tonight we let that me espresso talk

*month late

**eight pages

Going to establish my horse-picking experience right now by enshrining in writing that I know all the words to 2015’s “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” I fucking been on. 

With that said, most tracks on Sabrina’s hotly anticipated post-breakout album Short ‘n Sweet bang hard. And others have a certain…. Jack ne sais quoi. 

A word of moderation: the Jack Antonoff hate train has been America’s most reliable form of public transport since that excellent Drift essay came out last year. And anytime it’s trendy to dunk on something you must check that the shot you’re about to sink is fair and not because your inner teen is sprinting to side with the alphas in hot dodgeball. I mean, dodgeball. 

On the Jack defense tour, Lorde correctly criticized the Discourse’s impulse to attribute the sound of all the projects Jack works on to him, rather than the mostly-women artists he works with. It situates artistic control for a project in Jack-as-conservator, putting women artists almost besides the point in their own work. In reality, these women are responsible for their work, whether it fucks or flops. 

Further, as my genius friend + artist Noah (IG: @fakenoahgentry) pointed out, we can’t know exactly who made which choices in the stu. Even on songs Jack is credited as a sole producer on, there’s a team of folks mixing and mastering; a quibble I have with a sound effect might be a technical, rather than creative, issue. We also don’t know who’s setting the goals for a record, pushing it toward cult classic or summer blockbuster; ie, what label pressure is exerted. Except in this case, where we know that for sure.

All of which is to say, it’s perilous to point fingers at specific hot-button actors on a project rather than the project itself. Luckily, I grew up whitewater rafting and chase that rush in metropolitan adulthood by habitually pursuing Sagittarius women. I love peril! Let’s go!

Like exposition but with Jack. Get it

Friends have asked me “oh, do we not like Jack?” and vowed to listen to his hits to understand his sound. This is the wrong way to go about things. 

Jack produced some of the best pop records of the past decade: Melodrama, folklore, Norman Fucking Rockwell. At his best he is a masterful collaborator who zeroes in on the unique strengths of the artists he works with. In those records his hand is properly invisible as it turns up the intensity of an artist’s unique voice. They sound like damn good Lorde, damn good Taylor, career-best Lana. He did Troye Sivan’s “Strawberries and Cigarettes”! He did Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Want You In My Room”! He did Kevin Abstract’s “Peach”!

He is also an excellent live performer. I’ve seen his band Bleachers twice in concert and they’re simply fun shows. There are guitar-sax duels, there are girls climbing on shoulders during “Rollercoaster.” He’s amped to be there and it’s infectious. 

But at his worst, Jack is so insistent upon a toolkit of production habits he’s imposed on so many artists’ work so many times by now that they neon-flash “JACK ANTONOFF WUZ HERE” and throw a wet blanket over any singular Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, or Talent a track has. 

For instance, he is batshit fucking addicted to anything that sounds like the sparkle emoji. This guy: 

See the opening moments of Bleachers’ “Wild Heart”:

See the twinkling in the bridge of Taylor’s “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” (one of my all time faves of hers, tbf):

See “Please Please Please”!

When not plagued by The Sparkle, Jack’s stuff often sounds a way I can only describe as Love Simon-y:

Let’s wordcloud here: this music sounds vaguely cheerful, orderly, shiny and smooth. Warm in the way that Wayfair wood that’s too caramely is. 

I love Love, Simon. I am a white lesbian from Atlanta who dated in her sorority. In 2020 I got bad-trip high and watched three hours of the Love, Simon Hulu spinoff Love, Victor in the bath to sober up (as my friends, concerned, texted me “where are you” and “you said you were going to make dinner tonight” and I soothed their concerns by helpfully responding “I am watching all of Love, Victor in the bath.”) 

But I don’t need my mean nymphomaniac music in a post-Obergefell post-Covid post-”Elliot’s song” era to sound like the Obama lame duck years or a bottled Starbucks vanilla latte. So I need Jack to cut it out and, in the words of a girl he sued, “be like, messy.” 

So re Short ‘n Sweet and artistic responsibility: the flops don’t flop because Jack mixed chloroform into Barry Keoghan’s self tanner so that when Sabrina next licked his lower abs she was knocked out and woke up in the backroom of Electric Lady Studios where Jack, per his blood contract with Alison*, is housed, from whence Jack refused to release Sabreen until she turned over her songs for him to give the Minions Soundtrack treatment. Horny Polly Pocket chose this path. 

*For the uninitiated, Alison (one L) is Taylor Swift’s middle name, and what I call her when she’s in trouble. But she’s always in trouble, so to me she’s just Alison. 

But listening to the record, the trained ear can’t help but catch on flagrant moments of Jackin it. His production is so conspicuous as to overpower Sabrina’s unique sound and in multiple cases dampen a formerly promising track. 

Look at the Jack-produced “Slim Pickins,” which sounded absolutely fabulous in this live performance ahead of the album’s release. The twang of the single acoustic guitar gives Sabrina room to step into the Dolly persona of the song’s lyrics, interlocking content and form, and gives her jokes room to land and breathe. Then it arrived… totally muted. Stuffed with airy production and stripped of flavor. Festivus-style airing of grievances: the song doesn’t need that bass; the finger picking is turned staccato, removing the twang (Sparkle emoji strike one); we don’t need all those guitars to sound so smooth and pastel! Jack tends to watercolor together a wall-of-sound that has the effect of smoooooothing each instrument or effect into one floaty blur. 

It sounds like Target.

And I don’t want to taste Wild Fable when I listen to music. But listening to “Slim Pickins” album version feels like chewing $12 bikini neoprene under fluorescent white lights.

“Sharpest Tool” and “Lie to Girls” (Jack-produced) will trick new Sabreeners into thinking she can do sassmaster sexpot singlemaker but not more intimate and vulnerable fare, and that’s a shame! Her last album emails I can’t send is an immaculate pop album full of tender tracks situated in moments of solo reflection. Some are genuinely moving and hold a venerated place in my “sapphic breakup” playlists, the single most affecting emotional experience there is, worse than heterosexual divorce or survival cannibalism. “things I wish you’d said” sits between Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Kacey’s “It Is What It Is” during my Sad Showers. “how many things” and “decode” are brutal. 

Meanwhile, the synthetic-breezy bells and whistles layered onto Jack’s “Sharpest Tool” and “Lie to Girls” impose an antiseptic quality and give the impression of distance between the song and its cutting/delicate subject matter. “Sharpest Tool” opens with and rests on that fucking finger picking that SOUNDS LIKE THE SPARKLE EMOJI! (STRIKE TWO)

Both musicians I consulted about this piece quickly identified Jack’s heeeeavy hand on the reverb. “Lie to Girls” is lyrically strong and if played right could’ve reflected on the thematic romanticism-skepticism dialectic of the rest of the album. Alas, its climactic final build is unearned, forced with, in one friend’s words, “aggressive reverb.” (Her addendum: “and wind chimes don’t go everywhere!”) The topic is painful, which comes through in Sabrina’s voice, but the instrumentation won’t get agonized with her, choosing instead to float above her. Sabrina’s natural voice is clear like a goddamned bell; I want to hear it unobstructed! 

Does the following non-Jack track, “Don’t Smile” also get breezy with it? Yes. But it doesn’t feel this urge to BUILD!!!, instead wisely keeping us situated in a Place of Contemplation. Likely because it’s not mixed by her indentured producer, it resists the urge to Pull an Alison and force a mountaintoppy soaring climax. 

Jack is I think overlooking the psychic ramifications of the prodigal trauma of not having made best Alison song ever “Wildest Dreams.” 

To wrap the Jack of it all, aforementioned Noah, consultant on this piece (which is to say sender of five consecutive five minute voice notes he hasn’t yet charged me for), proffered a seasoned take on Jackuary 6th. (fuck. Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry)

Jack is a generationally gifted producer, but his reputation as Hitmaker has perhaps shifted him into a lane where he doesn’t belong. He excels when he takes big swings in service of a unique and often experimental sound for the artists he works with. See the pure experimentation and play on “Venice Bitch.” See the seemingly diegetic (to Lorde’s conceptual house party) placement of sound on Melodrama. See fucking last year’s “A&W”! JIMMY JIMMY COCOA PUFF! 

But because those experiments became greatest hits and Jack became an oat-milk-drinking-household name, he became known as the guy brought in when you want to mint a summer single, top the charts, join the pop elite, and make the label a ton of fucking money. In a word: Max. Okay, in two words: Max Martin.

This assembly line method isn’t simpatico with Jack’s apparent strong suit of intimately knowing his longtime creative partners (in more ways than-) like Lana, Lorde, and Alison, and having a heavy hand in projects from their inception. He is a collaborator, not a company man hitmaker, and when he tries to be the latter, the result are shy, milquetoast tracks. 

Make Jack Experiment Again!

TO BE CLEAR: Short ‘n Sweet is a great album. It’s the excellence of other tracks that make the aforediscussed mid fare so egregious, especially knowing from emails that Sabrina is capable of a no-skip. There’s a real solidity and clarity to Sabrina’s voice that helps her songs land. 

“Taste” is the best song on the record and the best single (yes, above that me espresso). It also strikes me (wish Jenna Ortega would strike me) that “Taste” is unafraid to incorporate pop-rock production, confident that the steely, warm and full timbre of Sabreen’s voice keeps up across genres. The instrumentation on the bridge is giving me Vamps, giving me One Direction. We’re having fucking FUN!! JENNA ORTEGA KILL ME NEXT!

I’m fondest of “Taste,” “Juno,” and “Don’t Smile,” the last of which sees Sabrina exercising uncharacteristic vocal restraint to really delightful ends. 

The genre hopping is fun; “Taste” is pop rock, “Bed Chem” is 2K R&B (and MUNA Naomi likes it and I like everything MUNA Naomi likes, so), “Don’t Smile” is COVID-descended bedroom pop through and through, “Coincidence” is the knee-slappy washboard romp we missed out on in “Slim Pickins,” “Juno” is unapologetic pop, and “Good Graces” is what I call Pool Pop. (The genre-happy nature of most of the album draws extra attention to the blank flyover spaces and elucidates the tracks on which it seems Jack is afraid of genre. (Except, perhaps, his own little concoction of Quality Pop Indie Synth.))

Whether because of the wide genre range or the jumps from high octane fun into Government Issue Indie Pop Synth, it seems to me that the primary throughline stringing the disparate tracks together is Sabrizz (ya? no? sound off down below) and a fun horny-trad Heterosexuality. 

The most interesting theme of the record is, uh, yeah, fertility. 

Fertile jester Sabrina is “so fuckin horny,” she wants her man to “mark your territory,” she tempts that one of her is cute, “but two, though?”

It feels like a heterosexuality over its Call Her Daddy/hookup warfare phase.* In the 2010s monoculture, women artists were on defense against accusations of being stickily Overly Obsessed. Pop girls first-wave-style fucked like a man; “love him and leave him,” “I don’t give a fuck about you,” “I’ll fuck your brother,” etc. The rule of college hookup culture was don’t get attached; the objective was to care the least. Emotions and desires for commitment were leaky, sticky, vulnerable, at once a weakness in you and a threat to your partner. (The effects of such a culture appear in Lana, who resonantly owned the epic highs and mostly-lows of a conventional feminine archetype set amongst punk ass modern men.)

Five years later, enter Sabrina, who uses her famous confidence to unabashedly fantasize about the long game and get off at the thought. She goes “dump him” in the postchorus of “Good Graces” (“I won’t give a fuck about you”) but establishes in its first verse “When I love you, I’m sweet like an angel / Drawin’ hearts ‘round our names / And dreamin’ of writing vows, rockin’ cradles.”  

The entire premise of “Juno” is how hot the idea of getting knocked up is. 

The hot-rollers blowout! The corsets! The high heels! The pink fuzzy handcuffs! The heavy breathing for babymaking! It’s a winking spin on the domestic aspiration. 

And pin this: this camping-heterosexuality is popping up everywhere these days: Bravo’s The Valley, Nara Smith etc etc, the Mormon Momtok series. The heterosexuals are giggling at themselves, you guys. I’m into it… I think. 

Rendering unembarrassing and unserious the near-ubiquitous desire for domesticity: great. (though for my money already done by a Twitter obsessed with “real yearners” and “starter homes”)

The other insidious elements of domestic fixation, from thinking settling down will fill your Lacanian hole all the way to fascism: less great. Like, is it upholding ~the nuclear family as a tool and image of fascism~ for Sabrina to fuck raw and for me to imagine waking up early and reading the paper in the dark at the kitchen island in the Asheville, North Carolina cabin I share with my wife and daughter before they wake up when we all listen to Fontella Bass and make coffee? Like, no. NO, RIGHT? Say no for baby Laurel.

But proceed thoughtfully! For a long look at the lures and perils of the trad aspiration check out these epic essays from Jamie Hood in The New Inquiry, one written at the fever pitch of her housewife obsession and one after her disillusionment.

Short ‘n Sweet is a really fun pop album. Sabrina has a gorgeous career and lucrative line of hot rollers ahead of her. The cannonballs into pop-[insert genre] fusion reap some real bangers, while a few tracks that happen to have in common being produced by Jack Antonoff leave you begging for them to sound like something. This’ll happen when you’re brought in as the guy to make someone more famous by making stuff that sounds like all the stuff you’ve made before that’s made other someones really famous. Also, Sabrina wants to fuck, but specifically in the McMansion Tuscan kitchen y’all share. Act right and your children will inherit a hot roller empire!!!!