The Olds Thought Your Pop Icons Were Stupid Too

Millennials are hating on Gen Z pop stars as if our predecessors didn't do the same thing to our faves.

I predicted the rise of Skibidi Toilet

It’s been a minute since Sabrina Carpenter went viral for the album cover (and if you don’t remember it, that’s fine—it wasn’t long before albumcovergate that she went viral for pantomiming an Eiffel Tower sex position at a concert in Paris.) Point is: people get mad about Sabrina Carpenter a lot. And while some of these people are the dreaded sex-negative zoomers, each with fifteen sexual orientations (none of which are actively practiced) a great deal of the criticism came from millennials and Gen X, who see Sabrina Carpenter (or any other zoomer pop icon) as a uniquely terrible, vapid and over-sexualized example of “what’s wrong with kids today.”

During the most recent Sabrina Carpenter related skirmish, I recall people my age balking at the idea that her controversial displays of sexuality could ever be likened to the icons of our youth, like Britney Spears, or even Madonna. It seemed that the older the pop icon, the more offensive the comparison was. The implication, of course, was that the newer the pop icon was, the more objectively untalented they were.

But I don’t think the Sabrina/Britney/Madonna comparison was all that crazy, especially because the way people talk about Sabrina Carpenter in 2025 is a lot like how people talked about Britney Spears in the late nineties, when I was a kid. First of all, people thought Britney’s music was vapid, mass produced trash, even if she also happened to be insanely popular and successful. Oops, I Did It Again wasn’t considered iconic among “real” music enthusiasts—it was considered stupid slop for ditzy teenage girls. When Britney Spears paraded around in a sexy schoolgirl costume, she was a dangerous example for the children. As she shed the schoolgirl persona and attempted to display sexuality in a more mature way, the “serious” adults of the time still reiterated that she was a dumb slut who made terrible music. Occasionally, someone would compare her shocking portrayals of sexuality and catchy music to that of Madonna—and how dare they. Madonna, you see, was a real icon.