SABRINA CARPENTER – MAN’S BEST FRIEND: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 13 minutes ago
- 3 min read
SABRINA CARPENTER
Man’s Best Friend (Island)
IT IS NOT EXACTLY the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but there is a strange but true part of the hellscape we inhabit today, at the intersection of militant religiosity, rising fascism, humourless moralisers, whining old farts, and the elevation of loud mediocrity to authority – in governments, media, marching thugs, tech incels and dank corners of your family – that feels similar.
This is a recognition that, broadly speaking, the things that offend or attract the ire of these people aren’t just amusing to observe but valuable as counterweights or small rebellions or necessary irritants. You don’t have to love all they offer, but you can appreciate the effect. Which brings us to Sabrina Carpenter.
Putting aside any judgement on the quality of the songs themselves for a moment, Carpenter is well worth the money for upsetting some of the worst people, who can’t help but lose their senses and demand that SOMETHING. BE. DONE! about her or Chappell Roan or Taylor Swift or Greta Thunburg or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Antoinette Lattouf – hmm, it’s almost like there’s a theme here isn’t it?
Carpenter is too brazen in her sexuality (how very dare she!) or too childlike in her presentation (what is she thinking?), too male-gaze in her femininity (where’s her self-respect?) or too disrespectful of the masculine (men have feelings you know!), too light in her genre (pop is for kids!) or too provocative in her language (you kiss your mother with that mouth?). Worst of all, she is too successful and still going (this is her seventh album for godsakes!) and pretty funny (I know, right?).
Funny? I can’t be the only childish person who cracks up hearing her kiss-off to a straying boy beginning with “Baby I’m not angry, I love you just the same/I just hope you get agoraphobia some day, and all your days are sunny” and finishing with “I wish you a lifetime full of happiness, and a forever of never getting laid.”
Actually, the worst of worst of all is that Carpenter – and her collaborators, Amy Allen, John Ryan and, especially, modern pop everywhere man, Jack Antonoff – keeps making records that are actually really good. Pop records that entertain as well as provoke, dazzle with skill not just shiny surfaces: with the modern predilection for high hook strike rates paired with old fashioned reference points that see more than a few direct nods to Abba across this album; a front-loaded album in the old school pop style that just keeps throwing up another hit-in-the-making; and smart lines that play adult, immature, knowing, irreverent and brutal – sometimes in the same song – even if the subject matter is pretty much limited to shitty boy trying to convince girl/on-probation-boy with girl/shitty boy schooled by girl.
For all the undoubted cleverness in Manchild – what may well be three separate songs seamlessly stitched together so that you skip, dance and grin at the same time – it’s the way so many songs mix once cool then very uncool elements that keep tripping you up if you were of a mind to object on principle.
In Never Getting Laid it’s all ‘90s nu-soul shimmer and Kylie balladry, while Tears takes your airy bubble disco, Prince’s dirty mind and finger-snapping beat; House Tour re-imagines Who’s That Girl-era Madonna, while Sugar Talking touches both T. Swift and C. McVie, and We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night is equal parts Rufus Wainwright and Lena Dunham.
Maybe the best example of this it shouldn’t work but it does method is how in Nobody’s Son the light pop-reggae insinuation – think Eddy Grant, but please don’t blame me – blossoms into a kind of Christmas special singalong that almost demands (but thankfully doesn’t get) accordion. The chorus, preceded by flighty backing voices that pull you effortlessly, is nowhere near as featherlight as it feels, and the bridge mixes ancient synth washes with little droplets of pain.
Whose pain? Ah, well, hers at first, but not for long. As closing track, and Abba-fronted-by-Miley gem, Goodbye, puts it, “You don’t get to be the one who cries/Can’t have your cake and eat it too”, because even when she loses, Sabrina Carpenter wins.
And that’s gonna really piss some people off. All the right people.
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Apple Music: Listen to Sabrina Carpenter – Man’s Best Friend
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