Sabrina Carpenter leaves audiences with mixed feelings with the slated release of her Album, Man’s Best Friend, on August 29th of this year. Sabrina Carpenter is a 26-year-old singer-songwriter and is currently a dominant force in pop.
Carpenter released her debut album in April of 2015 and, since then, has amassed over 64 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Carpenter’s most popular songs generally feature romantic relationships and tend to have a lot of sexual undertones.
Some of Carpenter’s most popular songs are “Espresso,” “Taste,” “Please Please Please,” and “Nonsense.” All of these songs have over 1 billion streams; “Espresso” in particular has over 2 billion streams.
What makes this accomplishment especially impressive is that Carpenter achieved all of the numbers on these songs without having any features. In fact, aside from a remix featured on a deluxe version, Carpenter’s last two albums have no features from other artists. Despite this, Carpenter’s albums performed exceptionally well.
World meets carpenter
While Carpenter is mainly known for her musical career, she originally started off as an actor. Between 2011 to 2013, Carpenter was primarily cast as minor characters in various films and series. In 2014, she would have her first big break by landing a role in the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World.
In Girl Meets World, Carpenter plays Maya Hart, a fifteen-year-old who is the main character’s best friend. Carpenter also sang the theme song for the show along with co-star Rowan Blanchard. The show was decently successful and still has a few die-hard fans to this day.
“I love the show, I find it funny, you can even learn some life lessons from Cory,” notes one Reddit User. “And of course, [I like] the fact that Sabrina Carpenter is in it.”
“[My favorite part of the show was] the theme song and Maya as a character,” another Reddit user comments.
Girl Meets World was also nominated for numerous awards. However, even though the show was reasonably popular, Disney ended up cancelling the show after its third season. Many suspect that Disney cancelled the show due to a dwindling viewership.
Reasons for show’s cancellation
The first season seemed to have an average of around 3 million viewers, while the third ended up with a bit less than 2 million. Some viewers believe the shifts within the show’s focus are to blame for the decrease in viewership.
“They were trying to get into deeper, mature themes, and also probably season 3 ratings didn’t hit the mark and everything,” one Reddit user mentions.
Additionally, while Girl Meets World received nominations for about 15 awards during its 3 year run, the show ultimately only won one of those awards. Without a consistently growing fanbase and solid ratings, Disney had no reason to continue airing the show.
Irrespective of the viewership, some also attribute the show’s cancellation to Disney’s tendency to cancel shows after exactly 3 seasons. Many speculate that Disney cancels shows after 3 seasons to avoid paying the main cast more money.
“3 seasons is the Disney standard,” one Reddit user comments. “[Disney sets contract rates for 3 years.] If they do an extra season, they renegotiate.”
While Girl Meets World certainly came to an end in 2017, Carpenter’s career was hardly over. During her time acting, Carpenter started dipping her toes into music as well. In 2015, Carpenter released her first album titled Eyes Wide Open.
Start of carpenter’s musical career
Similar to her current music, the majority of the songs featured in Eyes Wide Open were about romance and love. Unlike her more recent songs, the songs seem to be more innocent and wholesome. In addition to this, only one of the songs had Carpenter attributed as a writer, meaning she was essentially performing songs others wrote for her.
Carpenter’s biggest shift came during her second album titled EVOLution. This album actually had Carpenter as a writer on all of the songs, showing her progress as a songwriter. Furthermore, the genre of her music shifted from folk pop to dance pop.
Carpenter would continue making dance pop music for the rest of her career. In Carpenter’s second, third, and fourth albums, there would usually only be one song that performed well. This was not the case for Carpenter’s fifth album titled Emails I Can’t Send.
In Emails I Can’t Send, almost all of the songs achieved over 50 million streams. Carpenter’s performance only skyrocketed during her next album, Short n’ Sweet. Each song in the Short n’ Sweet album hit over 100 million streams, three of them going well over 1 billion. Short n’ Sweet also won two Grammar awards, making it extremely successful commercially.
Slated to release in about a week, the next album for Carpenter is Man’s Best Friend. While the album remains unreleased, Man’s Best Friend has garnered a lot of controversy.
Controversy of new album
The controversy around the album stems from the album’s cover art. The cover art has Carpenter kneeling down like a dog in front of a man who is grabbing some of her hair. Carpenter’s pose seems to imitate a dog, nodding to the fact that people call dogs ‘man’s best friend.’
While this doesn’t seem like a big deal, some believe Carpenter is objectifying women through the cover art.
“She time-traveled back to the fifties to bring back blatant sexism and female submission,” argues one Reddit user. “Who thought that this was a good idea!”
“[The] cover is not ironic. It’s just plain old misogyny,” another Reddit user comments.
Other users believe that Carpenter is free to do as she pleases and are eagerly awaiting the album’s release.
“Half of the freaks complaining don’t even listen to her music,” highlights one Reddit user. “[they are] just looking for something to complain about.”
“Art is art it is meant to be controversial. If she wants to represent herself like this, let her,” another Reddit user notes.
Considering she started off on Disney Channel, Carpenter has consistently faced criticism for her sexual lyrics. However, irrespective of the criticism, Carpenter has carved her way to success and garnered an impressive amount of fame through her musical career.
Other album details
In terms of other details of Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter has already released one song slated to be on the album titled “Manchild.” “Manchild” features lyrics criticizing men who exhibit certain behaviors that are childish. Carpenter also notes in the song that she likes incompetent men.
The whole song appears to be ironic. The underlying message seems to be that, although some people are extremely incompetent in particular aspects, it is hard for some to resist being attracted to those individuals.
The official album is less than a week away, and although Carpenter does not have a designated tour for Man’s Best Friend, fans can catch Carpenter on her second leg of the Short n’ Sweet tour starting this October. Official start dates for the tour are on the official Sabrina Carpenter website.
Until Carpenter’s Tour, fans eagerly await the release of Man’s Best Friend, anticipating her usual clever lyrics and catchy tunes.
