucial social skills. The posturing in it is more dom than sub. It is one of the breeziest, silliest, and rudest event-pop albums of the year.<\/p>\n You can barely make it to the end of one of the new\u00a0 songs without getting the feeling that Carpenter considers love interests a bit of a nuisance. The pillow talk on Man\u2019s Best Friend often takes the curt, assertive tone of a person reproaching a precocious pet. \u201cWhy so sexy if so dumb?,\u201d lead single and album opener \u201cManchild\u201d quips. Where you think you\u2019re getting typical pop-star-yearns-for-affection fare, she introduces a nagging wrinkle. \u201cMy Man on Willpower\u201d reveals its classical industrious male to be a bore: \u201cHe\u2019s busy, he\u2019s working, he doesn\u2019t have time for me \/ My slutty pajamas not tempting him in the least.\u201d \u201cTears,\u201d a frothing disco track, hooks with a shock-value opening line \u2014 \u201cI get wet at the thought of you\u201d \u2014 before ticking off an increasingly pithy list of qualities that get her going: \u201cRemembering how to use your phone gets me oh so, oh so, oh so hot.\u201d It\u2019s all a raunchy inversion of the sexual politics her critics, which now include right-wing media personalities<\/a>, presumed she supported after a glimpse at the cover. Her albums and photos seem to toy specifically with the reading that she\u2019s in thrall to someone else<\/a>.<\/p>\n Carpenter\u2019s pivot from moonlighting in wan folk-pop and trop-house bops to topping international charts is due in part to a steamier approach conveniently timed to her signing to Island Records in 2021. She dips assertively into the 2020s nostalgia pop wave responsible for Dua Lipa, Miley Cyrus, and Benson Boone singles that nip at the heels of Olivia Newton-John\u2019s \u201cPhysical.\u201d But she\u2019s not living in the \u201980s of sparkly New Wave, like big hits from Harry Styles and the Weeknd, or synth-y Springsteen, like Swift\u2019s The Tortured Poets Department and Selena Gomez\u2019s \u201cSunset Blvd.\u201d It\u2019s the \u201980s of gossamer Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duets, of prerequisite toplessness in coming-of-age comedies like Porky\u2019s, of news reports<\/a> about broken-windows policing and the cat-and-mouse game between city vice squads and sex workers. The GIF set gracing Man\u2019s Best Friend\u2019s official lyric videos shows additional scenes from the cover art that, like Sweeney\u2019s jeans-gate, bear some resemblance to the 1980 Calvin Klein campaign<\/a> that drew ire for 15-year-old Brooke Shields reading a \u201ccome\u201d pun. Carpenter seems to be inviting a similar reaction: Look what you made Maya Hart<\/a> from Girl Meets World do. <\/p>\n Man\u2019s Best Friend\u2019s dewy charm\/smarm offensive also seems purposely set to so much country music, a field shaped by its key artists\u2019 and core audience\u2019s Christian family values. The album only passingly cares about the signature dance-pop gunk of its 2010s and \u201920s peers and forebears and doesn\u2019t (like songs by Gomez, Addison Rae, and others) spend much time exploring Lana Del Rey as a subgenre. Subverting traditional values and joining points of reference that bristle against each other is of far greater interest. The soaring \u201cFuck my life\u201d in the chorus of \u201cManchild\u201d wants what brassy country shout-alongs of the past like Loretta Lynn\u2019s \u201cThe Pill\u201d or Gretchen Wilson\u2019s \u201cRedneck Woman\u201d had.<\/p>\n