Photo Credit: Apple Music
“Sabrina loves to be on top!” read the fake newspapers made for pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s Saturday Night Live performance in May. The mock headline perfectly sums up a large part of Carpenter’s repertoire—a celebration of women’s sexuality.
Carpenter first rose to fame in a major role on Disney’s Girl Meets World in 2014, a sequel series to the 1990s hit show Boy Meets World. She released her debut single in 2014 and first started to break out as a singer in 2021 with a little help from a rumored love triangle with fellow Disney stars-turned-singers Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett. After a stint opening for Taylor Swift on her juggernaut Eras Tour, Carpenter reached the stratosphere this spring after releasing pop earworm “Espresso” in anticipation of her Coachella set. Her highly-anticipated sixth album Short n’ Sweet, released on Aug. 23, lives up to its name with a runtime of just over 36 minutes. Despite being shorter than a typical episode of television, Carpenter packs in everything from heartbroken ballads about a no-good ex to upbeat anthems about wanting her current flame to impregnate her (yes, really.)
A standout feature of Carpenter’s lyrics is wit. Opening track “Taste,” a backhanded ode to her ex’s new paramour, starts with the lyric, “Oh, I leave quite an impression/Five feet to be exact,” a quip about her short stature (5’ 0”). The bridge ends with “Yeah, I’ve been known to share,” speculated to be a reference to the aforementioned Bassett-Rodrigo-Carpenter love triangle. Carpenter’s strongest—and funniest—lyrics are her clever double-entendres and unabashed sexual jests. Her talent for innuendo (with varying degrees of explicitness) is most apparent on album highlights “Bed Chem” and “Juno.” “Bed Chem,” where Carpenter propositions a new flame with whom she speculates she would have “really good bed chem.” The track features lyrics like, “Come right on me, I mean camaraderie” and “Where are thou? Why not uponeth me?” both of which went viral for their frank and hilarious approach to women’s sexual desire. Sneaky wordplay is the crux of album highlight “Juno,” in which Carpenter coyly croons about feeling so in love with her beau that she wants him to get her pregnant. “If you love me right, then who knows?/I might let you make me Juno,” she sings on the chorus, widely understood to be referencing the 2007 teen pregnancy movie Juno. The sexual references range from implicit (“Give me more than just some butterflies”) to in-your-face (“Wanna try out my fuzzy pink handcuffs?”). The album loses a little steam when Carpenter plays it straight—“Sharpest Tool” and “Lie to Girls” are perfectly fine and serviceable catchy digs at a philandering ex-boyfriend but not nearly as memorable as the aforementioned songs.
Over 25 years since HBO’s landmark series Sex and the City and four years since rappers Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion scandalized the quarantined world with “WAP,” there is still something that feels radical about a woman sweetly singing, “I’m so f***** horny.” Even as #BookTok is crawling with women asking for “spicy” romance novel recommendations, there is still something that feels taboo about listening to a song where a woman unashamedly asks if her lover wants to try out her “fuzzy pink handcuffs.” Women being the ones to openly–and proudly–discuss their sexuality is still a little revolutionary. Behind the catchy pop music, there’s a rallying cry. Women’s sexual desire is not dirty, embarrassing, sinful, or something that needs to be hidden. It’s something to be owned, something to be celebrated. Ladies, let your freak flag fly—in multiple senses of the phrase.
Rating: INDY
Grace Copps is a junior in the College studying Government with minors in Journalism and Justice and Peace Studies. She is Co-Reviews Section Editor for the INDY.
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