Sabrina Carpenter released Man's Best Friend amid uproar over cover art depicting a sexualized scene. The album is tightly crafted, mostly played with live instruments and packed with abundant hooks. Carpenter uses wordy, sexually candid lyrics and treats pop as a craft as well as art. The record includes unusual instruments such as clavinet, sitar and agogo, and echoes Abba and Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. Songs feature intricate, unconventional structures that make complexity feel effortless. The album positions Carpenter as a creative arrival and signals a willingness to defy industry orthodoxy and expectations of Gen Z pop stars.
It instantly caused an uproar online most notably among Carpenter's young fans, who weren't on Tumblr in 2015, or weren't aware of the way the Sun newspaper wrote about Madonna every day of the 1990s and 2000s, and therefore didn't realise that discourse around whether pop stars should or shouldn't be allowed to sexualise themselves is older than pop music itself, and almost always inane.
played almost entirely with live instruments and packed with so many hooks that it feels as if it might burst at the seams, it seems a true creative arrival for Carpenter. The most significant provocation here may be a newly minted star, beloved by gen Z, going against industry orthodoxy and packing an album with unusual instruments, including clavinet, sitar and agogo, and making distinct allusions to Abba and Fleetwood Mac's Tusk.
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