Sabrina Carpenter released a country remix of her 2024 hit "Please Please Please" featuring Dolly Parton, highlighting genre fluidity and a shared stage persona. Both women present a high-femme, sexpot-savvy persona that combines glamour with intelligence, tracing influences to Marilyn Monroe and aligning with figures like Loni Anderson. Parton praised Carpenter's resemblance and vocal power, while Carpenter's lyrics assert sexual agency. Songs "Please Please Please" and "Espresso" propelled Carpenter's breakout season, followed by the album Short n' Sweet. Early this summer Carpenter faced criticism over cover art for Man's Best Friend, with some feminist critics alarmed by a subservient pose.
Her commonalities with Parton have much deeper (dyed) roots. "She looks like she could be my little sister," the 79-year-old icon said of the 26-year-old Carpenter to Rolling Stone in June, the magazine pointing out that each is " a five-foot-tall blonde with serious pipes." The stronger link it overlooked is that both Carpenter and Parton are virtuosi of high-femme camp, particularly playing the role of the sexpot savant, the bombshell who's really a brainiac.
As Parton sang on her very first country hit in 1967, " This dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool " -or as Carpenter put it on "Please Please Please" in much more 2020s terms, "I beg you, don't embarrass me, motherfucker." That song, as well as the bubbling " Espresso," made last summer into Carpenter's breakout season, which she capped by releasing the album Short n' Sweet in late August,
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