The Growing Gender Divide, Three Minutes at a Time

My friends gave me a bit of grief for the headline of one of my recent articles: “The ‘Espresso’ Theory of Gender Relations.” The title, admittedly, was a bit heady for a story about a catchy song full of beverage-related puns. Was I overintellectualizing pop, which is supposed to be the dumbest music of all?

Nah. Sabrina Carpenter, who sings the smash “Espresso”—and its follow-up hit, “Please Please Please”—deserves to be taken seriously. She’s part of a crop of women who have made the past year or so one of the liveliest, and flat-out smartest, mainstream-music eras in recent memory. Her new album, Short n’ Sweet, is a salvo against the lunkheaded stereotype that women, blondes, and pop don’t have a lot to say. And her lyrical themes capture a lot about what’s going on between guys and girls in this country right now.

From a distance, Carpenter seems easy to place. She’s a golden-haired coquette dressed in outfits that evoke Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, and Betty Boop. She’s a sex-positive radio conqueror with a spry, breathy voice, like Britney Spears and Madonna. She’s a former Disney Channel actor, succeeding a generation of onetime child stars—Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez—who helped bring therapy-speak to the charts. These are superficial comparisons, which isn’t to say they’re not important. In pop, surface matters.

But Carpenter’s most important influence is her friend Taylor Swift: Beneath a shiny facade lies a multidimensional, self-assured storyteller and wordsmith. Sometimes Carpenter is slapstick funny, as when she breaks into fake Shakespearean verse on “Bed Chem”: “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?” Sometimes she’s punch-line clever, as when she tells a pseudo-enlightened dirtbag to “save all your breath for your floor meditation.” What’s best is that her music is hilarious in the way that only music can be, arising from surprising clashes of sound and sentiment. Think about “Espresso.” Previous hot-and-heavy songs of summer have had sappy, strident choruses, such as Katy Perry’s “You make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream.” Carpenter, however, has us all singing along to a sigh: “I guess so.”

That sigh expresses the core emotion of her songwriting: the exasperation of being young, female, straight, and single in 2024. On “Slim Pickins,” Carpenter sings about setting her standards low and still being disappointed: “A boy who’s nice, that breathes / I swear he’s nowhere to be seen.” When she does land an acceptable mate, the competition to keep him is fierce—see the gruesome “Taste” video, in which she and a rival chainsaw and flambé each other. “Coincidence” painstakingly captures the sinking feeling of losing a guy to a hot girl on the internet. “Without her even bein’ here, she’s back in your life,” Carpenter sings, before backing vocalists start jeering “Nah nah nah.”

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These stories really do contain a theory of gender relations. At a time when men and women aren’t hooking up as much as they once did, are achieving diverging rates of academic success, and certainly aren’t seeing eye to eye ideologically, how better to sing about romance than with sarcasm and detachment? But Carpenter is also annoyed about sexual tensions that are older than Gen Z. On “Dumb & Poetic,” she insults a pretentious ex who pleasures himself to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen. That song is the latest example of female singers getting fed up with condescending rockers: Chappell Roan raging on TikTok at “indie-pop boys,” Swift in 2012 negging an ex who’s into records that are “much cooler than mine,” Boygenius also bringing up Cohen’s name in somewhat disrespectful fashion on its album last year.

Why all the shade for the Godfather of Gloom? He’s a straw man for the post-Swift pop wave—which includes Carpenter, Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish—as it makes a forceful, witty reply to the music-snob tradition of portraying male emotion as deep and female emotion as trifling. In the process, these women are creating a new, hybrid subgenre with the help of “indie-pop boys” such as Dan Nigro (the emo guitarist who produces Roan and Rodrigo), Finneas (Eilish’s Radiohead-worshipping brother), and Jack Antonoff (Swift’s main creative partner, who worked on four Short n’ Sweet songs). The point is to express emotions in a way that is more direct, more legible, than classic Pitchfork fare—but also more artful than the groaning male rockers who have thrived on the Hot 100 of late.

The sound of Short n’ Sweet taps into another preceding canon as well. The album’s producers and co-writers have assembled a soft-rocking collage of musical references to Dolly Parton, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Carly Simon, and Lana Del Rey—female songwriting greats who had to fight to be respected. Carpenter even makes a point to encode linguistic precision as feminine: In carefully constructed verses layered with double meanings, she teases bimbo bros who don’t “even know the difference between ‘there,’ ‘their,’ and ‘they are.’”

Now, Carpenter’s not near the same level of brilliance as Mitchell or Parton—in part because her music, like a lot of music these days, relies way too much on pastiche. Even so, Short n’ Sweet is much more complex than the canned breeziness that “Espresso” advertised; check out the key change on “Please Please Please” and the interplay of Spanish guitar with hip-hop rhythms on “Good Graces.” Carpenter is at base a commercially savvy celebrity, working with the record industry to give people what they want right now: intelligence hidden in silliness, and confidence that avoids tired empowerment clichés. On the standout ballad “Lie to Girls,” she sings, “I’m stupid / but I’m clever”—a couplet that neatly, and probably knowingly, sums up the appeal of the best pop music.