When modern popular music shows an affinity for automobiles, it’s often nodding to the newest and fastest supercars or brainlessly reaching back to a period so far back that it’s not even nostalgia. Either what is “old” has shifted further forward than I’m comfortable with, or pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s consistent appreciation of Malaise Era vehicles is a real artistic choice grounded in a desire to achieve a specific aesthetic. But why?
The ‘Malaise Era’ is such a commonly used term these days (it has its own Wikipedia page) that I sometimes forget I’m old enough to have been there at Jalopnik when it was first coined and popularized by Murilee Martin. Drawing from Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise Speech,” it describes a period in time from roughly the early ’70s to the mid ’80s when a mix of safety and environmental regulations made new cars (especially American ones) notably worse.
It’s not a moment in history that’s remembered positively by enthusiasts, as Murilee himself explained for Capital One:
The idea that the citizens of the nation that invented the airplane and then helped defend the world from Axis powers would ever need to sacrifice anything didn’t sit well with Americans. Though Carter didn’t use the word “malaise,” journalists quickly dubbed it the Malaise Speech, and the name stuck.
My membership in the older cohort of Generation X means I sat in my parents’ thirsty 1973 Chevrolet Beauville in gas lines as a second-grader in 1973 and again as an eighth-grader in 1979. I reached driving age in a household with a miserably underpowered 1978 Pontiac Bonneville and a hilariously unreliable 1979 Ford Granada in the driveway.
With a few exceptions, these were the dark times for people who immediately consider hp/displacement when looking at a car. What if you don’t? Perhaps there’s some romance to those vehicles?
I mention this because the post-teeny bopper version of musical artist Sabrina Carpenter is, as the kids might say, very Malaise-coded. I’ll start with her latest video, for the song “Manchild,” which is basically a trailer for a movie that doesn’t exist and is absolutely jam-packed with Malaise or Malaise-inspired metal and outfits. Even the tint on the whole video makes it feel like an episode of The Fall Guy.
The video opens with Carpenter in Daisy Dukes being picked up by a single-axle Kei-truck. This is not Malaise specifically, but very of-the-moment at least. She’s then dropped off at a desert locale with an extremely Malaise Datsun 280ZX and a couple of older trucks.
She’s then picked up in this maybe 1974 Ford Gran Torino Country Squire Wagon with the super Malaise combo of red-over-fake-wood. You can feel America’s competitive edge bleeding away in the strangely raked C-pillar of this wagon. It’s possible this particular car has a 400 cubic-inch V8 with 173 horsepower, meaning it can barely power itself.
Do I care about the car’s power? I care less when Sabrina Carpenter is sharing a cigarette with the driver while hanging out on the roof. It’s a perfect image, and I like to think it’s a tribute to Robert Bechtle.
And speaking of The Fall Guy, what’s more representative of both the best and worst of this period than a full-sized two-door SUV? This specific version was neither green nor fast in its original trim, probably offering up under 200 horsepower from a carb’d V8, but it is at least arboreal.
I don’t know how old this garbage truck is, I just know that she’s Skitchin’ in traditional roller skates, which feels right.
I won’t spoil what happens to the Pinto because it’s a great payoff. This is a great example of a car from the Carter Presidency when America tried, and it still didn’t work.
This is an old bike, but the look wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of C*H*I*P*S.
This is definitely a ’90s Sea-Doo, so less Malaise, but the dude is pure ’70s.
The final frame is Carpenter getting out of an early Supra into what I think is the Chevy Citation above, though I’m not 100% sure. That’s a pure combo of late ’70s/early ’80s cars.
This isn’t her only video to feature both the aesthetic and the automobiles of the times:
In her video for “Please, Please, Please” she’s also rocking a peak-Malaise Dodge Magnum XE. This vehicle looks tough, and matches her black garters in a way that’s probably alluring if you can ignore the hottest motor available wasn’t even rocking 200 horsepower (or, worse, it has a lean burn V8 with 140 whimpering horses).
???? | Behind the Scenes of making the pool car for Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’ music video! pic.twitter.com/0cw5ecxA1X
— Sabrina Carpenter Daily (@SCdailyupdates) April 12, 2024
If you know Carpenter at all, it’s for song-of-the-summer “Espresso,” and that, too, features what looks like an early ’80s Mercedes R107 as the pool car?
That this has occurred in 75% of her new videos makes me think that it’s more than just a coincidence. This is quite clearly a choice, and while it might simply be nostalgia for the unrembered ’70s and ’80s, I think there’s a bit more going on here beyond Carpenter and her artistic collaborators being just old enough to have watched Silver Streak on Comedy Central every day after school
The easy political viewpoint at the macro-level would be a prediction that we’re headed towards a new era of stagflation, though there’s very little lyrically to go on for that perspective. Without getting into the Barry Keoghan/Shawn Mendes of it all, most of her modern songs are rooted in bad relationships with men. Her prior album, “Emails I Can’t Send” started out with a song about how she’ll maybe never fully trust the opposite sex because her father cheated on her mother.
While her follow-up, “Short ‘n’ Sweet” is a lot more poppy and cheerful, a good chunk of the songs are about wishing the men in her life weren’t such losers. Here are the lyrics to “Please, Please, Please”
I know I have good judgment, I know I have good taste
It’s funny and it’s ironic that only I feel that way
I promise ’em that you’re different and everyone makes mistakes
But just don’t
I heard that you’re an actor, so act like a stand-up guy
Whatever devil’s inside you, don’t let him out tonight
I tell them it’s just your culture and everyone rolls their eyes
Yeah, I know
The fun of your 20s, to varying degrees, is doing stupid things. Sometimes you do those stupid things with stupid people. It’s part of growing up. “Manchild” is also about stupid men, but the vibes are just a little different. It seems like she’s looking back, not looking forward. Or, as she said on Instagram:
[T]his song became to me something I can look back on that will score the mental montage to the very confusing and fun young adult years of life. it sounds like the song embodiment of a loving eye roll and it feels like a never ending road trip in the summer ! hence why i wanted to give it to you now- so you can stick your head out the car window and scream it all summer long!
While I was born at the end of the Malaise Era I didn’t live through it, but life has its own Malaise Eras. At the time it wasn’t much fun, but with enough distance, youthful indiscretions don’t look so bad. If you play back that time in your mind it’ll probably look like a highlight reel or a movie trailer, much like the video.
That’s my interpretation, at least. If I’m wrong, I don’t really want to know.
I watched the video on mute because I’m at work. To make Malaise cool you either have to go all in on the aesthetics of the era or put the car in a completely modern setting so that it stands out as an anachronism. They nailed the aesthetics of the era IMO.
Sabrina Carpenter illicits anything but malaise from me…
She jumps out of what appears to be a ca. 1980 Celica Supra, into the copilot seat of a ca. 1980 Chevy Citation (four-door).
It’s worth pointing out that that is also the car she bails out of in the beginning of the vid; wholly appropriate considering the lyrics.
This video is beautifully done, and it’s a really nice piece of surrealist art that was very well crafted for mainstream consumption. The cars are great, like everything else in the video, but of course they’re what really stands out for us car people. I’d love it if the Ford station wagon was a nod to Robert Bechtle, but that seems like a bit of a stretch. Which doesn’t detract on the quality of the work here, it’s a really cool, well-executed video, and I find it especially cool that it exists as promotional material for a mainstream pop artist.
I’m an amateur car guy who’s also a professional music guy, and I’l like to go on a tangent here and point out how good the song actually is. I’ve been saying this for the past decade or so: mainstream pop has been getting better and better with every year that passes – while still churning out some of the worst music ever known to man, sure. But the good stuff is actualy really good, and that’s because artists have way more freedom now than they did in the past. And I think this video shows that that freedom reflects on not just the music itself, but also the promotional art.
Leave it to Hardibro to write a gripping, insightful story about cars, life, pop music, and macroeconomics, with the sage perspective of someone just old enough, but still young enough to be hip to Sabrina Carpenter and not look like a Fellow Kids poseur.
Well done.
The Easy Rest Inn at 1:57 gets used a lot in films and videos.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stars4esther/3299388211
I believe the videos are less the vision of Sabrina Carpenter and more the vision of the creative directors, film directors, cinematographers, art directors and prop masters.
How 70s of you to assume that Ms. Carpenter has no agency.
I’ve worked in film/video production. It’s how things usually go.
No, I am with you. Could she have a general concept for this and maybe funded some of it to act as a co-producer? Maybe.
Did she have to sign off or approve the concepts? Certainly.
But the vision or pitch almost certainly came from whoever the primary producer is or the director.
And yes, the prop masters get ALL the credit here for finding some very cool, well maintained, less loved and remembered vehicles for this (the Pinto? The Magnum? That wagon in the last still pic? Someone on that team is either a car nut or was given a specific time frame to work within when finding cars to use for the video and did a fabulous job.)
Same here. And a quick web search of Sabrina Carpenter shows that she has an interest in 70s music and fashion. So while there are plenty of people who are involved, she was probably more engaged than a lot of other artists are.
Maybe it’s my lack of tik’tok’ing but I couldn’t keep up with that video, and I like some of her songs but it’s like as background, she’s always got this mumbly breathy kinda singing which is fine but not like real 80s. Best I’ve heard her sing was when she sang alongside Paul Simon for “Homeward Bound” almost acapella on SNL, so yes she can sing, but like Billie Eillish just decides to mumble.
Also for me I’m hearing hints of Melissa Manchester’s “You Should Hear How She Talks About You” or the Doobie Brothers “What a Fool Believes”. And it’s gonna bug me, like how I swear Teddy Swim’s “The Door” is using a slowed down version of the Zombie’s “Time of the Season”, but none of the 20-30 year olds I work with understand my angst when I tell them about it.
cool cars though.
I think Karen Carpenter is better.
Am I the only one that has an irrational desire to know EVERYTHING about that single-axle truck, and perhaps buy one?
First, is it real or CG? If it’s real, I want to know how they keep it upright and drive (built over a Segway maybe?) and then I want to see one of the Autopian staff do a test drive.
For some reason, it is hilarious to me they way it does a face plant when the driver hits the brakes…
I need to know more too. I’ve been looking for more on the web but I can’t find anything. This deserves its own article.
It’s edited. In the scene where she gets out of it, you can clearly see a few artifacts from the post-production. It’s likely greenscreen painted and then just overlaid with a still shot of the scene.
It’s a 1993-1996 Honda Acty with the bed removed by CGI.
Here’s what it looks like in real life: https://bringatrailer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/1994_honda_4wd_acty_5-speed_1580764738c798a42a1994HondaActy20.jpg
Well, that was… interesting.
That was a trippy music video. I wonder how much of it was practical effects verse computer generated?
I am both a fan of Sabrina Carpenter and a fan of malaise era cars (I was born in 1973). So this video is the perfect combo for me.
There were some great cars in that era. Absolutely not one single one of them was American. So whatever.
Battering ram bumpers have the advantage of not costing stupid money to repair after a minor tap.
“Manchild.” From the album The Cheerful Insanity of Sabrina Carptenter.
Fun video. Dull modern pop song. I’d much rather younger pop acts go back to the 70s and 80s not for the vehicles in their videos, but for the songwriting craft (and actual musicians playing the songs) that has sadly gone by the wayside.
I liked the cars, she’s pretty, the song is a monotonous, auto-tuned snoozer. She’s got legs and she knows how to use ’em.
She makes the best of her… backside as well. If you got it, flaunt it!
Apparently there were cars in this video as well.
Yeah, hooked me with the Youtube pic. lol