Sabrina Carpenter’s latest single “Taste,” taken from her new album “Short n’ Sweet,” arrived on Friday with a music video that certainly lives up to the song’s title.
Directed by Dave Meyers and apparently inspired by the 1992 dark comedy “Death Becomes Her,” the poignant video casts Jenna Ortega as the new girlfriend of Carpenter’s boyfriend.
The two women take turns trying to kill each other (using a variety of methods, from guns and knives to voodoo dolls) as Carpenter sings about their mutual love affair: “You’ll just have to kiss me you don’t kiss. search forever, I bet you / Just know you’ll taste it too.”
Indeed, the video climaxes with Carpenter and Ortega kissing, moments before Ortega uses a chainsaw to kill the “boyfriend” in question. These two women go to his funeral and smile knowingly from above the coffin.
Carpenter has been releasing music since becoming a Disney Channel star in 2015, but he reached a new level of fame this year with the hit song “Espresso,” a cheeky ode to his female tricks. (“I’ve got this boy, and he won’t stop calling / When they act like this, I know I’ve got them.”)
Carpenter followed that song up with “Please Please,” No. her first number one on the Billboard Hot 100, where she begs her new husband not to embarrass her. The music video cost her boyfriend Barry Keoghan.
Because of her rapidly growing star power, Carpenter – and her love life – have become hot topics in the public arena.
In June, the comedy podcast “Two Dykes and a Mic” featured a discussion about Carpenter’s sexuality. The clip went viral after it was shared on TikTok, garnering over 12 million views and 1.2 million likes so far.
Both hosts described Carpenter as “the biggest hetero of the time,” adding, “I don’t think Sabrina Carpenter has a gay bone in her body.”
A week later, Carpenter performed a cover of “Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappell Roan, who is a lesbian. The songstress, a mysterious woman, decides to pursue relationships with men instead of accepting her love for Roan – although, as Roan sings, she can’t get over his theft.
Many fans described Carpenter’s song choice as a sly response to the podcasters, as well as some online people who had started describing Carpenter as “the straightest woman alive .”
Some have noted other publicity stunts in Carpenter’s career, including “Do You Need Me Now?”, a duet with the writer’s daughter Redhead that was released in March. (Back in 2020, “Are you listening to the girl in red?” became a meme in the LGBTQ+ online community, a kind of code for knowing if someone is queer.)
Carpenter also addressed his attraction to women on social media, as Adele praised “Espresso” during the concert.
“When I went to bed last night, because [it] it was late at night for me, I found myself singing ‘I work late, because I’m a singer,’ a song by Sabrina Carpenter,” Adele said on stage. “That song is my jam.”
In response, Carpenter tweeted, “All I read was Adele thinking about me in bed
Speculation began to arise about Carpenter’s sexuality mainly because of his performances in “Nonsense,” a single released in 2022.’ Carpenter continued to ad-libbing raunchy outros throughout the I Can’t Send Emails Tour, a tradition he continued to open for Taylor. Swift’s Eras Tour earlier this year. Many of them include vague statements about having sex with men.
However, Carpenter said the problems are not meant to reflect his real life, but to fight the shame and stigma that often comes with discussing sex in public.
“I’ve learned more about sex through writing than people think,” she told Cosmopolitan. “I think people think I’m weirdly horny, when really, writing them comes from the ability to not be afraid of your sexuality rather than not being able to put it down.”