Proactively Working It Out on the Cover Song

Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, Lorde and pitting women against each other.

For the past four days, I’ve had exactly three songs on repeat. The first is irrelevant to this post but may be a point of discussion in the future. The second is relevant and will come up later. 

The third I already had on repeat two months ago when it originally came out. Now, Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” has been returned to the rotation thanks to a pristine, pared-down cover by ascendant star Sabrina Carpenter.

The cover, for the BBC1 Radio Live Lounge series, is a savvy move for Carpenter. She has risen to mainstream success essentially in lock-step with Roan. And although Carpenter’s style of pop is more mainstream than Roan, they certainly occupy similar spaces in the popular music discourse.

To put it simply, comparisons between the two are inevitable. In covering “Good Luck, Babe!,” Carpenter is proactively establishing that there is no competition between the two, only support and artistic admiration. 

It may seem unnecessary to make this move before even a suggestion of bad blood, but such a show of support to one’s closest contemporaries has become a sort of rite-of-passage for female artists today. It is the symbolic form of what has become a mantra of Very Online discourse about female pop stars: “We don’t need to pit two strong women against each other.”

The phrase, in all its variations, has appeared increasingly across the internet over the past decade. It’s a reactive slogan, a course-correction to the decades in which the music industry and media cycle seemed determined to suggest that any two popular female artists were in competition. These suggestions often led to very real feuds, and in turn metanarratives surrounding the artists that drove up interest in them. 

It’s entirely understandable that fans and music-lovers in general would want to push back on the recurring notion that no more than one female artist can occupy a space at any one time. After all, why can’t women support each other? Why can’t they thrive together?

Indeed, they can. But as it always seems to do, the internet took what was a logical argument and amplified it to the point of distortion. “Don’t pit two strong women against each other” has at this point come to mean “Any comparison suggests competition, which is bad.” 

The sentiment leaves little room for comparison-based analysis, and little room for genuine misgivings. For the artists themselves, it certainly leaves little room to express any feelings more complicated than complete and total support for everything their contemporaries do and say. Considering artists are, as a reminder, also humans who often interact in private, that sentiment can at times be more suffocating than unifying. 

That is what makes the song “Girl, so confusing version with lorde,” by Charli XCX, feel like a breath of fresh air. (That’s the second song I’ve had on repeat, btw.)

Much like Carpenter and Roan, Charli XCX and Lorde were themselves contemporaries, co-members of a micro-generation of female pop stars that rose to fame around the same time a decade ago. But while Lorde’s biggest smashes came early, Charli XCX is just now having her true time in the sun, following the release of her latest album, “Brat,” just over two weeks ago. (Read more on what is being dubbed “Brat Summer” here.)

On that album is the original “Girl, so confusing.” It’s not quite a diss track, but it is certainly a blunt, vulnerable admission by Charli XCX about her feelings toward a fellow female artist, aka Lorde. 

Now, two weeks later, they’ve dropped a remix in which Lorde responds. It is, and I do not say this lightly, a revelation both musically and metanarratively. 

As Lindsay Zoladz wrote for the New York Times:

When their voices finally join to indict the whole catfight economy — “It’s you and me on the coin the industry loves to spend” — their unity feels stronger and more deeply earned than the usual radio-friendly platitudes about superwomen and solidarity. In recent years, the female pop star collaboration has become an omnipresent cliché, telegraphing frictionless friendship at best and attempting to boost chart numbers at worst. But the “Girl, So Confusing” remix genuinely feels like something else: mutually messy risk-taking, honest reckoning with the fun-house mirrors of fame and conflict-resolution you can dance to.

Indeed, it is messy and honest, so much so that I almost hesitate to call the “Girl, so confusing” remix a resolution. That suggests this is the end-point for their relationship, an oversimplification of the unity on display in much the same way that the “don’t pit two women against each other” sentiment is. After all, this is not a vow of eternal friendship. There are still complicated emotions on display. 

Rather than an end-point, I’d argue, this is a healthy next step. And that’s something we should want out of art—and artists.