We Officially Have a Major New Pop Star

In the summer of 1982, a rocker from Indiana was finally breaking on the charts after years of trying anything for a hit. Born John Mellencamp, he marketed himself, reluctantly, under his manager’s preferred sobriquet, John Cougar. After about three years of singles that meandered around the middle of Billboard’s Hot 100, the hit that finally got Cougar into the Top 10, “Hurts So Good,” was undeniable: both a heartland rocker and a danceable bop at the same time. With its center-of-the-bullseye melody and cheeky S&M-adjacent lyrics, “Hurts So Good” had the makings of a Song of the Summer. But even as Cougar’s LP American Fool hit No. 1 on the album chart, in July ’82 “Hurts” got stuck at No. 2 on the Hot 100, behind even bigger hot-weather hits by Survivor and the Human League.

And then … the oddest thing: While “Hurts” was still in the Top 10, a second John Cougar hit came roaring in beside it, then soared above it: a little ditty called “Jack and Diane.” This was a quirkier tune, with pensive lyrics about the passage of time and a synthesized clap that recurred like a sample; it sounded like country music crossed with New Wave synthpop. At the beginning of the summer, “Jack and Diane” would have seemed an odd choice for a big hit (Mellencamp fought his own label to put it out as a single). At the summer’s end, it took Mellencamp to No. 1 for the first (and only) time in his career. America had been rooting all season for their new favorite pop star to top the charts, and he met his destiny—but with a different song.

This chart pattern popped into my head this week as the Hot 100 was overtaken by Sabrina Carpenter, America’s shiny new (but really long-striving) purveyor of pop jams. Since the spring, everyone you know has been swooning for Carpenter’s throwback early-’80s-style dance bop “Espresso,” the song that coined the memeable phrase “That’s that me espresso,” as well as claims that you might work late if you’re a singerrr. Many declared it 2024’s Song of the Summer even before summer had begun. Here’s the problem: To date, “Espresso” has peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100. To be the actual Song of the Summer, a song has to go to No. 1. (And I’m just gonna stop you right there before you give me that weak forget-the-charts rejoinder “Well, it’s my Song of the Summer,” because that’s not how this sport is played.)

And now … the oddest thing: While “Espresso” was still lodged in the Top Five, Carpenter dropped a follow-up—a quirkier, moodier ditty, “Please Please Please,” that’s a kind of hybrid of country and synthpop. Last week “Please” crashed onto the chart at No. 2, already hotter than “Espresso.” This week, “Please” is No. 1, while “Espresso” cools to No. 4. Sabrina Carpenter has done the thing everybody wanted her to do, but not with the song everybody wanted her to do it with.

Does it matter? Are we Team Carpenter, or Team “Espresso”? Carpenter’s near-takeover of the Top Five is nothing but good for her career—she clearly has momentum on her side, like Mellencamp in the summer of ’82. Besides the chart-pattern similarities, the other reason I invoke Mellencamp is legacy: “Jack and Diane” is now widely regarded as his song for the ages, in spite, or probably because, of its quirks. Its lifetime Spotify streams are much higher than those for “Hurts So Good.” “Hurts” is a fine example of an uptempo twangy-rock mode that Mellencamp hit with multiple times over the next decade, whereas nothing else in his long roster of hits sounds quite like “Jack and Diane.” As for Sabrina Carpenter, I can’t tell yet if “Please Please Please” will one day be regarded as her canonical bop, but it might. She will probably have several more hits that sound like “Espresso,” but I’ll be shocked if she ever generates another single with the oddball charm of her latest. As with “Jack and Diane,” the quirkiness is the point.

Indeed, 25-year-old Carpenter has long been building a brand as the lovable kook who delivers the goods. She has an appealing, cooing voice and cowrites all of her material, but the root of her stardom is in her coy persona. In her music videos and onstage performances—including a run of opening-slot dates on Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour—she projects a sex-positive insouciance that’s both heartfelt and in on the joke. Standing all of five-foot-zero, the former Tall Girl actress (she didn’t play the lead) has titled her forthcoming album Short n’ Sweet. In her “Espresso” video, she is arrested for credit-card fraud, then gets bailed out of jail in the follow-up “Please Please Please” clip, still wearing an untroubled smile. She titled one of her radio bops “Nonsense” and comes up with new location-specific puns for its outro each time she sings it live; some favorites include “I don’t Singapore, I sing amazing,” and “Tulsa backwards is actually ‘a slut.’ ” She casually drops curses in songs—“My give-a-fucks are on vacation” or “Your signals are mixed, you act like a bitch” or “Don’t embarrass me, motherfucker”—in such a cheerful, chirpy way, they’re almost wholesome.

She even survived a midcareer mini scandal by basically swanning past it. If you’ve been reading this Slate No. 1 hits series for the past few years and the name Sabrina Carpenter rings a bell, that might be because she was a spicy footnote to Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 chart-topping breakthrough ballad “Drivers License.” Carpenter was (allegedly) the “blond girl” who stole the affections of one Joshua Bassett, Rodrigo’s former boyfriend and co-star on the Disney+ show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. In other words, Carpenter was the fuel for Rodrigo’s wronged-woman rage and subsequent heartbreak anthem. This Gen-Z reality soap opera—which prompted a couple rounds of answer records from Bassett and Carpenter and some predictable side-choosing by the online hordes—could have utterly consumed Carpenter’s career. And she didn’t allow it, letting her sharp answer record, “Skin,” speak for itself (“You’ve been telling your side, so I’ll be telling mine … Even you can’t get under my skin if I don’t let you in”) and sneaking in sly Bassett references on her 2022 album Emails I Can’t Send (“Because I Liked a Boy” ) and in concert (“This song is not about Joshua Bassett”). Weirdly, the love triangle has been good for everybody not named Bassett—certainly for Rodrigo, but even (especially) for Carpenter. As a certain obnoxious rapper once said, an unasked-for scandal can make a gal famous, and l’affaire Rodrigo only boosted Carpenter’s stock, branding her as unfiltered and unbothered.

Carpenter has earned a measure of goodwill for toiling in celebrity’s middle tier for more than a decade. Like Rodrigo—and like numerous pop stars before her, from Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake to Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez—she came up through the kids-TV machine, breaking through in 2014 as one of the stars of the Disney Channel’s Girl Meets World. From the jump, she followed the multihyphenate music-plus-screen playbook: Just weeks after the TV show premiered, she dropped a debut single, “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying” (even then, the Sabrina Carpenter brand was sassy), and a full album followed a year later. From 2015’s Eyes Wide Open through 2019’s Singular: Act II, Carpenter forged an eclectic sound that blended folky confessionals with frothy club-pop. A couple of her tracks topped Billboard’s Dance chart, but her albums missed the Top 25 and routinely fell off the Billboard 200 in under a month. All the while, Carpenter tried a bit of everything, including movies—a supporting role in the acclaimed drama The Hate U Give, a star turn in the tiny indie The Short History of the Long Road—and Broadway, where she took over the lead role in Mean Girls just days before the pandemic shut down the show.

Nothing seemed to get Carpenter out of her semi-fame purgatory until Emails I Can’t Send, which besides the post-Rodrigo frisson also featured all-around smarter, more chart-savvy tracks. “Nonsense” gave Carpenter her first big radio hit, reaching No. 10 on the Pop Airplay chart in early 2023. A deluxe rerelease of the LP kept it on the album chart more than half the year and generated an even bigger hit with “Feather,” a neo-disco bop that got Carpenter into the Top 40 for the first time and went Top Five at radio. “Feather” was most notorious for its bloody music video, a bit of satirical ultraviolence a la Promising Young Woman, Jennifer’s Body, or Bottoms, in which scores of mediocre men literally kill each other over their lust for Carpenter. The video codified her knowingly ditsy, devil-may-care persona and even drew condemnation from the Brooklyn Catholic diocese for Carpenter’s scenes inside a local church, which … come to think of it, couldn’t have been bad for business.

In short, Carpenter built her profile brick by brick—for all its social-age Zoomer vibes, the explosion in her popularity this year is really an old-fashioned career development story of the bygone Hollywood variety, a tribute to never-say-die persistence. Carpenter kept refining her persona until the stars aligned and the world caught up. What’s fascinating about her pair of summer ’24 hits is how they reconfigure elements of that persona into something new, or at least novel enough to feel fresh. With “Espresso,” the electrofunk bop that my colleague Dan Charnas expertly dissected and historicized for Slate earlier this month, Carpenter (who cowrote the song with producer Julian Bunetta and songwriters Amy Allen and Steph Jones) honed her dance floor pop into a set of TikTok memes waiting to happen. You don’t sing a grammatically questionable slogan like “That’s that me espresso” unless you know it’s going to become a hashtag.

And then there’s “Please Please Please,” her actual chart-topper, which is something else entirely—yet also perfectly on-brand for her. Building on her previous folk-pop, Carpenter has written a midtempo country ballad that’s simultaneously burbly technopop—it’s basically both sides of her discography at once. The lyrics, delivered in Carpenter’s sweetest coo, are a pleading story song, a gloss on Dolly Parton: “Please, please, please, don’t prove I’m right. And please, pleasе, please—don’t bring me to tеars when I just did my makeup so nice.” Throw in a reference to a hussy named Jolene, and it really would be a Dolly song—except I don’t think Parton would implore her man, “I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherfucker.”

Carpenter’s timing with this approach couldn’t be better. “Please” just ejected Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s country rave-up “I Had Some Help” from No. 1 and comes just three months after Beyoncé’s two-step chart-topper “Texas Hold ’Em.” These are all country records reimagined for the streaming era, and “Please” is the most hybridized, pairing gentle acoustic-guitar arpeggios with a fuzzy synth filigree that keeps cycling through the song like John Cougar’s “Jack and Diane” hook. It’s a truly strange record, not so much genreless as multigenre, convincingly twangy and credibly electropop at the same time. In addition to Carpenter and her frequent co-writer Amy Allen, credit for the record’s unique sound must go to its other songwriter and producer—none other than Jack Antonoff, king of the moody synth burble, the man who’s been helming hits for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Ray, Lorde, and St. Vincent and is now sprinkling his pixie dust on Sabrina Carpenter. That’s the surest sign of how her profile has risen in the past year.

This higher profile is also evidenced by how easily Carpenter slays the charts now. Remember, prior to last year’s “Feather,” she hadn’t even cracked the Top 40. When “Espresso” arrived this April, it entered the Hot 100 at No. 7 and hasn’t left the Top 10 in its entire 10-week chart run. Arguably, the more immediate “Espresso” softened the ground for the oddball “Please Please Please,” which debuted at No. 2 alongside “Espresso” at No. 3—making Carpenter, according to Billboard, “the second act overall after the Beatles … to place two initial top-three hits with no other billed artists in the region simultaneously.” (An odd chart record, but long story short: Carpenter is achieving world-class chart berths now.) One week later, “Please” rose to No. 1, largely because the song’s streams actually grew after its debut—to 50.9 million, the kind of streaming number Kendrick Lamar’s beef records with Drake have been racking up lately.

In Carpenter’s case, those streams were boosted by its music video, whose co-star is Barry Keoghan, Oscar nominee, Saltburn star, and Irish internet boyfriend. He’s currently Carpenter’s actual boyfriend, and half a year after we all watched him hump a gravesite for director Emerald  Fennell, he is swimming in weirdo–bad-boy cred, which he brings to his role in the clip as a gun-toting thug and Carpenter’s jailhouse crush. His presence is a stroke of genius insofar as it gives Carpenter, three years after the Rodrigo–Bassett mishegoss, a new sexy metanarrative. And as any modern pop star from Taylor Swift to Ariana Grande will tell you, in the age of parasocial fandom, the metanarrative is essential.

With the year only half over, 2024 has already gone down as a great one for the Main Pop Girl, with Beyoncé, Swift, Grande, Billie Eilish, and Charli XCX all delivering. (Even the relative failures have been interesting—forget the haters, I like the Dua Lipa album.) In the second half, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, due in August, now stands as perhaps the most anticipated LP yet to come—amazing when you consider the aforementioned competition: artists, just a couple of years ago, she was either opening for or aspiring to emulate. Unlike any of those high-profile divas, Carpenter’s album will drop with not one but two already coronated hits. Best of all, “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” have the kind of stylistic and genre breadth that screams “career artist”—which Carpenter earned after a decade of putting in the work. Does it make sense that the weirder single is the Hot 100 No. 1? Who cares? Sabrina Carpenter has already won.