🟧 The song of the summer?

Debating Sabrina Carpenter’s single Espresso

Kyle Chayka: If you haven’t listened to the burgeoning pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s new hit single Espresso, please take the opportunity to do so now. It’s not hard; the song is only 3:20 with a beachy music video, and if you’re short on time you can listen to the nightcore / sped-up version in 2:36. 

It’s undeniably catchy. The track has airy synths that taper off like a squeezebox and vocal flourishes of a Sky Ferreira / Ariana Grande vintage. Past the instrumentals, the lyrics start coming through, which is when the true hypnosis begins. Carpenter compares herself to coffee, keeping some boy awake with romantic anxiety: “Say you can't sleep, baby, I know / That's that me, espresso.” The doubled “that” glitches the listener’s brain. To generously interpret it in internet vocab, maybe the line is like, espresso, that’s so me or it me, espresso. But it sounds even more recursive; “that me” is the meme, “espresso” is the comparison. Is Carpenter so caffeinated that coffee is like her? Then we come to the true showstopper: “I'm working late 'cause I'm a singer / Oh, he looks so cute wrapped around my finger.” The line is sung with such vacuity that it sounds like an A.I. model trying to identify itself, each phrase a total non-sequitur.  

Speaking of artificiality, Carpenter has been a manufactured image for more than a decade. She emerged in the Disney ecosystem circa 2013, when she was 14 years old. She got embroiled in a sung-about love triangle with her Disney cohort Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett. Then she opened for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour at the same time that Taylor and Olivia’s previously established friendship seemed to be crumbling. Among that pop-star triad, Carpenter seems the least heavy on self-disclosure, leaning more toward nonsensical bubblegum.

Granted, pop music doesn’t need to make sense. The song of the summer is just about capturing a mood. Maybe this mood is a little queasy, a little sickly sweet, a grasping for the normalcy of a beach day in a world where nothing is innocent. Not that any message is inherent in the song, of course. All it says is “that’s that me.”  

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Nate Gallant: Sometimes, a pop song hits you at the wrong moment, like when you're exhaustedly driving from Newark back to your house after a long, long work day. And instead of merely assessing whether the song of the summer has come too early or not, you fall back on your life as a someone who tries to make their way in the world by unpacking meaning in culture, and think, perhaps resentfully, that if there is any better demonstration that Americans do not understand espresso, it might be Sabrina Carpenter's new song of the same name. You think, espresso is supposed to be dark, dense, potent: a quick, powerful shot that leaves an impact. Instead, Carpenter’s Espresso is more like the bad old days of American cappuccinos. The song is absolutely unpalatable without the industrially perfected presentation of milky white girl and the granulated sugar of hi-fi synth.

Perhaps, however, you just listened to a song made for TikTok before it blew up on TikTok. This might explain the song's puzzling lack of friction. It's a series of disconnected verses, made to be chopped up, deconstructable into 10-second clips. It is a smoothness and vapidity that could even make one curious as to why Taylor Swift associates herself with this persona. Whatever we think of her actual "everygirl" status, Swift has traded very successfully on the lyrical image of exclusion, of being shaped by a girlhood of heartbreak, never being "that girl," well into Midnights. Whether she is bearing the brunt of lookism in high school; Kanye's male chauvinism and the women who enabled him; sexual harassment or sexism in media, she is always facing some kind of narrative obstacle. Listeners, fellow humans, identify with that struggle, her confrontation with imperfection. Could “Espresso” be too perfect to be this popular, too obvious to be really compelling? 

But then, you talk to everyone in your life, who loves this song; you see everyone vibing to it in every bar you walk into and you're compelled to think — maybe it's best to lean into the blunt force metonymy or hot girl alchemy of pop, and not fight its insistence that words be everything and nothing or whatever I say they are, and let Espresso expressly sprint headlong from any legible symbolism and sing us into the sweet, humid chaos of another themed summer. Just let it be the candy. Best not to look at the ingredients and just enjoy. 

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