Chappell Roan

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    Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan Saw a Gap in Pop, and Filled It

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    Two pure pop songs, “Espresso” and “Good Luck, Babe!,” may give the aspiring stars behind them a boost from music’s middle class to the big time.The caffeinated drink of the summer isn’t cold brew or iced matcha — it’s “me espresso,” a weird and strangely brilliant neologism coined by the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter in her ascendant hit “Espresso.” The track — sugary sweet, fiendishly catchy and meme-ready — has been out for only a month and change, but it is already one of the defining songs of 2024.It’s also one of the defining songs of Carpenter’s career so far. Last year, I described her as a member of “pop’s middle class”: a group of internet-beloved artists creating music that makes winking reference to pop history, whose celebrity vastly outmatches their commercial success. Although she is a new star in the minds of many, Carpenter, 25, is by no means a fresh arrival: “Espresso” was released almost 10 years to the day after her debut EP, “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Carpenter was 14 years old then; four more full-length albums have followed.Her career has been unusually slow-burning in the context of the well-oiled pop machine, and “Espresso” is a bullish breakthrough after a string of songs, including the Billboard-charting “Nonsense” and “Feather,” that had some radio and TikTok success but failed to permeate pop’s center. (“Espresso” reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is still in the Top 10.)She’s not the only middle-class pop star having a brush with more tangible success. Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” has quickly become her first hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Roan, 26, loosely fits a similar mold: Her music is funny and oftentimes covertly acerbic, and on her 2023 debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” as Carpenter did with her 2022 breakthrough “Emails I Can’t Send,” Roan tried on a variety of styles that each seemed to pay tribute to a different era of pop, sometimes even a specific diva.Chappell Roan leveraged the spectacle of her live shows to make herself omnipresent on short-form video platforms over the past year. Scott Kowalchyk/CBS, via Getty ImagesRoan first signed to a major label at 17 and was dropped five years later, a setback that compelled her to move back to her Missouri hometown and work as a barista to fund her career. She has since signed to Amusement, an imprint of Universal Music Group started by the producer Daniel Nigro specifically to release Roan’s music. “Good Luck, Babe!,” a kiss-off to an ex with a queer twist, has been streamed over 106 million times on Spotify since its early April release; for context, that’s far more than any song on Beyoncé’s splashy “Cowboy Carter,” which arrived a week earlier, with the exception of its lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Brief Tour of Pop Music’s Caffeine Addiction

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      Hear songs by Sabrina Carpenter, Squeeze, SZA and more.Sabrina Carpenter’s perky bop “Espresso” is … a bit addictive. (We’re sorry.)Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear listeners,A few weeks ago in our Friday feature the Playlist, I recommended a bubbly new single by the pop artist Sabrina Carpenter and made a bold prediction: “Get ready to hear this one everywhere.” Even more quickly than I imagined, the prophecy has come true. Last week, “Espresso” debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Carpenter’s highest charting hit yet. More important, it has taken over the nation’s psyche. You can hardly go anywhere these days without hearing someone quoting the song’s infectious hook “That’s that me espresso” or wondering aloud, “what is a ‘me espresso?’”That’s a profound philosophical question for another day. Today, we are simply honoring the absurdist joy of “Espresso” with a playlist of songs about caffeinated beverages.Coffee has been a consistently evocative theme throughout pop musical history, so this mix travels from 1940 right up to the present moment. That trusty beverage is often used to describe a sophisticated kind of romance (as it does on Otis Redding’s swooning ballad “Cigarettes and Coffee”) or perhaps the idle hours waiting around for said romance to occur (see Peggy Lee’s sultry take on the 1948 standard “Black Coffee”). Chappell Roan tries to use it as a shield against romance on a track from her 2023 album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” reasoning with a former flame, “I’ll meet you for coffee, ’cause if we have wine/You’ll say that you want me, I know that’s a lie.”In “Espresso,” Carpenter uses the caffeine metaphor to suggest how restless she makes a guy she has wrapped around her finger: “Say you can’t sleep? Baby, I know.” Also, crucially, she understands that “espresso” rhymes with “I guess so.” That’s poetry.It’s time for the percolator,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chappell Roan’s Eye-Roll Kiss-Off, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Prince, Young Miko, the Black Keys and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Chappell Roan, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’The rising pop star Chappell Roan sends an ex-lover off with an eye roll on the wrenching “Good Luck, Babe!,” a synth-driven tune that allows the dynamic vocalist to do her best Kate Bush. The subject of the song is noncommittal and perhaps in denial of her sexuality: Roan imagines her former flame kissing “a hundred boys in bars” and eventually becoming a man’s dissatisfied wife in the aftermath of their affair. But ultimately, Roan chooses herself, singing with all her heart, “I just wanna love someone who calls me baby.” LINDSAY ZOLADZPrince, ‘United States of Division’“Everybody stop fighting/everybody make love,” Prince urged in “United States of Division,” a song previously released only as a British single B-side in 2004, alongside Prince’s album “Musicology.” It’s six minutes of deep-bottomed polytonal funk — topped with synthesizer jabs and horn lines, goaded by a hard-rock guitar riff — that veers between disenchanted verses and a conditionally optimistic chorus. Prince was hoping for the best but seeing stubborn obstacles, pondering tribalism, inequality and faith all at once and wondering, “Why must I sing ‘God Bless America’ and not the rest of the world?” JON PARELESCharli XCX, ‘B2b’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Meet Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour Openers

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      The 21-year-old pop star wears her influences on her sleeve and, in one particular case, books them for her live show.Olivia Rodrigo onstage in California on Friday night.OK McCausland for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last Friday night, the pop sensation and verbal vampire slayer Olivia Rodrigo kicked off her Guts World Tour, one of the most anticipated live shows of the year. My colleague Jon Caramanica caught opening night in Palm Desert, Calif., and named it a Critic’s Pick, writing that Rodrigo “brought the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano balladry that her songs toggle between.”An avowed student of female-driven ’90s alternative rock — when I saw her two years ago at Radio City Music Hall, she played a rousing cover of Veruca Salt’s “Seether” — Rodrigo wears her influences on her sleeve and, in one particular case, books them for her tour. Though the brash, big-voiced pop singer Chappell Roan kicked off the show in Palm Desert, for some dates Rodrigo will be joined by the legendary Gen-X rockers the Breeders. Any young pop supernova who picks the Deal sisters to open for her — and who convinces them that she’s a talent worth supporting — is all right by me.While not everyone who sees the Guts World Tour will be lucky enough to witness some lavender-clad grrrls experience “Cannonball” live for the first time, every opener Rodrigo selected is worth arriving early to catch. Today’s playlist, comprising her supporting acts, hopes to convince you of that.Roan, a rising star whose influences connect the dots between Katy Perry and “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” opens the show until April 2, when the Breeders take over for a four-night stint at Madison Square Garden. They’ll pass the baton to Remi Wolf, an eclectic and charismatically in-your-face singer-songwriter, who will handle the European dates, until the tour returns to North America in July and is supported by the whispery electro-pop upstart PinkPantheress. In mid-August, for the tour’s last splash — forgive me — the Breeders return for several dates in Los Angeles.In her music, Rodrigo centers her own personal experience of girlhood, and in some sense all four of these supporting artists offer different variations on that theme. Get ready for some towering choruses, gigantic personalities and refreshingly expansive takes on musical femininity.Got that long hair, long beard, turtleneck sweater,LindsayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More