With Year-End List Season Upon Us, What Do You Think Is the Most Overrated Music of 2024?
My pick: Sabrina Carpenter
It’s the first week of December, which means it’s end-of-year list season—the time when workers and/or nerds put in a grueling amount of thought and energy into making their annual best-of tallies for the edification and discussion of their readers, and the satisfaction and enrichment of their corporate overlords and the ephemeral SEO gods. (Or, as the writer Jack Denton put it: “The Best Albums of the Content Fiscal Year Ending in Mid-November Due to SEO Arms Race.”)
These lists generate a big chunk of traffic for every publication, juicing up the numbers for parent companies to then take to advertising agencies and brag about how many readers they’ll be reaching if they just buy some space. The revenue generated may go to fund the publication, or it might pad the pockets of C-suite types and shareholders. Along with year-end lists from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork to Billboard all dropping on the same day, this week also marked the media world’s annual holiday layoffs—in which workers across the culture-publication landscape got their walking papers in the interest of “balancing the books” for the Q4 finance report. And thus a thing that most music journalists have a great time doing has become another cog in the corporate grind, algorithm’d and monetized to its very cells.
This is not to say best-of lists are not fun for those who make them and read them—Hearing Things will publish our own later this month, mainly because we are nerds who love to take stock. For now, I’d like to consider one of the most important aspects of the yearly best-of debate: the fact that all lists are subjective by nature, and that some of us will, inevitably, think your faves are overrated.
This is where I bring my own neck to the chopping block: Sabrina Carpenter! I don’t get it! Her sixth album, Short n’ Sweet, is on best-of lists from Stereogum to Consequence of Sound, but to me it merely sounds like the kind of music I don’t mind bopping along to while looking for overpriced medicated Band-Aids at the local CVS. Its workhorse vagueness—cutesy country for people who don’t like country, saccharine pop, Swiftian folk, an infuriatingly limp attempt at Rhythm ‘n’ Quad (“Good Graces”) and mimeographed ’80s LL Cool J rap interludes (“Bed Chem”)—reflects corporate producer calculus rather than any real interest in genre versatility, and gives me the vertigo I get in any still-extant American shopping mall, which all have that same new-clothes and Jamba Juice scent. I love omnivorous pop music more than most people, but this shit is really not hitting for me.
I constantly think about what my colleague Jill Mapes said about Sabrina in her great Charli XCX blog: “Chappell Roan is queer pop made by a queer person that straight people listen to, Charli is queer pop made by a straight person that queer people listen to, and Sabrina Carpenter is frighteningly heterosexual.” Her overall heteronormativity, plus the ’60s burlesque bunny remixed with the blonde clean-girl aesthetic, is deeply conservative, its retrograde minx-molding reflecting an empire in decline. (Gloria Steinem didn’t get sexually harassed for this!) Carpenter’s arguably least hetero effort, “Taste,” sounds like an expensively-produced pop-country song engineered to hit every corporate radio base, but ultimately even its cheeky sapphic undertones don’t overcome a bitchiness I don’t buy. Sabrina seems evil to me in a white-girl high-school cheerleader way, which can be terrifying but is ultimately toothless the minute you call her out to her face. (Also, as the admittedly great video eventually posits: Isn’t the real villain here the boyfriend in question?)
Now that you know some of my feelings on the Sabrina Carpenter industrial complex (and the year-end list SEO gambit), this leads us to the question at hand: What album or song—or artist or trend!—do you think is the most overrated of the year? Let us know in the comments, we love mess!
