20 years after her first Coachella appearance in 2006, Madonna faced the Indio desert again as a surprise guest in Sabrina Carpenter’s headliner show –– looking at a very different audience on very different terms. The Queen of Pop was promoting the release of a successor to her album “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” fittingly named “Confessions II,” but her dual performance with Carpenter largely featured older songs, like “Vogue” and the perennially resurgent hit “Like a Prayer.” To me, inviting Carpenter to feature on her new album and perform her classics felt like a way for Madonna to grant Carpenter her blessing, a way to tell a younger audience: “This is one of my disciples. Don’t pass up on her.”  

I think Madonna connects to Carpenter because she’s tapped into an artistic well of female sexuality that Madonna brought to the pop domain. In many ways, Carpenter owes her raunchy lyrics and penchant for innuendos to a precedent that Madonna established in the ‘80s and ‘90s with albums like “Erotica” and “Bedtime Stories,” which were direct challenges to misogynistic media criticism and sexism within the music industry. Madonna’s irreverent sexuality was distinctly independent from the patriarchal image of how women should behave. Her status as a sex symbol was grounded in her representation of female sexuality as empowering, a way to escape double standards of modesty and repression placed on women.  

Carpenter’s music similarly seeks to empower women through promiscuity; her recent music video for “House Tour” features several risqué shots of women in lingerie and every live performance of Juno features the recreation of a different “position.” It makes sense that Madonna would give Carpenter a ringing endorsement. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “sorry Madonna, I love you, but I don’t think Sabrina Carpenter has earned this one.”  

When Carpenter released the promotional material for her album “Man’s Best Friend,” feminist groups responded with mild outrage to the album cover’s depiction of Carpenter on all fours at the feet of an anonymous male figure. The album cover wasn’t empowering, wrote organizations like Glasgow Women’s Aid, but a regressive and degrading presentation of female sexuality as submissive to male authority. 

While I disagree that the album cover is explicitly misogynistic, I do think it makes it clear that Carpenter isn’t subverting sexual norms and industry standards, like Madonna did before her. Madonna’s cultural image was unique and rebellious because she refused to play by the rules or accept the expectations placed on the female pop star. She was explicitly concerned with women’s liberation from the patriarchy. 

In stark contrast, Carpenter’s music and cultural image quite literally submits to the established sexual norms and industry paradigm, claiming that in doing so, it aims to reclaim and satirize the male gaze. I’m unsure of how successful Carpenter has been in this respect, but whatever her goals, it’s unfair to call it subversive, and it’s unfair to compare her to Madonna –– even if this comparison is coming from Madonna herself.