In 2013, the first year I reviewed albums, I gave Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience a resounding 10 out of 10. It was the first and only album to ever receive a perfect score from ol’ garebear. In that review, I alluded to the irony of giving the best score to an album in the worst genre - pop. And yet, here we are again. So let’s talk about pop.

Pop

Pop, aka “popular music”, should be an easy win. It should be music that most people like. Thriller was pop. Abbey Road was pop (that may be a reach). If it charts Top 10, it’s pop. Now, sheerly by virtue of most people liking it, some people won’t like it, but barring that you can’t please all people, making popular music should be a mark of pride. Unfortunately, that comes with one grave misassumption - that popularity is a sign of quality.

Putting all the contention of capitalist art into a single sentence: the profitability of popular music has yielded an industry whose goal is to acquiesce to the least common denominator. Put simpler: tolerable does numbers. 

Lemme give you an example. When I say the phrase “you my little boo thang”, how do you feel? Some will smile, some will eye roll, most will feel indifferent. “It’s a fun song” you’re saying. It is a fun song. But there are tons of fun songs. The question is, why is it a popular song? Well, it might be helpful to know that before Paul Russell moved to LA to make music, he was a business analyst and corporate advertiser. See, while historically value was correlated to originality, if value is now measured in potential ad revenue, which is measured in followers, and followers follow things they like, why not make a sequel to one of the most popular songs in history, that just so happened to be released the year before copyright/royalty laws were updated. Given this lens, do we find it surprising that this particular artist turned a TikTok snippet into a State Farm ad? 

Sabrina

When I entitled 2024 “The Year the Girls Got Even”, I myself was surprised to enshrine a 5-foot-nothing valley girl from California as headliner. Certainly a Beyonce or Doja Cat would better fit the bill. But upon deeper inspection, there couldn't be a better candidate. 

Sabrina possesses a Dolly Partonesque confidence, wholly unconcerned with assessment. She's not trying to convince you she's *that bitch*, she's not trying to make anyone fall in love with her, she's not trying to make her parents proud, or put her friends on. And she's not being belligerent about it. She's simply running through men whispering *que sera sera*. She operates with an intimate knowledge of her own power and employs it quietly.

On the other hand, we need to call a spade a spade. Sabrina Carpenter is not what I would call a good person; she's also not a bad person, but her appeal is separate from her morality. For comparison’s sake, she's somewhere on the spectrum of Olivia Rodrigo to Chappell Roan, both musically and ethically. But where Olivia feels like she's trying her best and Chappell feels like she's trying her worst, Sabrina isn't trying at all.

So what does a low-key, self-assured, post-Disney, R&B-turned-pop princess make when she finds her sound?

Short n' Sweet

Like the artist herself, Short n’ Sweet is deceptively clever. Packaged as just a ‘cute little thing’, this collection of 12 songs spanning 5 genres covertly covers more emotional ground in 30 minutes than most albums do in an hour, all while being decidedly danceable. Take it from me - it’s no easy task to genre-bend without feeling disingenuous, but inspiration is part thievery, so you have to draw your own line. In this case, Sabrina's line is the rim around Espresso. 

(Quick aside: I'm not gonna write a think piece on Espresso. Great as it is, it’s self-explanatory. And also, when you google “espresso”, actual espresso is the second result, so I know you’ve heard it enough to form your own opinion.) 

For as much secret subtlety as there is in the album, the straight-forward Espresso is still the emotional and tonal core, so much so in fact, that even the tracklist centers around it and kind of works its way from the middle out. Short n’ Sweet has its moments of regret and rage, but the amplitude of any given song never strays so far from Espresso that it feels like they don't belong on the same album. Yet and still, each song is its own; related to that core, yes, borrowing from other genres and artists, yes, but each their own. They are pop; but they are their own. It's the right mix.

Speaking of mixes, unless you make music yourself, you may not know that music & lyrics are often written separately. As is evidenced in the word painting, vocal flourishes, and sonic cuts all over this one, I’d put money down that most production and writing being done on this album are in tandem. I've said this same thing about Ariana Grande, but Sabrina’s newest producers & mixers do a tremendous job at getting everything they can out of her voice. Now to be fair, her voice does heavy lifting throughout, but at no point do I feel she plays second fiddle to it, which is a technical accomplishment.

But by and large, what takes everything from good to great is Sabrina's understanding of her writing capability. Look, this album is unabashedly raunchy - and with that backdrop it's hard to imagine the scripting would be a standout feature, but despite its crassness, she manages to plate all subjects in a way that feel playfully grounded, intimate, funny, cheeky, or cute. Whether through tone or word choice, she takes the sting out of the hard parts and adds depth to the easy parts, all while keeping it relatively simple. 

...

And this - this my friends - is the whole thing incarnate. It is simple. Listening to the album feels effortless. Despite what rap implies, good writing does not mean jamming the most entendres into a bar; it means phrasing a story in a way that most effectively conveys the feeling. Use whatever literary tool best draws interest, but at the end of the day, if your audience doesn't feel your story, you've left food on the table. There are no crumbs left on this album. The pockets of depth are there when you need them - the entendres, the innuendos, the irony - it's there if you listen intently; but if you don't, or you just don't want to, you can love it all the same.

Short n’ Sweet is the cutest, funnest, easiest, secretly smartest, best album of the year. It's deep enough to garnish an 82 from metacritic, wide enough to get her on SNL 50, and is a serious contender for Album of the Decade.

Rating: 10

Favorite Song: Good Graces