Early Sunday around 3:30 a.m. I was getting back from a birthday party, much drunker than I planned to be and so I thought it was a good time to pull tarot cards to the tune of Kylie Cantrall’s song “The Boy Is Yours” (mind your fucking business please). Perfect timing because it turns out that my girl Kylie dropped a new album just this past Friday!
The next day as I was walking around, I put on Valley Girl Problems and was delighted. Just like her last album B.O.Y., Kylie is really good at honing in on that fun early-2000s pop girl group music that effectively raised me, an old crone. She’s got a song called “Carrie Bradshaw” (!!!!) and has a couple of CLASSIC interludes with recorded voice memos/phone calls—more on this later. Sure, Ms. Cantrall is only 21 years-old and very much a gen-z, but it’s clear she’s heavily, heavily influenced by the Disney Channel stars of the past. Her discography fits right into that of Destiny’s Child, Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan, and even Selena Gomez—and I say this LOVINGLY and in HIGH REGARD. These are timeless bops!!!!!
But I’m not here to do an album review or try and convince a bunch of people in their mid-thirties to open their minds to teen girl pop music. Olivia Rodrigo has broken containment out to the indie people and that’s good enough for me right now. For those of you who don’t suffer from arrested development like me and/or don’t have children or niblings (still need a better word for this), you probably have no idea who Kylie Cantrall is or why she’s important. So I will explain:
Kylie Cantrall is a young actor who is the star of the second wave of the Descendants series starting with Descendants 4 and now Descendants 5 as Red, the daughter of the Queen of Hearts (played by Rita Ora). Descendants if you don’t know, is a series of musical movies on Disney Channel starting in 2015 about a universe where every Disney fairytale character lives in the same place at the same time and after a big war they put all the Disney villains on a prison island and then all the characters you know and love had sex with each other and now their kids all go to magical high school. They were extremely popular during the initial run of the first three movies, which you probably didn’t know because you were probably already in college by the time they came out. They also failed to do much of anything for Dove Cameron’s career. If you want to catch up on the lore that has no real importance to the rest of this story, you will not be surprised to find out I did a whole presentation about the Descendants series.
After a few years that the trilogy was complete, Disney said, “I think everyone’s over being sad that Cameron Boyce [another actor in the series] died and we can start making money off this franchise again.” And so they did. The fourth movie came out in 2024 with a whole new cast of characters for the next generation of tweens to obsess over, and they had Kylie as the lead with her co-star, Malia Baker, who plays Cinderella’s daughter Chloe.
Just like the movie focuses on their characters becoming friends despite how different they are, Kylie and Malia seemed to have become fast friends, close the way that teen girls who are also coworkers tend to become (if they don’t become enemies first). It’s a perfect girl friendship, and everyone was for it. But of course, things change.
Kylie started dating another Disney Channel star, Malachi Barton, while they were doing the Descendants/Zombies: Worlds Collide Tour. Malachi is the star of Zombies 4, a series about how monsters represent different people of color and they end racism (???). (They also made a new series after the original three were done and it is worse, but I CANNOT get into it more right now). I guess he’s the new Zac Efron (??) or at least the new Milo Manheim (?????) but with none of the charisma of either. Apparently teen girls are very into him and I just really don’t see it. That might be because I am an old hag and appropriate, it also may be because he’s a Trump supporter and that is just automatic rancid vibes.
She realized she could do better (probably not about the MAGA thing though) and then they broke up. Suspiciously, though, three days later Malia was posting hanging out with Malachi on the set of Camp Rock 3 (they need to stop with these sequels). That…doesn’t seem like bestie behavior, hanging out with your best friend’s ex—even if you are coworkers! Then, another shoe hit the second tower and the two announced they were an official couple. Apparently, Kylie didn’t know this was all happening until WEEKS later, while Malia was still keeping the ruse that she was being a good, honest friend. There’s a Twitter thread that explains this better if you’re interested.
And now, they have to promote this god awful (I am pre-judging but nothing about it has given me hope) made-for-television movie together, real-life enemies forced to be on-screen friends. You know they’re gonna have to be in this for at least one other movie to finish the trilogy, so who knows what will happen in a year or two from now?
This isn’t the first time that Disney Channel stars have ended up in a tumultuous love triangle. First came Aaron Carter who cheated on Hilary Duff with her “best friend” Lindsay Lohan. Then we had Nick Jonas dating Miley Cyrus and then Selena Gomez in quick succession—less dramatic but we got “Burnin’ Up,” “7 Things,” and “I Won’t Apologize” respectively out of the situation. Around a decade later pop divas Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter both were involved with Joshua Bassett, who in my opinion is completely forgettable but managed to be the inspiration of some of the best pop songs of the last decade. It’s been a few years and to keep the universe in balance, we must have another celebrity girl friendship ruined over some guy. At least good music comes out from this.
Going back to the album, Kylie is definitely hurt by this whole ordeal, but the heartbreak in the songs is all about losing a friend who you thought you trusted. In peak Y2K fashion, she incorporates these interludes halfway through the album. The first interlude is a conversation where the “best friend” suggests that the boy Kylie is into may not be so faithful. The second interlude it’s the same friend and Kylie says, “You were right. He has been talking to another girl…There’s one thing you didn’t tell me. That other girl is you.” Straight into a Ginuwine beat. And finishes the EP with the line “Now there’s always gonna be a boy-sized space between us.” DAMN. A canon experience for most young women at the age of 21.
I was once also in the same place as Kylie as a young lass, except it wasn’t over a boy we were dating—just my friend liked a boy who hated me so she didn’t invite me to hang out with her anymore as time went by. He looks like a thumb and me and her are chill now. That’s girlhood!
Some other stuff I wrote recently:
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.