Switched on Pop - The Imperfect Feminine: Camila, Charli, and Sabrina

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

The first half of 2024 has been for the “pop girlie.” It seems like every major artist who’s dominated the discourse this year has been a woman, ostensibly making music about what it means to be a woman. There’s Camila Cabello's "Chanel no.5,” Lorde and Charli XCX working out the labyrinth of emotions that come with female friendship on the “Girl, so confusing” remix, and Sabrina Carpenter’s ode to the female ego, “Please Please Please." On this episode, Charlie, Nate, and Reanna – with some insight from journalist Ilana Kaplan – unpack these tracks at length, exploring what these artists are saying about femininity, and by extension, themselves. Songs discussed: Camila Cabello – Chanel No.5 Camila Cabello – I LUV IT (ft. Playboi Carti) Camila Cabello – DREAM-GIRLS Charli XCX – Girl, so confusing Charli XCX, Lorde – The girl, so confusing version with lorde Sabrina Carpenter – Please Please Please Read more from Ilana Kaplan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm producer Rianna Cruz. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So, y'all, happy to be here

with the of you. It's a pleasure. Always. The biggest album of Summer is here, and we're finally talking about it. It's the center of the conversation. Her name is on everybody's lips. Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Does it start with the C? It does. It starts with the C. Okay. C. H? No? Charlie, I hear you. I see you, and we're going to get to that. But I, of course, I'm talking about former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello.

Oh, what? Really? The reveal. Twist. I feel cheated because my namesake, Charlie X-E-X has the biggest record of the summer,

Brat, you've got some explaining to do. Camilla's new album C, X-O-X-O, came out this past Friday. It's 14 tracks, and it paints a multicolored, deeply fascinating picture

of who Camilla Cabello is as a musician and also as a woman in music. And the latter specifically is what interests me. Over the past few months and the last few weeks even, we've seen an influx of female artists addressing head on the idea of femininity and what it means to be a woman in their work. From the other C artist that you mentioned Charlie XX on Girl So Confusing, It's so confusing sometimes to be a girl. To Sabrina Carpenter on her number one hit, please, please, please. So today, what I thought we do, if you indulge me,

is look at a couple of tracks on Camila's new record, as well as some other heaters of the moment, and try to unpack how these songs are expressing different or perhaps the same sides of the feminine experience. I'm so here for this. And Rihanna, I mean, you've come to the right place for hard-hitting issues having to do with finding your place as a woman in the world. I mean, who better to talk to than Nate and Charlie? Experts.

Well, maybe we could go to the experts, the musicians themselves. And maybe, I don't know, maybe I'll bring in a woman or two to discuss these hard-hitting issues on Switched-on Pop. Okay, okay. Secret guests. That's kind of crazy, but all right, we'll go with you. So let's start with the woman of the moment, Camila Covello. I feel like it's been a hot minute since we checked in with Camila Cabello on the show. In fact, I would say it was probably 2018 with her song Havana featuring Young Thug. That was the last time we covered her.

And that track felt very in the zeitgeist back in 2018. A little bit of hip hop, a little bit of Cuban salsa all wrapped up in this. nice pop package. This, I love it, L-U-V, love, to be clear. It sounds very different. This feels hyper-poppy, a little experimental, a little rougher around the edges. What do you think our C-artists of the day is trying to accomplish with this new sound, Rihanna? You know, I think Camila is trying to correct the narrative about herself. I think a lot of people write off Camila Cabello as an artist that maybe is shallow or doesn't really have a rich interior construction.

A common criticism waged against those who begin their careers in a boy group or girl group. We hear that all the time. Formed on the X factor, no less. The number one industry plants. That'd be a great name for a nursery, by the way. Just putting that out there. Industry plants. Oh, definitely on sunset.

What were we talking about, Rihanna? We were talking about Camila's new sound on this album and how she's trying to change the narrative around her since her debut. As I said before, Camila started as a member of the Girl Group Fifth Harmony and has had the most solo success of the five members. You know, shout out Normani's new record. But Camila really takes the cake. No one else has had a hit of the caliber of Havana, which we played earlier,

which is currently over 2 billion Spotify streams. Dang. Multi-Billion Air Club. CXOXO takes Camila's work in a direction that seems largely unfamiliar because her last album Familia highlighted her Cuban roots on songs like La Buena Vida. That's fire. This record, CXOXO, as we heard with I Love It, takes a sharp left, and Nate, you mentioned earlier, puts Camila in the world of hyperpop.

I'm talking heavy auto tune, glitched out samples, and strange esoteric lyrics, perhaps most apparent on the ballady single Chanel number five. Yeah, what another departure from the Camila sound we've come to know. One thing that strikes me about this track, in addition to those hyperpop elements that you identified, Rihanna, there's something about the song that is a little bit disconcerting when you listen to it in terms of like where where's the downbeat where is the pulse of the song it's a little bit up in the air there are no bumpers on the bowling alley for this song you know it's a little bit like in outer space so i really enjoy listening to this i feel like part of that ungroundedness

comes across in the contrast of these very hypersexualized, very confident lyrics that are set against the backdrop of this beat, which has this tape warbled piano, it feels very dusty, kind of unattractive. Yeah. And the way that she delivers the vocal is heavily auto-tuned, a little mumble-wrappy, almost more to create a vibe than to be understood.

That's how I feel about most of this record. The whole, you know, she's working to create a vibe more than to be understood. And it's interesting to unpack what this song sounds like. But I think the real tough nut to crack here are Camilla's lyrics. Understanding this song and the rest of the Camille album to me feels like solving like a cursed Rubik's Cube. You know, like every time you're like close to like finishing it, the next move sort of gets it away from you. You know, it's like really hard to parse and almost like punishing in trying to figure it out. And this song really, really gives me pause.

And it's quite fascinating. So let's look at verse one. Yes. And it's lyrics and try to unpack what Camila is trying to say. Fold for me like origami, magic and rich. like Morikami, red-chipped nails. I'm Wabi-Sabi. Make you tongue-tied like new Shibari, subtle and complex, like umami.

Up to me like Omikasi. Okay, we get it. You've been to Nobu. Good for you. Yeah, right. You went to Kyoto. You saw the cherry blossoms. We're happy for you.

Yeah, a little bit of a Japanophile thing happening here. Reminds me a lot of the vocal styling of Grimes, who also will take on a sort of J-pop, a very breathy vocal. And I'm somewhat skeptical of using this extended metaphor of the few things that you've seen from Japan. Like, what are you trying to articulate? One of the things that comes across, I think, more as the song progresses, is that there's a lot of seduction here. It's about a relationship, which she calls criminal, the beginning of the song. I got shit number five, never survived.

It's a cram to cram. You watch me to wine. I know, I know. And I think we might be hearing a little bit of like the girlfriend experience and that maybe she is evoking the idea of like the Japanese geisha. There's no clear direct allusions to sex work. But the way that she describes what she's wearing, the confidence that she carries the way in which she uses, that this narrative uses their sexuality within a relationship which is not supposed to be happening and is some kind of marital trist. I think that's a bit of what we're hearing. Damn, Charlie's got a whole like extended narrative for this song.

I know, I was like initially it does kind of sound like nonsense to me. No, Charlie's got got his like in the director's chair. He's got the whole vision. Well, I find this very interesting because for one, like I've never heard origami rhymed with maracami or shibari for that matter. But once you dig deeper, right, like once you get past the like this is nonsense sort of initial reaction. Each line kind of hits at something bigger. Camilla herself spoke of CXOXO and this song specifically as, quote, a very sensual one, meaning of the senses. And that's communicated in a lyrical specificity.

She says, magic and real like Murakami, not referring to the artist, Takashi Murakami, but the magical realism author, Haruki Murakami. A deeper cut. Wind up Bird Chronicles Hive, rise up. She follows it by saying red-chipped nails, I'm Wabi-Sabi. And Wabi-Sabi refers to the traditional Japanese aesthetic worldview of imperfection. Each line, which on the service seems trivial, paint a more imperfect, a more detailed picture of who Camila Cabo is. Even in those lines that we just communicated, she is magic and real like Murakami. is into this magical realism.

Wabi-sabi, she is imperfect, you know, like make you tongue-tied like new Shibari. She's tying. I wish I could explain that line, actually. I think it's okay. What's Shabari? I'm not familiar with it. It's a form of BDSM.

Oh, that's Shabari, yeah. Tell me more, Charles. No, we're good. I have family that listens to this podcast. So, yeah, this kind of tapestry of sensory feelings. that she's communicating in this verse reveals a larger picture of Camila Cabello, which is interesting

when Camila's big hits look at her in this simplified, almost Latin fetishized way, mainly a song like her Sean Mendez's collaboration, Senorita. Okay, so rather than being something like a Latin sex object, what we have here is her talking about the seductive.

of confidence of putting on her fancy perfume. Riss, ritz, spritz, spitz. Thank you. Little Anamonopoeia right there. A bunch of the metaphors kind of contradict that confidence, that show that there is some sort of imperfection, as you said,

that perhaps even the vocal styling, the fact that it isn't articulated and every consonant is clean, and instead it's kind of mumbled and like it all paints this larger picture of imperfection. So Chanel number five is painting this picture of the imperfect feminine. And on other songs on the record, Camilla is playing with a similar idea of womanhood,

but from the kind of external rose-colored glasses view of perfection. I'm thinking of a song like Dreamgirls. I was thinking of that same song. I can't believe it. Anyone else getting Lou Begum? Mambo number five vibes here. With the sort of bad trumpets. I mean, we got the like regatone

beat. Well, we've got the listing of like, you know, sexy women's names. Oh. I don't know. This is a fun track. Her voice sounds completely different on this track. It's like there's this interesting thing where as she's moving into this new project,

I feel like she's embracing the different modes of vocal expression that she can use. Like when you were playing Senorita, I was like, oh, wow, she's belting, you know, she's doing this like pop diva thing. Here she's doing this thing where it's like, no, let me make my voice sound weird and mutable

and chameleonic. So a very different kind of vocal approach on this record is what I'm hearing. Camelionic. Good word for camillianic. Not even intentional, y'all. I'm just on that wavelength. I change it up like origami, y'all. No, no.

You're done. Okay. But Sorry to take it back to Mom in Number 5. We have Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary, and Jessica. Who is Camila talking about here? She's talking about Keisha, Sonia, Tanya, Monique, Nisi, and Kiki. And are these specific Dreamgirls or just, like, generic? I hope these are real people. I think they're her, you know, her homegirls, her besties.

because this song is not about Camila. It's about her friends and experiencing the world with her friends as a teenager, as a young adult. And contrary to Chanel number five, which is like laden with references, the song is simple and it's almost cheeky in a way. It's simple and it's cute and it kind of communicates this nostalgic girlhood and girl friendships. Shout out to songs about friendship. I always love them. So that's a nice departure in terms of the different aspects of femininity or hearing explored on this record. Chanel number five was like we commented so sensual, so lascivious even.

This is much more kind of innocent and pure and childlike. The pre-cores says, play some 2000s. They're on shuffle. I guess shout out to the iPod shuffle there. Makes me think of us in 08 takes me back to the days. Yeah, she's like recounting these experiences with her homegirls, and it's like shifting the perspective off of an internal monologue to the external. It's deflecting off of her point of view, and it's not about her.

It's about perceiving these experiences through. as I said earlier, these rose-colored glasses and this, you know, young, dumb, innocent quotes around that way of experiencing life. So Dreamgirls takes this kind of girlhood and female community and puts it on a pedestal as if it's a nostalgic ideal, this kind of easy female community that as an adult, perhaps Camila yearns for and looks back and goes, man, I had it good. And speaking of female community, when we come back from break, we're going to look at a track that directly addresses this in extremely candid terms. Nice. It's going to get juicy. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

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So we're switching off of Camilla and going to the other C artists of the month, and that is Charlie XCX. Her new album, Brat, has taken over the summer. Big Brat summer. Big Brat summer. Everybody's talking about it. I saw a green car on the street yesterday and went, that's Brat car. It's a very exciting moment because Charlie XX has been working to build the pop icon moment of her career for a decade. And I think we covered her in our third episode.

ever back in 2014. Wow. Her song Boom Clap. I'm pretty sure that was in episode three, which was titled Boom Boom, Boom, Bang, Pow. There were a lot of songs that were into using sounds as choruses. You had to be there. You know, she's had a couple of hits on the charts, but never been the sort of the topic of the moment.

And now she's put out this album, Brat, and it seems to be the most dominant sound in clubs. She has really captured the popular imagination around the idea of celebrity and what that means in 2024 through the use of many references of other microcelebrities, macro celebrities, girlfriends, and so on. Yeah, it's a testament to her cultural reach right now that even the slyb green color of her album cover. Yeah. And it's awkward, out of focus, weirdly space typography has gone on to have a life of its own. Like you were saying, you know, you see a car like, oh, brat green. I saw someone make a TikTok of cooking brots and they made three gross green style loaves that said brought slash brat on them and then stuff with Brought Wars. Yeah.

I do not love it. Oh, Rihanna, save us. Well, I think we should focus on the track that has perhaps commanded the brat discourse the most. And that is girl so confusing. It's so confusing sometimes you'd be a girl. Right away, I'm noticing a connection to Camilla that I, wasn't expecting, which is this hybrid space of confidence and insecurity. This is a dance pop song. It is meant for the club. And yet, she's singing about how confusing it is to be a girl with really

pitchy vocals. Even though she's using auto tune, she's kind of intentionally layered her vocal in a way that it sounds a little autotune, not so confident, directly addressing what she's saying. feels so confusing, not even singing in tune with myself. And I think if we were to sing along with it, her fans who might feel the same way, might also sing along slightly out of tune. I also think it's interesting how Girl is used as kind of a double entendre, where she's saying,

girl, it's so confusing to be a girl, right? But the syntax of the title and the lyrics in the song are, Girl, comma, so confusing. As if she's talking to somebody and being like, girl, it's so confusing. double meaning. It makes me think about something R. Charlie told me that he read about Charlie X-E-X

that she tries to make her lyrics sound like a text message. Yeah, no flowery metaphor, just direct, this is what I would text you. There's no subtext. There's no figurative language. It's just like, what you see is what you get. Which is what's so powerful about this album.

Because a lot of what we get is direct language about how it feels to be this sort of kind of celebrity with this strange status that's like kind of known, but also not. And she also speaks pretty plainly about specific girls, right? She's addressing someone very important in this song. Yeah, the whole record is extremely internal. Charlie leaves nothing off the table. On Girl So Confusing, she talks about her friendship,

and I put quotes around friendship, with another artist and how hard it is to, A, maintain that friendship as women, and B, the complicated mental gymnastics that goes along with passive friendships in general, where you kind of always feel in competition with those around you. Yeah, basically we're talking about the most thinly, veiled celebrity Easter egg. Right. The track is ostensibly about Lord. The Queen of the Royal. There's lines like, people say we're alike, they say we've got the same hair. Charlie and Lord

both have, you know, long, kind of unruly, black curly hair. It's easy to draw those comparisons. One has a British accent, the other has a New Zealand accent, so which are, you know, to an American, exactly the same, obviously. My favorite thinly veiled illusion is when Charlie sings, you're all about writing poems, but I'm about, you're all about writing poems, I'm about, think you should come to my party and put your hands up. Because on Lord's song, Team, Lord sings, I'm kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air. So there.

So it's a little pointed, this Charlie X, X, X, X, X track. It's not a diss. It's not like us. But it's like a little, it's a little prickly. Yeah. She's taking some pot shots. It's a little prickly. And people, you know, immediately through comparison.

to Lord. And the track expresses this core sentiment that Charlie and this other girl would love to connect and make music together if this inherent blockage, whether it be, you know, of the self or of their relationship, wasn't in the way. What really took this over the edge, though, is a remix of Girls So Confusing in which Charlie featured the artist herself, none other than Lord. Damn, that is candid. And, you know, the phrase, let's work it out on the remix. That is an incredible turn of phrase. Yeah, that is going to enter the lexicon.

It contains one of the few moments of rhyming in this. She says, well, honestly, I was speechless, which later rhymes three lines down with, let's work it out on the remix. But the rest of this verse is very loose and has that feeling of being like a text message. Like, the end words are speechless, voice note, feeling remix. Let's go out, minute, head, pictures, couple years, body, thin, or weight back. There's not really any rhyme. The flow is just kind of like following the natural rhythm of the words.

It feels like they're in a real conversation. It felt like Charlie doing slam poetry for a second. That will never, ever happen, a promise. It feels like we have an ear to the door. of a very private conversation. And honestly, the song makes me a little bit uncomfortable. And because it's like I feel like I shouldn't be hearing this. Like, I feel like these two artists, Charlie and Lord,

are really getting to the heart of these issues that women perhaps feel in female friendships. They're getting to the heart of that in a way that feel so real and raw that, wow, like it takes a certain level of candor to communicate that. on a song that is immediately going to blow up. I'm just realizing the only other obvious rhyme I'm catching continues, like, multiple stanzas down from the speechless remix.

And at the very end, she says that I forgot that inside the icon, there's still a young girl from Essex. Remix in Essex. So when she's saying, like, we're going to work out on the remix, Charlie, and I forgot that, like, all this beef that we've had between us or this sort of, whatever, discomfort, is this projection. I forgot that, you know,

you're still this young girl from Essex. You're just a person. There's a little poetry in that. I didn't realize the verse rhymes like that. I just kind of thought it was like stream of consciousness, letting it all out, you know, not really going back and editing, just kind of being like, this is what's up.

That may be the case. But there is this nice little moment, little chef's kiss at the end. I like it. I like it. Which communicates exactly what's going on here. Like working out in public, are imperfections and showing that all the things that we're holding on to, we don't need them.

They're not serving us. In fact, they even talk about how they know if they do this. They're going to blow up the internet and, you know, be bigger together. Solidarity. Even the title of the song has this kind of lack of artifice and pretense. It's just called Girl So Confusing the Version with Lord. It's like straight out of the draft. drafts file, you know, on your hard drive.

Yeah. Is this all lowercase? It must be. Oh, please, Charlie. Do you even need to ask? Okay. Yeah. Brat is all over case.

I'm just glad we have some, like, spacing and punctuation. That's nice from my old, my middle-aged brain. I think what also amplifies the importance of the song is that it's an extremely candid internal monologue from an artist, Lord, that historically is super closed off. Charlie is very, you know, open. She's very on the internet. throughout the course of this record really bears her soul in terms of what

she's thinking, Lord doesn't really do that and hasn't really been in the public eye since she put out solar power in 2020. Her pandemic album that wasn't quite the hit that I think she was hoping it to be. She was the original

Duleepa radical optimism. Ooh, oh boy. I just got to go back and fact check for a second. It's not all lowercase. The is capitalized. Ah, of course. And it's notable here. I'm sorry, but this is an important moment.

The original song is, Girl, So Confusing. And the remix is The Girl, so confusing version with Lord. I appreciate the correction. I do want to get this right. This little article here is important. It's saying, here's who the girl is.

Like, this is the girl I was talking about, just so we're all clear. No? No? It's the girl. It's Lord. I was with you. But that's not what the syntax or the same.

sentence is saying. So I've... Maybe it's... The version is the so-convusing version. You know? The girl, comma, so-confusing version with Lord. Now it all makes sense. I'm not sure we've gotten to any greater sense of clarity, but I think if we keep talking about it for another 20 minutes, we will. All in all, the song, you know, is a very real reflection of female friendships, the idea of that one can conjure in their own head kind of, you know, lean into the spiral of insecurity that then becomes projected on the other person.

Because what Lord and Charlie work out on the remix is that neither of them really disliked the other or really had beef with the other. It was just kind of their own internal monologue, their internal tribulations, that then they used. to direct at the other person and kind of use that as a barrier, you know? Here's why I used to not like you, and this is why you got problems, but it's okay. Let me air out all my insecurities. Next time the two of you have beef, I'm going to say, hey, guys, let's work it out. Let's work it out of the remix. Definitely, definitely.

So what's interesting is that all the songs that we've talked about express femininity in relationship to perhaps themselves or other women around them. And I think it could be interesting to look at a song that expresses womanhood and specifically heterosexual womanhood in relationship to a man. And that's in Sabrina Carpenter's number one Billboard hit. Please, please, please, please. Please, please kind of expresses a universal feeling that transcends gender. You know, the don't embarrass me.

Please. This is another sort of in-between feeling. Great songs I think often are about those in-between. feelings that are hard to articulate. It's not just don't embarrass me. It's like there might be something really wrong in our relationship and yet I still want something from it. It's like she talks about this guy as having like a devil inside of him that could come out and deeply embarrass her. And yet in the second verse, she's also like, but I'd like to keep you around in my bedroom. Maybe just stay inside. I know you're craving some fresher, but the ceiling fan is so nice.

And so it's a very uncomfortable, like probably toxic relationship that should end, but the narrator here can't quite navigate what the right path is to this relationship. Sonically, I feel like the song sits somewhere in between country and disco pop, a blend that maybe Casey Musgraves really mainstreamed in her 2018 hit High Horse. And it feels appropriate for this song because as you were saying, Charlie, there's a lot of pathos in it, but it's also got a little bit of an edge as well. Yeah. Especially when she swoops down into the lowest register of her voice to deliver a very lip snarled motherfucker.

There's a little bit of twang on it too, I think. I also like the phrasing of that section, too. Because the phrasing to me feels stream of consciousness, kind of just letting it go, Don't embarrass me, motherfucker. Okay, Charlie, it's your turn. Motherfucker. That was a little Toby Keith with him. That was a little too country.

Sounds like you had had a fifth of Jack Daniels before you sing that. It says I haven't. Oh. Oh, man. This is a sober podcast. No Shabari, though. No. I hear the country thing that you're talking about, not just in the lyrical styling and a little bit of that twang, but also just the chords that we have here are not very poppy. They're almost more like throwback older, foky country stuff. Like, it's a very cordy song. A cordy song. Yeah, it's a cordy song. There's a lot of harmonic movement. Like the narrative of the song sort of moves with the chords, which are always changing and pushing in a direction.

constantly descending downward. The least descending, there's all, this is always falling feeling, which I think obviously mirrors the sinking feeling she has in the lyrics. But I'm calling it cordy because there's also these sort of like,

there's these two sections that really sort of push on the harmonic boundaries of contemporary pop. We get just lots of chords. As I said, in the second verse, we actually modulate to a whole other key in this very bizarre way. Moving from a E to C.

And in this modulation, this is where she's like, actually, you know, maybe we could be together and we could just like screw out of my bedroom. And that's not enough. Like, she needs to keep this narrative going. And so we get, the ending of this song is like a bridge coda, outro. I don't even know what to call it.

It's its own new section where we get entirely new harmonic material. Maybe transcending the relationship, I don't quite know. Oh my gosh. There's just so many chords. I feel like we could read that outro as being sort of wishful. You know, maybe there is a world in which this works out. But I like how the song is a little bit up in the air. Is her pleading going to be, you know, reciprocated?

Well, she does say, don't make me hate you prolifically at the end. Please, please, please, please. I don't think it's going to go well. Well, I mean, speaking of the country tradition, though, I do agree with Nate that the lyrics feel a little bit ambiguous to me because she's not necessarily breaking up with him and she's also not, I think, chastising him in a way for his bad actions. She's sticking with him, you know,

and when I listen to it, it reminded me of Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man. Oh, yeah. Because she's singing about kind of the same thing, you know, sticking with your man despite his shortcomings. I feel like we're about to have a discussion on tradwifing and popular music. Sabrina Carpenter is kind of spitting the trad wife thing, though. It's like, I will stand by you, even though everybody thinks you're nothing, and you better not prove them right, or else I will hate you prolifically.

So, Rian, if we return to the idea of different facets of femininity as expressed by these different artists. How might you sum up this vision of what it means to be a woman? I think what Sabrina is communicating, perhaps, is the inherent ego and preservation of it in presence of a perhaps less, seemly, more unbecoming man. And it's something that a song like girl so confusing excuse in favor of candid expression. Please, please, please is a little bit shrouded. It's a little bit vaguer. She speaks directly about her ego. And it talks about how Sabrina feels responsible for her partner's actions in a way because of the power dynamics in the relationship. She might be speaking in slightly more vague terms, but she's also not above dropping a not-so-thinly-veiled

reference. I mean, in the first verse, she said, says, I heard that you're an actor, so act like a stand-up guy. Sabrina Carpenter has dated actors. Yes. We don't need to name names because there's no remix yet, but it's very likely she's, you know, pointing a finger at a past public figure in her life. Are Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodriguez going to work it out on the remix? Mm, one can only hope.

But looking at all of these songs, you know, all within the same month time span or so. It really makes it seem like this is a cultural moment for womanhood and reflecting femininity in your work. The pop music with the most fervent support right now all focuses on the female experience. I'm even extending beyond, you know, Sabrina Carpenter, Charlie X, X, X, Camila Cabello, and looking at artists like Gracie Abrams or Chapel Rhone. Billy Eilish. Yeah, you could call this whole thing maybe a feminine omiton. That was a good one, Charlie.

Charlie's waiting for like a thunderous round of applause. It's a song by Chapel Rhone. Yeah, we know. By the way, everybody has been asking to talk more about Chapel Rhone because she's having a moment. I just want to say that Rihanna Cruz had a fabulous interview with Chapel back in December, and everyone should go listen to it. We were too ahead of the curve. We were ahead of the curve.

Undone by our own premonition. I just wanted to give you props for that interview. But to your point, we are in this moment of discussing feminine numinons. I don't know how to say it. I'm sorry. Feminineomenon. I've lost it. Throw this man a life preserver. Or just let him drown.

I'm sure Sabrina Carpenter would love that. So to digress, I wanted to know why these artists are having a moment right now and why there's a kind of focus on femininity in pop music. And somebody that's done a lot of thinking on this and is very passionate about these artists is music and culture writer Alana Kaplan. So to close us out, I will let her take it away. It feels like we have entered an arrow that whether or not you're queer or straight, girls are supporting each other, like at least in the music. They're trying to at least and uplift each other. I think that there are feminine flourishes with each of these artists, not all necessarily, you know, the same,

but they're all kind of coming together at one time and speaking to the same idea. Not to be like everything connects back to the Eros Tour, but I do feel like the Eres Tour reignited this desire for nostalgia and a lot of the earlier records from Taylor really leaned into femininity and girlhood. And I feel like the success of that has also precipitated in other ways, including the artists that she's brought on tour like Sabrina or Gracie, it's tapping into what people care about, what women care about at the moment. I feel like they're showing that there's no right way to be feminine. And I think that that goes beyond gender and that anyone can express their femininity. And I think a lot of women in particular, like, sometimes you don't realize that you've been

experiencing a certain emotion for so long until you hear a song. For instance, like, girl, so confusing, hit my heart in a way I didn't expect it to. Like, I really didn't. And that song was like, did she just like reach inside my brain and bring out all of my anxieties? And like, I think that there's this personalization that's happening, particularly in the way that songs speak to women. And I just think it hits hard when that happens. And it's, you kind of just want to continue hearing more. of it. Switched on Pop is produced by Rana Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by Arras Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr. Our executive producer is Neshaq Kerwa, or a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. Subscribe to New York Magazine at nymag.com slash pod. You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts and at switchedonpop.com and at Switched on Pop on

all social media. Anything that floats your boat, we got it. Next week, we'll be back with a brand new episode featuring Charlie in conversation with the phenomenal sibling duo Lawrence hearing about how they are making their way through a music industry out to get small artists as an independent act, even going all the way to Congress to try and stake their claim in the music world. Very fun in review. conversation so definitely want to tune into that and until then all that remains is for us to say thanks thanks for listening for listening