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Pop music, be it on Spotify radio or radio radio, became a landmine in 2025. You\u2019re sitting there with your family \u2013 at the dinner table or in the car \u2013 enjoying the latest Taylor Swift album altogether, when suddenly you have to explain to your little children what Taylor means when she says that Travis Kelce\u2019s \u201credwood tree\u201d was \u201cthe key that opened my thighs\u201d.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s that, or you find yourself rushing to press skip on Tears by Sabrina Carpenter as she sings about getting \u201cwet at the thought of you… tears run down my thighs\u201d. It\u2019s a catchy chorus, but I don\u2019t need my five-year-old singing that around daycare, you know?<\/p>\n
Following the ridiculously bawdy Nonsense outros<\/a> that marked her breakout last year, Carpenter has since cemented her status as pop\u2019s poet laureate of lewd, the Emily Dickinson of dick \u2018n\u2019 sons. On House Tour, my favourite song on her recent album Man\u2019s Best Friend, she spends almost three minutes offering a prospective lover a tour of her, uh, home: \u201cI just want you to come inside\/ But never enter through the back door,\u201d she sings, and I blush.<\/p>\n Thanks to Sabrina\u2019s influence, pop got filthy in 2025. It was Lorde talking about getting her \u201clips \u2019round your halo\u201d (Clearblue); it was Lola Young yearning for \u201cyou to trickle right down my throat\u201d (Post Sex Clarity); it was Addison Rae \u201cwith a cigarette pressed between my tits\u201d (High Fashion); it was Lily Allen finding \u201cbutt plugs, lube inside, hundreds of Trojans\u201d in (allegedly) David Harbour\u2019s dojo (Pussy Palace); it was budding icon Romy Mars singing \u201cIf you wanna know how hard it is to listen to you talk\/ just look down at yourself when I take my clothes off\u201d (Ego). Even PinkPantheress, pop\u2019s top purveyor of sweet introversion, got blunt: \u201cYou want sex with me? Come talk to me,\u201d she sang on Tonight.<\/p>\n The biggest shock \u2013 and one that drew the most controversy around many of her fans who\u2019ve only ever thought of her as a fantasy princess \u2013 was that even Taylor Swift, one of pop\u2019s more romantically elevated songwriters, got down and dirty. As well as reflecting on her paramour\u2019s manhood (Wood), she also sings that being chastised as \u201cboring Barbie\u201d is \u201ckind of making me wet\u201d (Actually Romantic).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Coincidentally or not, these were also my favourite pop songs of the year. Am I depraved? Perhaps. But what does it mean that pop music in 2025 got so provocatively unhinged?<\/p>\n The simplest answer is the most obvious: sex sells. \u201cRecord labels know that sex sells \u2013 a tale as old as time, of course, but in the current climate of lesser censorship and government regulation online, artists can get away with lewd content more easily,\u201d says Ethan Bryant, a PhD candidate at RMIT University researching lyrical meta-reference in pop music performed by major-label female artists.<\/p>\n It\u2019s never been a better time, it seems, for pop stars to get dirty. Perhaps pop is just borrowing \u2013 as it has for decades \u2013 more spiritedly from the brashness of hip-hop, which has always had a transgressive bent built into its DNA. You can\u2019t talk about bawdy music without discussing 2 Live Crew, Too $hort, Lil Kim and, sure, even Khia<\/a>. Sometimes, not often, these artists crossed into the mainstream: I remember my 4th-grade teacher giggling uncomfortably as she berated me for playing Wrecx-n-Effect\u2019s Rump Shaker during classroom free-time one afternoon (\u201cThere\u2019ll be no more zoom-a-zooming in anyone\u2019s boom-boom!\u201d she ordered).<\/p>\n And if Salt-N-Pepa\u2019s Let\u2019s Talk About Sex felt risqu\u00e9 in the \u201990s, it\u2019s positively educational in 2025, when we\u2019ve lived through WAP, where Cardi B compared the sounds of a sexually stimulated woman to \u201cmacaroni in a pot\u201d or Sexyy Red\u2019s Pound Town, with its viral catch-cry. Around the clock on the radio right now, you can hear Come N Go<\/a>, the new hit from cult rapper Yeat \u2013 a next-gen follower of icons of filth, Future and Drake \u2013 which features a majestic beat from Working On Dying\u2019s Bnyx and horrific lyrics for anyone who\u2019s not a 13-year-old boy.<\/p>\n Sabrina Carpenter, the poet laureate of lewd pop.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Evan Agostini\/Invision\/AP<\/p>\n But unlike hip-hop, pop \u2013 with its barriers to mainstream acceptance \u2013 has traditionally had to play coy. In the past, going too hard \u2013 like, say, Madonna\u2019s Like a Virgin or Divinyls\u2019 I Touch Myself \u2013 might risk outrage and censorship. In the streaming age, all bets are off.<\/p>\n For today\u2019s pop stars, self-censorship is unnecessary and potentially even detrimental. Why hold back when the market, as in all aspects of content culture, rewards the most outlandish and extreme? The single that first broke Chappell Roan, after all, was Casual<\/a>, her graphic lament of sapphic situationships, with its soaring chorus: \u201cKnee-deep in the passenger seat and you\u2019re eating me out, is it casual now?\u201d Sabrina Carpenter was toiling in obscurity for a near-decade until she found her sex-obsessed schtick on Short n\u2019 Sweet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an unashamed comical quality to Carpenter\u2019s displays of sexuality, and it seems that Generation Z, characterised by a shared post-ironic mentality, are attracted to such garish exhibitions of explicit sex,\u201d says Bryant of Carpenter\u2019s influence on pop\u2019s zeitgeist.<\/p>\n Lily Allen and Taylor Swift, meanwhile, are playing the same game that Swift long-popularised with her diaristic songwriting, and tapping into the increasingly parasocial relationships fans and celebrities share in the social media age. The more intimate and provocative \u2013 be it personally or sexually \u2013 a pop star\u2019s work is, the better.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s at play here is the public\u2019s shared infatuation with the messiness of celebrity,\u201d says Bryant of Allen and Swift\u2019s bawdier turns this year. Tapping into the online attention economy, both artists turned interest in their real-life relationships \u2013 Swift with her fianc\u00e9 Travis Kelce, and Allen with her ex David Harbour \u2013 into hits. \u201cAllen cleverly commodified her hardship and is now reaping the benefits of that exposure, all while the final season of Harbour\u2019s hit Netflix show Stranger Things is beginning to air,\u201d says Bryant.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a danger here of looking at pop\u2019s dirty pivot in 2025 in cynical terms, an outlandish grab for attention. The truth is that none of the songs feel that way \u2013 these are just female artists expressing themselves with maximum freedom. Bryant notes that pop trends tend to be cyclical, and they\u2019re often indirectly reacting to the sociopolitical climate of the time.<\/p>\n \u201cLooking back at the MTV era, we saw similar displays of brazen sexuality in pop music while the world reeled from the September 11 attacks,\u201d he says. \u201cChristina Aguilera\u2019s Dirrty, Britney Spears\u2019 I\u2019m a Slave 4 U, Kelis\u2019 Milkshake, and Nelly Furtado\u2019s Promiscuous all featured young women declaring their sexuality in unflinching fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you want to understand why today\u2019s pop stars \u2013 and they\u2019re almost exclusively female \u2013 have pushed pop\u2019s boundaries so brazenly in 2025, just look to who\u2019s dominating culture. \u201cI think we can identify a direct line between Trump\u2019s second term as US president, and his historic repeals of women\u2019s rights legislation, to an increase in explicit themes being explored in mainstream pop performed by women,\u201d says Bryant. \u201cBy using their sexuality in praxis as a device of empowerment and pride, these women subtly refute the system that is trying to regulate that very thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Which begs the question: if all the most explicit pop this year came from female stars, where are the rowdy boys? While queer male pop stars like Troye Sivan and Conan Gray have played their part \u2013 Gray\u2019s viral video for Vodka Cranberry<\/a>, released in July, made explicit the song\u2019s searing love story between two boys \u2013 the straight dudes dominating the charts, namely Sombr, Benson Boone and Justin Bieber, are dropping the (blue) ball. Which is, perhaps, for the best: in the post-#MeToo world, no one wants that.<\/p>\n Loading<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cMale pop stars have never been at the forefront of the sexual revolution. And I think we are seeing less male pop stars embracing sexuality in the ways their female counterparts are because in our current patriarchal society, explicit male heterosexual sexuality doesn\u2019t serve much of a social purpose,\u201d says Bryant. \u201cThe ruling class \u2013 white cisgendered heterosexual men \u2013 just aren\u2019t as thought-provoking as the plethora of female pop stars that rule the charts, especially in an era when Roe v Wade has been overturned.\u201d<\/p>\n To read more from<\/b> Spectrum<\/i><\/b>, visit our page here<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n