Sabrina Carpenter brings ‘Short n’ Sweet’ — and special guest Christina Aguilera — to Crypto.com Arena

Sabrina Carpenter performs in June in New York. In late 2022, Sabrina Carpenter was a hard-working Disney Channel journeyman just getting out from beneath the pop-culture ignominy of having been cast as the bad-guy “blond girl” in Olivia Rodrigo’s instant smash of a Gen Z heartbreak ballad, “Drivers License.” Two years later, Carpenter arrived at Crypto.com Arena on Friday night with one of 2024’s biggest albums, two of its biggest singles and half a dozen fresh Grammy nominations, including nods for album, record and song of the year as well as best new artist. “Short n’ Sweet” is brimming with hooks and jokes and vocal exaggerations; this show, the first of three sold-out dates in Los Angeles to wrap Carpenter’s North American tour, left virtually no surface un-bedazzled. About halfway through the 90-minute gig, Christina Aguilera — one of several earlier icons in pop’s blond-bombshell lineage — appeared onstage without warning for flamboyant renditions of her late-’90s/early-’00s hits “Ain’t No Other Man” and “What a Girl Wants.” “So, that just happened,” Carpenter said with mock disbelief after Aguilera’s exit. As a songwriter, she delights in saying the quiet part out loud, as in “Lie to Girls” — crummy men shouldn’t bother, she sings, because “if they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves” — and “Juno,” an extended bedroom fantasy that climaxes with what might be the year’s most candid lyric: “I’m so f—ing horny!” At Crypto, that line went off like a battle cry in a crowd filled with girls and young women: a nightmare, no doubt, to some of the parents in the house but certainly not to the fans who value the rawness of Carpenter’s confessions.