The most fashionable music of the 2020s is very long or very short. Taylor Swift heralded the advent of the long pop song by including four six-minute ballads in 2010’s Speak Now, an album that, by crediting Swift as its sole writer, made the singer-songwriter a mainstream cultural fixation in a way not seen since James Taylor or Joni Mitchell. This shift enabled rising pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter to add an idiosyncratic touch to ubiquitous hits that sound like they could have received radio airplay in the 1980s or 1990s.
Taylor Swift also created a template for publicly melding one’s personal and professional lives in which autobiographical songs spark Internet scavenger hunts. Carpenter, who opened for Swift’s Eras Tour and described Swift as a “best friend”, follows this example on her sixth album, Short n’ Sweet, which she dubbed her second made with “creative control” as a “full-fledged adult”.
Her first body of work to fit this categorization, 2023’s Emails I Can’t Send, followed four albums at Disney’s Hollywood Records, a glossy cage former child stars seek to escape. “I’m 900 inappropriate jokes away from being a Disney star, but people still see me that way,” Carpenter told Variety.
Short n’ Sweet abounds with Sabrina Carpenter’s sly innuendo, a contrast to the cartoonish flair of Katy Perry. Perry’s Teenage Dream never missed an opportunity for playful objectification, becoming a parody of itself. This approach differed from Britney Spears, who was serious about her proactiveness. Careful not to repeat history, Carpenter sidesteps Perry’s obviousness without taking herself too seriously. The title Short n’ Sweet nods to its length, 36 minutes, and Carpender’s height, which in “Taste”, she describes as “Five feet to be exact.”
The sleek, chart-topping single “Espresso” embodies Carpenter’s approach to pop: cautious maximalism. The viral lyric “I’m working late ‘cause I’m a singer” summarizes her ability to create mythology around a self-evident topic: her occupation. By approaching a blindly optimistic genre with wry humor, Carpenter reclaims it for Gen Z.
Carpenter makes direct musical references in the 1980s-inspired “Juno” without shattering her mystique, as pulsing synths and electric guitar evoke the grand romantic aspirations of REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling”. Two-thirds through the album, Carpenter safely unmasks herself as a conventional pop star.
The lyrics of “Juno” also reflect an offbeat approach to pop centrism. In the bridge, Carpenter rhymes, “adore me / explore me/ …territory.” This couplet would serve as a substantial verse in most pop songs. Carpenter adds edge with a seemingly unnecessary line that strengthens her presence.
Rhyming perfectly, the line is: “I’m so f***in horny.” Fitting flagrant desire into a boilerplate lyrical structure mirrors Sabrina Carpenter’s persona, which crawled out of the Disney ether with biting humor. Carpenter speaks as forwardly as Katy Perry while remaining coy enough to ask, Who, me?
Many of Short n’ Sweet‘s jokes come at the expense of Sabrina Carpenter’s romantic partners. In “Coincidence”, she portrays the dating landscape of the digital era as a nightmare and fantasy, admonishing an ex, “What a surprise, your phone just died.” This song is allegedly directed at Shawn Mendes, who reunited with his ex Camilla Cabello after a brief fling with Carpenter. In an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Carpenter said the title Short n’ Sweet refers to relationships that “were the shortest I’ve ever had [but] affected me the most”.
In the number-one single, “Please Please Please”, Carpenter lets herself be lovestruck while remaining in control, as she warns, “Don’t embarrass me motherf***er.” Carpenter all but confirmed the song to be about her current flame, actor Barry Keoghan, when he starred in its music video as a gangster dragging his love interest through precarious situations. Carpenter told Rolling Stone Jennifer Lopez’s “Jenny From the Block”, which starred her then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck, inspired the “Please” video.
This single also represents the sonic strengths of Short n’ Sweet. Produced by Jack Antonoff, its bouncy synths complement Sabrina Carpenter’s vocals, oscillating between feathery and firm. In its bridge, minor chords underlie subtle note changes, mimicking how a person might repeatedly use different intonations when asking for something.
The song’s titular hook is ironic because Carpenter appears to ask for something she already has. When this confidence gives way to doubt, her fluttering harmonies conclude the song, patching the glitch in her glittery matrix. Carpenter’s music embodies a self-destructive devotion to love despite its breezy veneer. “We love to mistake butterflies for cardiac arrest,” she says on “Lie to Girls”.
Everyone must learn to balance individual happiness and a desire for romantic connections. In a foreword of 2017’s reputation, Taylor Swift wrote, “We are all a mix of selfishness and generosity, loyalty and self-preservation.” Swift’s Speak Now is a sister album to Short n’ Sweet. Both, coming at pivotal early-career moments, announce the foundational principles of their creators. As Swift’s most prolific album to date, Speak Now solidified her credibility as a songwriter, underpinning even her most concise work.
Short n’ Sweet builds on the persona of the album that preceded it as Carpenter navigates stardom on her own creative terms. It is essential for a person to set the terms of their career, no matter how similar those terms might appear to what others may have decided. The act of doing so independently matters. This give-and-take is central to Short n’ Sweet as Carpenter reckons with compromises she makes for love. In “Dumb & Poetic”, she channels Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! by lamenting her affection for a pseudo-intellectual boyfriend who references Leonard Cohen and quotes unoriginal self-help books.
Pop, as a genre, requires that artists remain concise. But, tie the knot too tightly, and a star risks drowning their own voice. Sabrina Carpenter starred in the Disney show Girl Meets World as a child actor. Through its use of provocative language, Short n’ Sweet embodies that title. Perhaps through years of media training, Carpenter knows how to inflect lyrics with personality without breaking the universality of a pop star.
Unless a Disney star emerges from their cocoon with a completely new personality, traces of their former selves will be used to invalidate the adults they want to become. Commercially, these stars need to rely on their younger personas to maintain a core fanbase. Disney actors must embody the past and the future to grow up.
In the novel 1984, George Orwell said, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” It may seem strange to quote George Orwell in a review of a pop album. However, the level of image control record companies exert over young stars is nearly dystopian. To say that analysis of a frivolous cultural object cannot be conducted in a serious way enables the means of control that create the appearance of frivolousness. The government of 1984 relies on the mantra, “War is peace.” Pop music strives to appear light and fun. But it is business, and business is serious.
Speaking of formulating the lyric “That’s that me espresso,” which wouldn’t pass a Grammarly check, Carpenter said, “What sounds awesome? What gets the story across, whatever that is?” Pop music is not an exact science, and it relies on deception.
The title Short n’ Sweet refers to Sabrina Carpenter’s brand of concise bubblegum pop. It also stands in for the broad purpose of pop music, which proposes that brief, major chord-driven bursts of energy provide enough escapism for any good participant in a capitalist economy.
In reality, pop music is not escapism but a template for it. A shiny red herring, it maintains pre-established patterns of thought. The urge to criticize music, as I currently am, diverts from the cognitive dissonance that already exists in listeners. A pop song cannot contain a complete escapist realm on its own; it relies on engagement from listeners to propagate its fantasy. The adage “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” becomes a commercial proposition.
The government of 1984 criminalizes thoughts of protest. By “narrowing the range of thought” it seeks to make “thoughtcrime” impossible. In the real world, many people trivialize pop music as fluff that distracts from intellectual pursuits. However, by giving inquisitive people a straw man to tear apart, pop music acts as the force that narrows the range of thought so “intellectual pursuits” occur only on certain terms.
The United States Constitution designates “Free Speech” as a founding principle, but capitalism, another founding idea, enables the human tendency for self-censorship. If this restriction is a product you’re paying for, what’s the harm? For escapism to be total, your ignorance must be part of the transaction.
The act of compression makes something sweeter. It’s comforting to think complicated emotions can be reduced to a simpler form. The problem remains that people become easily manipulated into falling for their own mythology. Is Big Brother winning if you let yourself get brainwashed? As Sabrina Carpenter would say: “Please, please, please don’t prove I’m right.” But all the fun is in asking. The spell of Short ‘n Sweet is broken before you know it.