Although the ostensible majority of people from Sabrina Carpenter’s generation—a.k.a. Gen Z—aren’t exactly known for “getting crunk,” as it was once said, it didn’t stop her from penning a drunk dialer’s anthem for her seventh album, Man’s Best Friend. Even though this concept/practice, too, is an anachronism to Carpenter’s generation, which scarcely knows how to use a phone in a more conventional sense. That is to say, by talking on it as it was originally intended (who knows what Antonio Meucci, the real inventor of the telephone, would think about how far it’s come—or rather, how much it’s devolved). And, of course, the concept of “dialing” is perhaps even more arcane. And, of course, trying to put a rotary phone in front any of them would result in some possibly finger-injuring hijinks.
Thus, as if wanting to prove her legitimacy as an “old soul” (or simply someone who knows how to use a phone in its analog form), Carpenter goes all in with reviving the “romance” of the drunk dial. And yes, it can be quite fun to taunt (and, let’s face it, harass) someone in this way, particularly an ex or a person you have a more than slight crush on. The drunk dial is also incredibly healing/cathartic if one has freshly experienced heartache, as Carpenter makes it clear she has from the start of the song, painting the picture, “Love when happy hour comes at ten a.m o’clock on a Tuesday/Guess a broken heart doesn’t care that I just woke up.” No, it surely does not, for when the desire to numb one’s feelings is at its greatest, alcohol remains the tried-and-true “best friend” (in fact, it ought to be called “woman’s best friend,” to make an inverse reference to Carpenter’s album title).
Which is why Gen Z’s pivot to other, less “lively” drugs like cannabis is, in its way, “ill-advised.” Because it means they’ll never know the joys of making a fool of oneself in that kind of way. The drunk dialer’s way. The simultaneous “what have I done?”/“I’m so funny” emotions that go hand in hand with waking up the following morning and wondering who you might have called and what you might have said (though, if you’re drunk dialing someone, you’re also likely to leave a message on their voicemail too, which means there’s a record of it on the person’s phone if you really want to shake down what it is you said and how unhinged you sounded when you said it).
Carpenter, however, does still seem to understand those joys, as evidenced by her chirpy chorus, “I’m just drinkin’ to call someone/Ain’t nobody safe when I’m a little bit drunk/Could be John or Larry, gosh, who’s to say?/Or the one that rhymes with ‘villain’ if I’m feeling that way.” In other words, she’s prepared to go through her entire contact list in order to ensure that she gets someone “on the horn” to tease and toy with.
Elsewhere in the chorus, she also adds, “A girl who knows her liquor is a girl who’s been dumped.” Here, too, Carpenter alludes to alcohol being a woman’s best friend in that it’s the one thing that allows her to become uninhibited enough to say what she’s truly feeling in a society that constantly suppresses a woman’s emotions. Telling her to “get over it” and “just move on.”
Well, if one expects a woman to do that, then, as Carpenter says, “Some good old-fashioned fun sure numbs the pain.” And there it is: Carpenter suddenly and fully revealing her “Gen Z-ness” (even if she’s classified as being among the “elder” part of that generation) by calling getting drunk in general “old-fashioned.” But even more so is getting drunk and calling someone.
The fact that the song is suffused with a country sound (co-produced by Carpenter, Jack Antonoff and John Ryan), complete with a fiddle-heavy musical breakdown, gives Carpenter further license to be “playful” as the song starts to come to a close. This is when she mimics the drunkard’s lilt/grammatically incorrect turn of phrase with a chanting, “Ba-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da-da” followed by her slurring speech that includes such phrases as, “How’s yous been? What’s up?” and “Bye, it’s me, hows mm-call, do you me still love?”
Before then, Carpenter offers a lyrical example of one of her drunken calls via the verse, “Ring, ring, ring, yeah, it’s super important (how many shots in an ounce?)/I might have double vision, but that is irrelevant right now (answer me, baby, um, are you in town?)/I miss you and I think about you every minute/If you’re still disinterested in me, well, fuck/Just tryin’ different numbers, didn’t think that you’d pick up.”
To be sure, there are many times when the drunk dialer calls someone half-expecting there won’t be an answer—particularly since they have a tendency to call people at rather “unseemly” hours of the night. Hours when more “respectable” types are already asleep. Often with their new bedfellow—you know, the one that likely replaced the drunk dialer. But when the woman on the other side of the line is drunk, it’s just as Carpenter says, “Sippin’ on my go go juice, I can’t be blamed.”
Whatever one’s “go go juice” of choice—wine, whiskey, straight vodka, espresso martini (since that’s what Carpenter made trend with her first big hit, “espresso”)—there are so many ways to “fuel” one’s mind and body for an “old-fashioned” (no alcohol pun intended, though maybe Carpenter did) drunk dial. A lost art that perhaps Carpenter briefly brought back in the wake of releasing Man’s Best Friend, where “Go Go Juice” is placed at track nine, fittingly sandwiched in between “When Did You Get Hot?” and “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry.”
While it may take some time for those who rely on alcohol as their post-breakup coping mechanism, eventually the thrill of the drunk dial starts to wane. Though it takes far longer for the drunk dialer to get over its amusing qualities than it does for the recipient of the (many) call(s).
