The millennial vanguard of the entertainment industry isn’t supposed to be like their predecessors. They say they’ve traded heroin chic for body positivity, cultural appropriation for social justice, pitting women against each other for feminism. Then why does the meanest of the mean girls keep topping the charts?
A hairstylist in Beverly Hills once told me that Ariana Grande might be the worst diva to reign terror over Hollywood since Mariah Carey (but the pint-sized pop princess “didn’t earn that right” as Carey did, he reminded me). A photographer in L.A. who shot the singer for a magazine noted that, around the time she was engaged to Mac Miller, Grande asked after the shoot that photos that included her engagement ring should not be published. Grande and Miller split shortly thereafter, and she began dating Pete Davidson the same month.
Grande is now embracing her characterization as a diva and not trying to shed it at all. This is obvious when one listens to her chart-topping album “thank u, next.”
Her new album contains every bottled-up emotion of Hollywood’s puritanically repressed id: greed, cheating, envy, decadence, and a massive “up yours” to wokeness.
“Whoever said money can’t solve your problems/ Must not have had enough money to solve ’em,” Grande croons in the song “7 rings.”
Break up with your girlfriend! she demands. I’m bored.
The album’s eponymous single might seem serene, but don’t be fooled. In the music video, she dresses up as the main mean girl in the film “Mean Girls” and leaves lewd comments about her exes in a burn book. That video became the most-watched video on YouTube within 24 hours.
Grande’s success is illuminating. Entertainment is supposed to be an escape. We can praise body positivity and lambaste wealth all we want, but what many people really want is to watch a 100-pound pop star bragging about buying “matching diamonds for six of my bitches.”
Vox.com, typically a ferocious police force of political correctness, almost acknowledged that we don’t have to be relentlessly humorless. “She is telling me I’m successful and beautiful,” Vox’s Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote, “neither of which is as true as it could be, but feels good to hear all the same.”
Even the woke want to be lied to, sometimes.
