Chels

I’ve had Man’s Best Friend playing on a loop since last week. I have no authority to give a full album review (unless my music BTEC counts), but in my opinion, it’s a no skips album. I do, however, have some authority to talk about the way Sabrina is deliberate with her word choices to curate her signature aesthetic and playful sexuality.

When the Man’s Best Friend album cover was first released, there was a lot of backlash about the imagery. The thing is, I get why people were criticising it, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with the criticism. Throughout the last few years of her career, Sabrina has consistently used satire to playfully examine modern romance and gender roles.

Here’s the thing: her music may not be deeply feminist, it may not be an academic critique, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s pop music, after all. I think we are just deeply uncomfortable seeing young women express their sexuality. Because even if Sabrina wasn’t being satirical, even if everything was played straight, that’s not exactly a problem. She’s talked about preferring to leave her music up to interpretation – she knows what she was thinking and feeling when writing her songs, and as an audience, we can interpret that how we see fit. I personally see her work as playful and satirical, but less overtly. I think a lot of people defend her against the accusations that her work is too sexually explicit sit quite far on the other side of the fence; there’s been a lot of insistence that Tears isn’t supposed to be a sexy song, it’s a criticism of men’s behaviour, highlighting how men get praised for doing the bare minimum. Put a pin in that thought, because I’ll unpack it later, but I think it would be perfectly okay even if the song was just about finding a man attractive. Men can do it, so why can’t women?

I’m not here to defend Man’s Best Friend from criticism. I’m not a music expert. What I do want to talk about is an interesting pattern I noticed. Of the twelve songs on the album, all but three are marked as explicit (at least on Spotify), and it’s the three you’re least likely to expect; Tears, When did you get hot, and House Tour, arguably the three most overtly sexual songs on the album.

It’s such a subversion of expectations, but also very typical of Sabrina’s writing, to create playful, sexy imagery, without actually saying anything graphic. It feels very flirty, and in a way silly (but I mean that complimentary), and it matches her old Hollywood, babydoll pyjama aesthetic. And it’s not that Sabrina shies away from explicit language. In Never Getting Laid, she sings ‘You could be using your lips / On a girl with big tits’, a very frank line. Deliberate, too, as in Never Getting Laid she references male attitudes to women, singing ‘Us girls are fun, but stressful, am I right?’

It’s one of her most scathing songs when it comes to men, I think, and the blunt, almost misogynistic tone mocks the way men speak about women. Like her album cover, what appears to be submission is actually sardonic and self-aware.

Tears can be interpreted both ways – it is an ironic song, poking fun at the low standards for men, maybe even Sabrina’s own low standards, but at the same time, it’s still a sexy, flirty song. The most explicit lyric, in fact, is ‘I get wet at the thought of you’, which is, it turns out, too explicit for radio. Which is funny, because ‘tears run down my thighs’ managed to bypass radio censors. I think the difference between the two lyrics demonstrates the way Sabrina toes the line between suggestive and explicit – she’s able to craft overtly sexual imagery while avoiding anything that actually requires censorship.

We all know what House Tour implies, yet there’s not a single lyric that would raise a red flag for explicit content, with the exception, maybe, of I just want you to come inside. Even then, it’s a perfectly normal lyric, out of context. Sabrina said it herself – I promise none of this is a metaphor – for all the censors know, it’s a song about a literal house tour.

My favourite bit of wordplay in the song is for sure I’m just so proud of my design (to dim the lights). The double meaning of design coupled with the secondary meaning hidden within backing vocals implies that Sabrina was plotting to dim the lights to set the mood.

When did you get hot? is pretty overtly about Sabrina’s attraction to a man, so it’s not a case of clever wordplay disguising sexual undertones in an otherwise unassuming song. Rather, the wordplay is more overt, deliberately employing thinly veiled metaphors. It’s a return to the cheeky and playful sexuality of the Short n Sweet era – there’s no hiding the meaning of the song, but Sabrina still avoids explicit sexuality in favour of fun double entendres like ‘I bet your light rod’s, like, bigger than Zeus’s’. 

Man’s Best Friend is an album that portrays conflicting, coinciding feelings and ideas – there’s heartbreak and revenge, self-criticism and playful flirting. It’s the songs about heartbreak where Sabrina is often blunter, saying exactly what she means, and in her flirtier songs, she leaves it up to the imagination, dropping playful hints to the songs’ true meanings.