"NONSENSE" BY SABRINA CARPENTER (2022)
or, "how a major label squeezed millions of streams out of a viral moment"
Before I get started, I just want to get one thing out of the way — I cannot stop listening to this song. Is it catchy? Yes. Do I love it? Well, that’s complicated.
Every few years, a song will capture my attention and baffle me to the point of endless fascination. I become obsessed because I can’t quite figure out if I love the song or hate it. And in the process of dissecting my mad delusion, I rack up an embarrassing amount of streams in the process, fucking up my entire Spotify Wrapped.
“Nonsense” by Sabrina Carpenter was released on July 15, 2022 and is the fifth single from her fifth studio album, emails i can’t send. I’m not going to get into the whole history of who Sabrina is, because we have a lot of territory to cover here, but TLDR: she’s a former Disney Channel star from the post-Debby Ryan generation whose name was splattered on the e-tabloids last year as the rumored new girlfriend of Joshua Bassett and the alleged subject of many Olivia Rodrigo songs. Now, I’m not here to debate whether or not these claims are true, and I’d need to write an entirely separate newsletter to discuss society’s fascination with burdening female singer/songwriters with the yokes of their romantic interests, but that piece of gossip is, unfortunately, a key part of the “Nonsense” story.
I’ve followed Sabrina Carpenter’s music career from the sidelines since she debuted on Disney Channel. As a big fan of Girl Meets World, I would stream her Disney-era singles once in awhile for that saccharine dose of kiddie-pop. When the show ended and she began her court-mandated “I’m not a Disney kid anymore” tour, her immense vocal talent was obvious. But in my personal opinion, her full-length albums left much to be desired, and whoever was marketing her didn’t utilize her full potential.
This was a fringe theory I held as singles like “Sue Me” (2018) struggled to make the Billboard Hot 100. She represented a phenomenon in modern pop culture that I associate with artists like Madison Beer and Olivia O’Brien, whom I affectionately call “Instagram Pop stars” — they’re musicians, yes, but they’re seen as influencers first. This is to say nothing of talent; it simply means that their primary audience, for whatever reason, is a fanbase that only exists on social media. And this intense fascination with their beauty, persona, and aesthetic makes their music feel like a secondary thing. The proof is in the pudding: if you compare Sabrina’s Instagram stats (28M followers) to Spotify streams (14M monthly listeners), there’s a huge disparity, a gap which many music marketing teams struggle to close.
So yeah, I figured her team was struggling to market her through the Disney transition, plus the added hurdle of closing the Instagram Knowledge Gap. I believed that until Sabrina signed to Island Records in 2021 and released the single “Skin.” While Sabrina denies claims that “Skin” is a response to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License,” the singles were only released two weeks apart and she directly references Olivia’s lyrics in the song:
“There's no gravity in the words we write
Maybe you didn't mean it
Maybe blonde was the only rhyme”
AGAIN, this entire post is not about the alleged love triangle. But this is all relevant to the point I’m trying to make!! Just stick with me, here!! I promise!!
So, “Skin” flops. The discourse around her choice to release the song is pretty yikes, and they don’t even put it on Sabrina’s album, which further fuels the rumors that she only released it in response to Olivia. But there’s something more sinister afoot — at the time of signing, Island Records CEO Darcus Beese exited the company, and the new CEOs would not begin their tenure until 2022. In short, any music released by Island Records artists for all of 2021 would have to be promoted independently by the artists with no support from the label. Because Sabrina was the latest signee to Island Records at the time of the CEO’s departure, I suspect that the “Skin” release was rushed, and she probably received little to no guidance on whether or not this was a good PR move at all.
Here’s an r/popheads comment that aged like milk:
So, emails i can’t send drops over a year later and is her highest charting album, peaking at #23 on the Billboard 200. The album, while positively received by critics, is still struggling to find a strong single. And so on August 22, 2022, Sabrina posts the following TikTok to her 13.3M followers:
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Viral pop chart speedrun (NO MODS) (ALL COMMENTARY)
A Harvard University sociological study needs to be done about why every generation loves a Chipmunk remix so damn much. But until that necessary work is done, I’m here to use this very post as a case study as to why music marketing in the age of TikTok is so fascinating. Endless articles have been written about what TikTok is doing to the music industry, how it’s affecting new artists, and the (in my opinion) negative impact it’s had on the craft of songwriting.
In the week leading up to her album’s release, Sabrina posted several videos using her own songs as the audio. These songs were uploaded to TikTok by her label, thus directly boosting her streams. While those videos all garnered over a million views, the video above currently sits just under 10M, and is how I first heard the song.
The problem for Sabrina, however, is that the audio she used for the viral video was not uploaded by her label, but by a TikTok user named @sabrinasueme (which is hilarious for so many reasons), who edited and uploaded their own sped-up version of the song to the app.
And of course, this is the version of the song that goes viral. So Island Records sees this and commissions their own sped-up version of the song, which Sabrina then uses on TikTok in an attempt to redirect the streams to her “official” version, released on October 17th, 2022. But as you can see below, the amount of times that the “official” sped-up version has been used is so tiny (11%) compared to the unofficial version:
Not only that, but the regular version of “Nonsense” has been used in videos less than 7k times. It’s around this time — September 2022 — that Sabrina embarks on her emails i can’t send tour.
And thus, the madness begins.
The outros are in
This song has driven me so crazy that my friends Angela and Lauren and myself have a groupchat called “nonsense girlies” where we just send each other new content about “Nonsense.” This all started when Sabrina Carpenter started “freestyling” at the end of the song at her live shows. If you want to watch a full compilation of every outro, I’ll link it below, but feel free to scroll past because I am absolutely going to break this shit down.
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Before we get into the outros, we need to talk about the song itself. “Nonsense” is literally just nonsense. Sabrina explains in her Genius video that the song was meant to be a deviation from the more serious, personal tracks on the album. Similar to a rap freestyle, they created the beat in the studio and kept riffing on the idea of being so infatuated with someone that you can’t think straight, so you just start saying things that don’t make sense. She even refers to this song as “breaking the fourth wall” of songwriting, because it shows awareness that the craft is often viewed as this serious, self-indulgent thing, when in reality, it’s pretty funny to be sitting around and digging for stupid rhymes.
And now, a selection of lyrics from “Nonsense”:
“But I can't help myself
When you get close to me
Baby my tongue goes numb
Sounds like bleh, blah, blee…
This song catchier than chicken pox is
I bet your house is where my other sock is
Woke up this morning thought I'd write a pop hit
How quickly can you take your clothes off, pop quiz?”
I mean, those lyrics are utterly ridiculous. And although they’re supposed to be funny, I was taken aback. Because, yeah, I’d known Sabrina as someone who prided herself in lyricism, and seeing this specific song go viral felt confusing and off-brand. But when the song was released, comments flooded her TikTok praising it, with many people saying it’s their favorite song on the album and calling her “Ariana’s child.”
But when my TikTok algorithmic gods started feeding me the live clips of Sabrina’s shows and her “freestyle” outros, I needed to speak to someone immediately. I was fascinated by her fans’ rabid response to these silly little stanzas that she seemingly planned beforehand being called “freestyles,” and the crazy reaction they’d get from the audience. And show by show, they seemed to get more and more explicit and random:
“This crowd is giving me all the endorphins
I wish someone would rearrange my organs
Philly is the city I was born in”“My favorite character in friends is Phoebe
I’ll only watch the Super Bowl for RiRi
The hottest people ever are in DC”“Water ain’t the only thing I swallow
I wish that I could play right here tomorrow
My favorite city ever is Chicago”
We “nonsense girlies” even started writing our own outros as our daily check-ins:
Once Sabrina had harnessed the power of her outro on TikTok through viral user-generated content (aka UGC), she upped the ante, culminating in the most controversial outro of them all…
“I’ve got a personality and no tits
This song is not about Joshua Bassett
Los Angeles, your energy is big dick”
And the girlies in the group chat were howling at this one!! Sabrina had made a point over the last two years to never directly address the controversy surrounding Joshua and Olivia, despite hinting at it in all her music. I was convinced that much like Taylor Swift, she would never directly name those involved in the “drama” and instead let the public create their own narrative. Plausible deniability, you know?
But throwing out that statement in an outro that she knew would go viral, on a song that she didn’t know would go viral, is some 4D-fucking-chess.
And you know its tea once PopCrave says it:
So yeah, this should be the end of the story, right? Pop star on a mismanaged label finds her way to viral success by being silly, goofy, and quirky online? But no, call her M. Night Sabrina, because this story has one more unexpected twist.
Calling Mr. Dickens
On December 7, 2022, I received the following voice note from Angela in our “nonsense girlies” group chat:
Seemingly out of nowhere, Sabrina dropped a TikTok of her singing a Christmas version of “Nonsense,” dressed in (what I assume was) her costume from her limited run in Mean Girls: The Musical where she was cast just after the departure of Vine star Cameron Dallas, who did not sing a single note correctly while on Broadway.
The video was cute, but the lyrics skyrocketed me beyond this mortal plane. Everyone who called her “Ariana’s child” didn’t think she’d come for Ari’s horny Christmas crown*, but here we are!!
* Ariana Grande has a long history of making Christmas very horny by fundamentally misunderstanding the role of Santa Claus and confusing him with both Cupid and the Hormone Monster from Netflix’s Big Mouth. But that’s a topic for another day.
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“You're my wish list
Lookin' at you got me thinkin' Christmas
Snowflakes in my stomach when we're kissin'
And when you're comin' down the chimney
Oh, it feels so good
I need that Charles Dickens (!!!!??????!!!!!!!)
You'll be Santa Claus and I'll be Mrs.
I'll take you for a ride, I'll be your Vixen
I don't even know, I'm talkin' Christmas.”
She did that! What did she do exactly? I don’t know, but it’s blowing my mind. One thing I will say about Ariana’s horny Christmas songs is that she’s always subtle with it (“Are you down for some of these milk and cookies? / Down for loving? / You’ll be my drummer boy, 'cause I’m the only drum that you’re gonna play.”) Sabrina is out here making Charles Dickens dick jokes and complimenting someone’s “big sack”! Looking at someone and thinking “Christmas” has maybe never happened, ever? It’s like someone put “tis the damn season” in an AI generator and asked them to spit out a song that’s the polar (lol) opposite in every way.
She posted this clip and of course every comment on TikTok was “release the full version queen!!!!” and a few days later she tweets this:
“Y’all made me do this” ??? No one asked for this, but now the fans are begging! Sabrina traded in her flop marketing team for a Machiavelli-level plotting genius, because this is next-level trend hopping. Sabrina is doing a full-press, Jack Harlow-style speedrun through this “Nonsense” campaign — harnessing the virality of one clip and spinning it into as many opportunities as possible. Her team even made a “Nonsense” filter on TikTok, which is now the moving graphic when you listen to the song on Spotify.
While many major label artists have spoken out about the pressure to “go viral", this is the first time I’ve seen a label so blatantly pivot away from an album’s rollout plan to cater to a viral moment. They’ve dropped the Sabrina redemption arc and swapped it for self-parody of an already satirical song. And of course, releasing a Christmas song is the best way to secure longevity and relevance at least once a year for the rest of your life (I mean, just look at Pentatonix!) But I don’t think Sabrina’s horny ho-ho-holiday bop will be making it on the Ulta corporate-approved holiday playlist anytime soon.
There’s been lots of talk about how TikTok is pushing artists to write shorter songs and how pop songs are losing their bridges, but I’m curious to see how the success of “Nonsense” will change her musical trajectory. Sabrina herself has said that “Nonsense” was a throwaway track that they added to the album last minute, and it doesn’t sound like any of the other songs on emails i can’t send. I wouldn’t be surprised if her team spends the rest of 2022 and Q1 2023 pushing “Nonsense” as a single, positioning Sabrina to release an album that’s more “nonsense-esque” at the end of next year. Whether or not that’s a sound she’d like to pursue is a different story.
So while this song is a bop and I can’t stop listening, and the Christmas version is so ridiculous that it just might work, I can’t help but have mixed feelings about the ways TikTok is pushing the industry towards creating fake “organic” viral moments. “A Nonsense Christmas” being positioned as something “the fans wanted” when it was clearly another attempt at creating a viral trend is some Josie and the Pussycats-level trend control, toeing the line between clever and opportunistic.
And let’s not forget that for major labels, the bottom line is always $$$. Every “new” version of “Nonsense” is catalogued on streaming services as a double-sided single with the OG “Nonsense” as the partner track. That means if you listen to either the sped-up of Christmas version of the song, the original version will automatically play right after, and you’ll likely just let it play anyway, thus boosting the original’s streams.
At the time of writing this, “Nonsense” has yet to break onto the Billboard charts, but is gaining traction on Spotify, likely due to TikTok.
This is just the beginning of this “Nonsense” story. If the song can climb into the Billboard Hot 100 and continue to gain traction on the Spotify Viral Charts, other major labels can use this case study as proof to artists that it’s “easy” to go viral in the age of TikTok.
All you have to do is write a hit, have a copyrighted reupload accidentally go viral, reclaim the reupload, release multiple versions of the song, and then grind on the platform until a trend claims your track and watch the streams rack up!
Or maybe all it takes is a pair of big snowballs.