Madonna’s collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter, as we interpret it, is about autonomy. It is directed at everyone who has ever felt entitled to define her: the press, the trolls, the keyboard warriors who treat artists as public property. And the industry itself — the machine that has always tried to reduce creative worth to cold metrics, to streaming numbers and chart positions, as if those numbers could ever contain what she is or what she has built.
That reductiveness, that urge to contain and define, runs through the whole song — in the press, in the algorithm, in the industry’s obsession with metrics. But the song also feels like it might be looking directly at us too. At the fans. At the people who love her most and have followed every step. Could it be that even our devotion — the expectations, the projections, the vision we have built of her over decades — is part of what she is singing about? It is a question worth sitting with.
In Kabbalistic thought, judgment and perception are intimately linked — what you see is shaped entirely by what you are capable of seeing. The eye doesn’t receive reality; it filters it. And the song seems to understand this. It is aimed at the deeper human tendency to reduce what we cannot fully comprehend — to make something vast and living fit inside the frame of what we already know. She has always existed beyond that frame. The song is a reminder that she always will.
Running beneath all of this is the unmistakable presence of memory — long, unfiltered, and unflinching. Of secrets, of silences, of things this industry would rather keep buried. She has witnessed it all and survived it all, and she is done pretending otherwise.
What drives all of it, though, she makes absolutely clear. Everything — every battle, every reinvention, every misunderstanding — was done for love.
We will be hearing this very soon. 👀
DrownedMadonna
