"Dumb & Poetic"
Sabrina Carpenter
Short n' Sweet
2024
Judge a pop album by its worst song, and you can get a pretty good read on how it's going to go down overall. I would argue that "Dumb & Poetic" is the worst song on the pretty darn good Short n' Sweet. It's just too slow for my tastes. But it's still not that bad. At least it's an acoustic guitar ditty with some strings and not a painful piano dirge. I've heard enough of those.
Judge a whole pop movement by the worst song on one album, and you can get a pretty good read on how the cookies are cut. What I don't understand is why these talented young women are putting out really great pop bangers ("Espresso," I'll admit, is pretty fucking fun) but then feel compelled to put these corny-ass ballads on the albums. Pam tells me that they are using it as a way to show off their vocal range. That's fine, but it doesn't make for exciting listening. I wish just one pop artist worth a damn would eschew these fucking slow songs in favor of a tight dozen uptempo jams.
Judge a whole pop movement by the lyrical content of all of its songs, and you start to require a name for the genre. I'm not the authority here, so maybe I'm not the guy to name it. But there really does seem to be this entire subgenre of upbeat pop that uses pop psych vocabulary words and isn't afraid to get "dirty" and really lean into the fallibility and quirky imperfections of their otherwise heroic female leads. (An idea first formulated during the Chappell Roan review.)
I've landed on "Found Drama" as the subgenre name that I will be referring to this class of pop music as. I can't get into my reasoning because of the word count. But I'll give quick examples. Found Drama is music that focuses on womanhood while refusing to decenter the idea of the male. Found Drama asks you to relate to her fuckups, because you understand that most of those fuckups were fueled by lust and excess. Only in Found Drama music can you hear a female deliver the verbal beatdown of "Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen" (copying a lyric from fellow Found Dramatics boygenius). Found Drama asks you to be yourself, your full damn self, and then asks you to force your full damn self to make a TikTok video. Found Drama feels real and true in the moment, and the songs are so sticky that you somehow convince yourself that they will stay real and true no matter how old you get.
Judge a good song that fits snuggly into a subgenre that I just made up, and you can get a pretty good read on why I feel the way I feel about this song, this artist, this album, this pop movement. Pretty good stuff, but quickly becoming unoriginal.
2 comments:
1) Seems like a pretty straightforward country play.
2) Something I saw that I think is correct is that this crop of pop represents a return to "singing your guts out," as opposed to whispering / talking. Roan does more of this than Sabrina, but she gears up more than the average.
I'll buy the "singing your guts out" description. I think I take issue with the fact that it seems like your Found Drama pop star feels the need to make the singing-the-guts-out songs slower and sappier. Whereas there's a winning formula right there, surrounding 'em on the same damn album, and I just don't understand why this sort of ballad needs to exist still at all.
Post a Comment