Flirty and thriving: How Sabrina Carpenter became a pop superstar

Sabrina Carpenter’s career is anything but wooden. Last August she released Short n’ Sweet, one of the albums of the summer, which topped the charts in 19 countries. Three songs from the record, Espresso, Please Please Please and Taste, ranked in the top five of the Billboard chart in America simultaneously.

Her status has built up quickly. In the first half of 2022, Carpenter’s songs were streamed 73 million times in America; in the same period this year, that number had jumped to 1.9 billion. In April, Luminate, a data firm, found that Carpenter’s fandom was growing faster than any other musician’s. (Their index looks at things such as social media engagement and public awareness as well as streaming data.)

Carpenter is hoping to follow up on that success with Man’s Best Friend, a new album released on August 29. Its lead single, Manchild, has already topped the charts in America and Britain. In coming months, you can expect to hear her effervescent melodies and sultry lyrics blasting from every car radio and teenager’s bedroom. How has Carpenter established herself as pop’s new princess?

Three factors explain her ascendancy. First, her music is compulsively catchy. Carpenter has spent a long time finding the right sound. (Man’s Best Friend is her seventh studio album.) Like pop stars Miley Cyrus and Olivia Rodrigo, Carpenter started her career as a child actor on the Disney Channel. Her first song was released in 2014, when she was just 14 years old; she spent the next decade exploring modes as varied as folk and electronic dance music.

‘Everything she does is with that knowing wink at the audience.’

Glenn Fosbraey

This experimentation came to fruition on Short n’ Sweet. The record is a paragon of pop in 36 minutes, incorporating sounds from disco to country to hip-hop. Even as Carpenter borrows from different genres, her songs have a distinctive, whimsical quality.

Jack Antonoff, a producer who works with Carpenter (as well as Taylor Swift), has said the appeal of Please Please Please lies in the “push and pull” between the regimented percussion and “bubbly … floating” synthesisers: “It makes you feel like a little bit drunk, a little bit dreamlike.”

The second reason for her popularity is her witty lyrics. Carpenter stands out because she makes “really fun, really flirty, sometimes silly, literally nonsensical songs”, notes Erica Campbell, author of a forthcoming book about the star. Take Espresso, Carpenter’s biggest hit, in which she croons: “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know / That’s that me espresso.” Or this, from Bed Chem: “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?”

Such playfulness is the point. As Glenn Fosbraey, a specialist in pop songs at the University of Winchester, puts it: “Everything she does is with that knowing wink at the audience.”

She can be salacious, such as when she sings, “Come right on me, I mean camaraderie” in Bed Chem. She can also be droll: in Taste, the diminutive Carpenter declares, “I leave quite an impression / Five feet to be exact.” The same self-conscious mischievousness is evident in her live performances and music videos. In the video for Manchild, Carpenter mocks bad lovers by bathing with pigs.

That points to the third and final reason for Carpenter’s success: her carefully constructed brand. Not only is it easy to spot “a Sabrina song”, notes Campbell, but also “a Sabrina outfit”. On stage, she prances about in corsets and mini skirts. On the Short n’ Sweet tour, she wore custom lingerie made by Victoria’s Secret.

Some, however, worry that Carpenter’s sexualised self-image is inappropriate. The album cover for Man’s Best Friend, which shows Carpenter on all fours as a man pulls her hair, was censured as regressive.

Fans demanded an alternative cover, so she gave them one “approved by God”. It is a black-and-white recreation of a paparazzi shot of Marilyn Monroe, another blonde bombshell. It implies that Carpenter is under no illusions about the price of her newfound fame.

The Economist

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.