With over 12.78 million views within 24 hours after being posted to YouTube, pop singer Sabrina Carpenter has set a personal record for her most successful debut of a music video with “Taste.”
The quick success of this music video mirrors Carpenter’s growing fame. Carpenter’s Spotify monthly listeners count has had an increase of over 128% since her Coachella performance of “Espresso” in April. She has gone from 36.3 million monthly listeners as of April 12 to 84.6 million monthly listeners by Sept. 10.
On Aug. 23, Sabrina Carpenter released her newest album, “Short n’ Sweet.” A music video was released with the album for the opening track “Taste,” directed by Dave Meyers and featuring actress Jenna Ortega. Carpenter has had a recent theme of showcasing popular actors in her music videos; her previous music video, “Please, Please, Please,” features her (maybe?) boyfriend Barry Keoghan as the love interest. Ortega was a great pick for this video because the storyline is that of a satirical horror, with which Ortega is not unfamiliar.
Meyers and Carpenter paid clear homage to several classic satirical horror films including “Death Becomes Her,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1,” “Psycho,” “Addams Family Values,” and more. While never explicitly referenced, there are plenty of parallels in overall content, specific scenes, or even just screen grabs of the video compared to screen grabs of one of the films.
This music video had a very aesthetically pleasing feel to it, yet was blatantly violent to a comedically unrealistic extent. Afterall, “in the Sabrina Cinematic Universe, women never die,” according to Carpenter in her YouTube video. The video contains two women literally trying to kill each other over a shared male love interest (who does not share the luxury of being immortal in the SCU). At the very least, this music video is nothing if not entertaining. It shows (almost) 100 ways to die, includes a kiss between Carpenter and Ortega and showcases a banger of a song (that may or may not be about Shawn Mendes but definitely is.) No one can blame Sabrina for writing a hit about a one-month-long situationship, seeing as though it clearly resonates with a lot of her audience.
