Ever since Sabrina Carpenter released her first teaser for “Manchild,” the Internet (Twitter, specifically) has been ablaze with the kind of incredible passion you can only find on such chronically online spaces. But the buzz has snowballed into something entirely new with every release of promotional content leading up to the actual release of Man’s Best Friend on August 29th.
I’ll note that while I’ve enjoyed some of Carpenter’s stuff in the past, I followed this buzz with the detached interest of someone too occupied by other chronically online wars to fully participate. Short n’ Sweet was fun, but was ultimately its own self-fulfilling prophecy, while her performances, in my opinion, buoyed the wave of “Espresso”’s success along into undeniable stardom. But what with the amount of controversy generated by her newest album cover alone, I figured it was worth looking more deeply into. This is, I’m sure, what her label intended for in choosing such “shock-factor” material for promotion. Full transparency: this soured my opinion on the album early on; I typically end up disliking anything that’s so obviously engineered to generate as much buzz as possible, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative.
But like it or not, that means it’s also generated lots of things to talk about! The nuances of its cultural impact are somewhat out of the scope of this review, so I’ll start by unpacking this album from a musical standpoint—but because music is cultural, I think it’s within reason to comment on whether I think the songs serve a certain purpose in light of our current cultural climate. Whether that purpose is esoteric satire or tasteless sensationalism, maybe it’s best to ask the lyrics that big question first.
On “Manchild”—there’s a bit of context to consider first. Before its release, Carpenter had just had a public break-up with a man who then became subject to a lot of collective public dislike. I’m guessing Carpenter fans and Barry Keoghan haters alike expected something hard-hitting and targeted from “Manchild”’s lyrics, but they’re clearly not that.
I will say that I listened to this with a relative lack of expectations. And there was an equal lack of reaction to me. It gets its point across pretty clearly: she dislikes immature men but keeps getting with them, and it’s frustrating. It’s fun, it’s catchy, it doesn’t require much diving in to grasp. Not particularly laughter-inducing for me, but you can probably tell I’m that kind of person at a party. Moving on.
The rest of the album is lyrically similar. Sexual, droll, playfully lamenting. While it occasionally has its comical moments and is surely meant to be relatable, I struggle to find anything satirical about it. I’ll push it a little further and say that I don’t think any of it is particularly witty, either, but that’s because I tend to find this overtly edgy sense of humor corny, which is completely personal.
Production-wise, it’s clear that the “Espresso” money has been cashed in. Simply put: it’s tight. No obvious holes, cohesive if a bit one-noted, and above all, catchy. That being said, is any of it especially remarkable? No; but of course, you could argue that’s not the point of this album. None of it is meant to be revolutionary.
But if I could make a semi-unfair comparison here, it’s not true that pop music can’t be meaningful, or at least not completely out of touch. Chappell Roan is a great example—there’s heart driving a lot of her lyrics, which I’d call equally “scandalous” but working in connection with themes of queerness and belonging and self-expression. Does Carpenter have to sing sapphic pop-operatic ballads to relay a similar sense of heart? Obviously not. But there’s something in this brand for the average person to latch onto more easily, even in a lighthearted sense, that Man’s Best Friend lacks.
This, in my opinion, is the root of the Internet’s bad reaction: Carpenter showing symptoms of affluenza when she used to be a somewhat accessible figure. Two weeks ago, Carpenter told Gayle King, “Y’all need to get out more,” in response to the backlash. But here is the root of my baffled reaction: throughout the interview with King, Carpenter seems equally confused about the purpose of her own album and its brand. She repeatedly says that the cover is “perfect for what the album represents” but is never clear on what exactly that is. She goes on to say the album is up to interpretation but that her fans, the ones who “truly know her,” will understand her intentions, and that those criticizing her don’t “know” her. Is the satire of this album so esoteric as to exclude its own artist?
To strip this album of its context when discussing its content, even from a musical perspective, is not only impossible but also anti-intellectual. It’s also true that women are being subjugated across the world against their will amidst a rise in violent rhetoric against them. It’s certainly a choice to put something like this out there in light of that, a choice that is guaranteed to spark discussion. At the end of the day, I suppose Carpenter and her label underestimated just how negative that buzz would get, maybe because she’s previously been a “controversial” character. But she isn’t just upsetting scandalized sex-averse moms anymore.
And now here comes the take you’ve been waiting for: I think she has, intentionally or not, shut out a lot of potential listeners in committing completely to the manufactured-to-stoke-the-fire brand of Man’s Best Friend. Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and this is doubly the case if you’re as prominent a star as Carpenter currently is. While I think it’s hilarious that people expected Carpenter to put out some kind of radically feminist and abrasive satire on the patriarchy, I don’t blame them for disliking what they got instead.
We’ve seen how easily people were turned off by Sydney Sweeney catering towards a … specific audience in that American Eagle ad. This sort of questionable pop-culture behavior has existed for decades, but I think I’m being objective when I say that, especially in the current sociopolitical climate, it just makes your brand less accessible to the average person, or more frankly, the average woman. There’s only so much celebrity out-of-touch-isms that the general public can take.
I debated on titling this Man’s Best Friend or Public’s Worst Enemy? but I think that’s a bit dramatic. People are just turned off. (There’s a joke I can make here but I’m not good enough at innuendos. I’ll leave that to Sabrina.)
