This week, a very old tradition of the recording industry came to the fore. We’re talking about the answer song, of course.
Response records are songs that “answer” a previous recording by another artist, sometimes speaking directly to a specific event, and other times playing it. The novelty has been around for decades, and has been passed down from blues to R&B to country to hip-hop, and is often a response from one generation to the next.
The trick was originally designed to capture the momentum of sales of the original song. Rarely has it achieved the same amount of success, but it has certainly given fans and the industry something to keep up with in the wake of a hit.
For example, Andrea Carroll’s 1963 song, It hurts to be sixteen, was the answer to Neil Sedaka Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen. In this case, the sales-minded Sedaka wrote the melody for both and used different lyricists to convey the different perspectives.
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More popular was Back in the USSR., a 1968 track by The Beatles 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. So Young asked again:
Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard Neil put her down
Well I hope Neil Young will remember it
A Southern man does not need him anyway
More recently, Sia’s 2014 song Big girls cry was the answer to Fergie’s Big girls do not cry, while Katy Perry’s California Gurls with Snoop Dogg answering Jay-Z and Alicia Keys with their tribute in New York, Empire State of Mind. It was the first time that both the original songs and the answer hit. Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.
In this final round, Sabrina Carpenter Skin is, according to widespread fans of fans, the response song to Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s license.
Rodrigo, who played in Disney’s High School Musical: The Series, debuts her song about a lost love and hits number 1. The lyrics tell how she sees her ex move. But it also contains an alleged excavation with which he continues: “And you’re probably with that blonde girl / Which has always made me doubt / she’s so much older than me / she’s all I’m unsure about.”
Fans referred to ‘the blonde girl’ as Carpenter (famous for the Disney show) Girl meets the world and Netflix’s Work it out). Carpenter is blond and four years older than Rodrigo.
Carpenter’s response was quick. Two weeks after Rodrigo’s release, she replies with Skinand refers to someone trying to get ‘under my skin’.
“You told your side / I will tell mine” and “Maybe ‘blonde’ was the only rhyme,” Carpenter wrote. She added: “You can try / to get under me, under me, under my skin / While he’s on mine / Yes, everything on me, everything on me, everything on my skin / I wish you knew that even you / Can ‘I can not get under my skin if I do not allow you.’
So far no singer has commented. If the tradition of answering records holds, this is probably where it stays.