<\/p>\n
It was a savvy move back in February when Sabrina Carpenter released a country remix<\/a> of her 2024 summer hit \u201cPlease Please Please<\/a>\u201d that featured Dolly Parton. Not just because Carpenter is a genre-fluid performer and country-pop crossovers have been \u201cin\u201d<\/a> for the past couple of years. Her commonalities with Parton have much deeper (dyed) roots.<\/p>\n \u201cShe looks like she could be my little sister,\u201d the 79-year-old icon said of the 26-year-old Carpenter to Rolling Stone in June, the magazine pointing out that each is \u201ca five-foot-tall blonde with serious pipes<\/a>.\u201d 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\u2019s really a brainiac. They\u2019re in line there with the recently deceased Loni Anderson<\/a> as Jennifer on the 1970s sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati<\/em>, the leggy radio-station receptionist who\u2019s secretly the mastermind running the place. Tracing back further, all three lifted their wiggle-with-a-knowing-wink from Marilyn Monroe, while refusing to be misused the way she was.<\/p>\n As Parton sang on her very first country hit in 1967, \u201cThis dumb blonde ain\u2019t nobody\u2019s fool<\/a>\u201d\u2014or as Carpenter put it on \u201cPlease Please Please\u201d in much more 2020s terms, \u201cI beg you, don\u2019t embarrass me, motherfucker.\u201d<\/p>\n That song, as well as the bubbling \u201cEspresso<\/a>,\u201d made last summer into Carpenter\u2019s breakout season, which she capped by releasing the album Short n\u2019 Sweet<\/em> in late August<\/a>, proving she had plenty more salty reports from the dating scene up her sleeve, or wherever she could stash them in her barely there outfits. Her popularity has only continued to escalate this year, by some measures faster than any other current pop star<\/a>.<\/p>\n She ran into a speed bump early this summer when she unveiled the cover art for her new album Man\u2019s Best Friend<\/em>; some feminist critics were alarmed by her subservient pose<\/a>, kneeling before an unseen man with his hand pulling at her hair. But only someone who hadn\u2019t listened much to Carpenter\u2019s previous songs could fail to get the point, given the album title, that the image was about men treating women like dogs\u2014with perhaps a side dish of self-recrimination for too often playing along.<\/p>\n If any confusion remains, it should be cleared up now that the full record is here. Sure enough, it proves to be another machine-gun round of chronicles from the trenches of heterofatalism<\/a>. It\u2019s a landscape Carpenter sketches colorfully, but one so bleak it\u2019s astonishing she manages to be as perky as she is about it. Perhaps she\u2019s stretching herself a bit thin in the process. Like the self-descriptive Short n\u2019 Sweet<\/em>, this album checks in with a dozen songs in under 40 minutes, refreshingly refusing to game the streaming system with bloated packages of bonus tracks and the like, but it doesn\u2019t quite manage the frictionless charm of its predecessor.<\/p>\n It\u2019s still full of wit, sass, and hooks, but a few B-grade songs drag down the momentum. Carpenter and her collaborators\u2014the core Short n\u2019 Sweet <\/em>team of co-songwriter Amy Allen<\/a> with producers Jack Antonoff and John Ryan\u2014occasionally seem to strain to pull more fresh sex bunnies out of the same top hat. This is unsurprising. Functionally Man\u2019s Best Friend <\/em>is in the same position as a typical \u201cdifficult\u201d second album, hurriedly following up to capitalize on a breakout success, even though (because Carpenter was part of the Disney Channel ranks from the age of 14), it\u2019s technically her seventh.<\/p>\n The biggest misstep here to me is actually the very first track and only advance single, \u201cManchild<\/a>.\u201d It hits too many of the same boyz R stoopid <\/em>thematic notes as Short n\u2019 Sweet <\/em>songs like \u201cSlim Pickins,\u201d \u201cSharpest Tool,\u201d \u201cDumb & Poetic,\u201d and of course \u201cPlease Please Please.\u201d And it hits them with a way-too-heavy mallet. With its 1980s keyboard stabs and blaring orchestra hits<\/a>, and its Taylor-ish spoken-word vamping about finding a \u201ccuter word\u201d for \u201cuseless,\u201d it reeks of a group of people trying way too hard to make a hit. In strict terms, they succeeded, but the song debuted at No. 1 only on the strength of preexisting pro-Sabrina goodwill, before quickly slipping out of the Top 10. It soon became another of the many also-rans in 2025\u2019s summer-without-a-song-of-the-summer<\/a>, the anticlimax to 2024\u2019s summer-song surfeit, which was in no small part thanks to Carpenter.<\/p>\n That\u2019s especially a shame because I think she might have had a chance at reiterating last year\u2019s heatwave if they\u2019d put out second track \u201cTears\u201d back in June. Instead it was launched as a single last night, including a Rocky <\/em>Horror<\/em>\u2013style video<\/a> complete with Colman Domingo as its Frank-N-Furter. It\u2019s a perfect example of Carpenter\u2019s femme-camp subversions: a Donna Summer\u2013style disco jam in which the singer gets hot, bothered, and quite frankly \u201cwet\u201d (the titular droplets are not running down her face) over fantasies of men behaving responsibly, doing dishes, and assembling Ikea furniture, not to mention\u2014oh my!<\/em>\u2014communicating respectfully. With luck it\u2019s not too late now for the song to get huge, which I dearly hope it does, if only so we all can turn to our friends in moments of stress and stage-whisper, \u201cDance break!\u201d<\/p>\n