We gather here today to mourn the loss of a true pop icon: the horny outros Sabrina Carpenter usually performs at the end of “Nonsense.” The pop phenom kicked off her Short n’ Sweet world tour in Columbus, Ohio, last night to an audience anticipating which city-incorporating innuendo she would spin to conclude the song. The last time she was in Ohio, she whipped up: “If it’s small that’s super inconvenient/If he doesn’t know this song you should leave him/I wish that I could put the cleve in Cleveland.” But the singer has decided to retire the lyrical shtick this time around.
At the end of “Nonsense,” Carpenter delivered the usual “Woke up this morning, thought I’d write a pop hit/How quickly can you take your clothes off pop quiz?” set up. Then, when she would normally launch into the outro, she started descending beneath the stage and feigned a microphone mishap with a look of faux confusion. “We apologize for the interruption of our program due to technical difficulties,” a graphic on the stage read.
The outro series had a good run. When Carpenter performed on Saturday Night Live, she spun it into: “He is 30 Rock hard cause I said “Hi”/My sense of humor is but I am not dry/SNL I just came for the first time.” And when she stopped by BBC’s Radio 1 Live Lounge, she joked: “I’m American, I am not British/So BBC, it stands for somethin’ different/This Live Lounge is so lit because I’m in it/Innit, because I’m innit, you get it?”
The last one she delivered was at San Fransisco’s Outside Lands in August. “Soon cometh my album so exciting/My heart doth pound beneath my breasts, so mighty/Outside Lands, it’s like thou art inside me,” she sang, bringing the era to an end on a Shakespearian note.
But the death of the “Nonsense” outro doesn’t mark the end of Carpenter’s affinity for horny one-liners. Her new album is full of them. The viral second verse from “Bed Chem” is the perfect example: “Come right on me, I mean camaraderie/Said you’re not in my time zone, but you wanna be/Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?/See it in my mind, let’s fulfill the prophecy.”
Carpenter also injected comedy into other parts of her production on the Short n’ Sweet tour for good measure. At the end of the show, fans were treated to a prerecorded goodbye message. “Hope you had a great night, drive safe! Thanks for coming to my tour. I love singing,” she says in the infomercial-style video. “I hope you liked hearing me sing for that long. Make sure to check out the merch table on the way out. There’s a lot of merch — or maybe there isn’t, maybe it sold out. I don’t know, I filmed this months ago.”
And she just keeps going: “Thanks so much for coming to the show. I hope you sang your heart out. Just kidding, I know you did. I was there the whole time. I love you. Have a good night, everybody. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Thanks for coming to the show. Hope you had a great night. Was that sincere?”
