Sabrina Carpenter Apologizes for Reaction to Cultural Chant

Sabrina Carpenter has addressed online chatter regarding her reaction to a loud, high-pitched cheer from the crowd during her Coachella performance Friday night (April 10).

The pop star seemingly wasn’t aware that it was the trilling vocal sound known as a Zaghrouta, a chant common to various cultures that’s meant to honor and celebrate. (Music fans might recall Shakira expressed herself this way amid her 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, while wagging her tongue at the camera ahead of singing “Hips Don’t Lie.” Shakira, who is half Colombian and half Lebanese, was paying homage to her Middle Eastern roots.)

During the Coachella livestream and in video recordings circulating the internet of Carpenter on stage Friday in Indio, Calif., the Man’s Best Friend singer was seen sitting at the piano with a confused expression on her face upon hearing the sound, and heard saying, “I don’t like it.”

When someone in the crowd loudly called out, “It’s my culture!” Carpenter retorted, “That’s your culture, yodeling?” before adding, “Is this Burning Man? What’s going on? This is weird.”

On Saturday, Carpenter followed up on the comments she’d made on stage.

“my apologies i didn’t see this person with my eyes and couldn’t hear clearly,” Carpenter wrote in reply to a post on X that accused the artist of reacting in a way that was “insensitive and Islamophobic.”

The pop star continued: “my reaction was pure confusion, sarcasm and not ill intended.”

“could have handled it better!” she said. “now i know what a Zaghrouta is! I welcome all cheers and yodels from here on out.”

A Zaghrouta is often used by women in the Middle East and North Africa as a way to express joy, and — as explained by the educational resource Arab America — is “best described in English as ‘ululation.’ It is a form of a long, wavering, high-pitched vocal sound representing trills of joy. It is produced by emitting a high-pitched loud voice accompanied by a rapid back and forth movement of the tongue.” 

Carpenter headlined night one of the first weekend of Coachella 2026 on Friday. The lead slot comes just two years after the her debut performance at the annual festival — the time when she accurately predicted, “Coachella, see you back here when I headline” in an ad-libbed lyrical outro to her song “Nonsense.” Since then, she’s released two Billboard 200 No. 1 albums, 2024’s Short n’ Sweet and 2025’s Man’s Best Friend.