A very old tradition in the recording industry took center stage this week. We’re talking about the answer song, of course.
Response records are songs that “answer” a previous recording by another artist, sometimes addressing a specific incident directly, sometimes playing back its themes. The novelty has been around for decades, moving from blues to R&B to country to hip-hop, and is often a gender-to-gender response.
The trick was originally designed to capture the sales dynamics of the original song. Rarely has it achieved the same level of success, but it has certainly given the fans and the industry something to get into after a hit.
For example, the 1963 Andrea Carroll song, It Hurts To Be Sixteen, was the answer to Neil Sedaka’s Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen. In this case, the sales-conscious Sedaka wrote the melody to both of them, using different lyricists to convey the different perspectives.
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More popular was Back in the USSR, a 1968 The Beatles track that responded to Chuck Berry’s back in the US. There’s also Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, the answer to Neil Young’s Southern Man. Young rebuked it like this:
Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard old Neil knocked her down
I hope Neil Young will remember it
A man from the south doesn’t need him anyway
More recently, Sia’s 2014 song Big Girls Cry was the answer to Fergie’s Big Girls Don’t Cry, while Katy Perry’s California Gurls with Snoop Dogg Jay-Z and Alicia Keys responded with their New York homage, Empire State of Mind. It was the first time that both the original songs and the answer hit. # 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart.
In this final round, according to widespread fan speculation, Sabrina Carpenter’s Skin is the answer song to Olivia Rodrigo’s driver’s license.
Rodrigo, who starred in Disney’s High School Musical: The Series, debuted her song About Lost Love and hit # 1. The lyrics tell of how she moved on with her ex. But it also contained a supposed excavation of who he went on with: “And you’re probably dating that blonde girl / who always made me doubt / she’s so much older than me / she’s all I’m unsure of.”
Fans dubbed “the blonde girl” Carpenter (known for Disney’s Girl Meets World and Netflix’s Work It). Carpenter is blond and four years older than Rodrigo.
Carpenter’s response was quick. Two weeks after Rodrigo’s release, she replied Skin, referring to someone trying to get “under my skin”.
“You told your side / So I’ll tell mine” and “Maybe ‘blonde’ was the only rhyme,” wrote Carpenter. She added: “You can try / get under mine, under mine, under my skin / while he’s on mine / yes, everything on mine, everything on mine, everything on my skin / wish you knew that too / Can’t get under your skin if I don’t let you in. “
No singer has commented yet. If the tradition of reply recording continues, it will likely stay there.
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