By 2020, Ariana Grande had achieved saintlike status in pop. No one would argue with it. At her 2017 show in Manchester, 22 fans were killed in a terrorist attack, and she was praised for her grace when she threw the all-star One Love Manchester benefit concert just two weeks later. The following year, her still-beloved ex-boyfriend, the rapper Mac Miller, died of an accidental overdose. She then got together with comedian Pete Davidson but swiftly broke off their engagement in her enduring grief. Her music evolved from enjoyable post-Nickelodeon bad-girl R&B to process these anguishes with fleet sophistication, and Grande’s name came to populate the writing credits: 2018’s at-ease Sweetener was her statement of survival. Five months later came Thank U, Next, a breezier assertion of acceptance and pleasure that was written and recorded in just a few weeks, after Grande said she wanted to be freed from pop’s heavy logistics to release music like a rapper – to “talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do”. One year on, Positions precariously navigated the compatibility of healing and moving on. The latter was a minor dip in quality, but the intimacy and immediacy of Grande’s reborn project felt transcendent.
Her tentative recovery continued when she got married in 2021. Two years later, it was over – and unfounded speculation about Grande’s alleged infidelity, as well as taking up with her married (but separated) co-star in a forthcoming film adaptation of the musical Wicked, prompted a backlash, despite “a source” telling People that there was no overlap with either party’s prior relationship. Social media gossips made viral clips compiling “evidence” of Grande’s alleged history of cheating. At the end of 2023, the press-shy musician posted a rare statement on Instagram about feeling “so deeply misunderstood by people who don’t know me, who piece whispers together and make what they want out of me and their assumptions of my life”. In January, her Vogue-referencing comeback single Yes, And? reminded haters “your business is yours and mine is mine / Why do you care so much whose dick I ride?”, which unfortunately also highlighted the drama to anyone blissfully aware of it. Apparently many did care: she lost 360,000 Instagram followers after the song’s announcement. It’s a dispiriting reminder of the fickleness of public favour and the entitlement over other people’s business that social media has stirred – the souring of Grande’s unusual vulnerability.
