STACK #166 Aug 2018

MUSIC FEATURE

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THE GRANDE PARADE

Jake Cleland charts Ariana Grande’s rise from Demon Hunter to Pop God.

A riana Grande is a silhouette. Or could be – in a tumblr meme, “Who’s That Pokemon?” kind of way. Einstein, Bowie, Slash, Grande – that high ponytail sticking out like a satellite uplink to God. Speaking of which, the 25-year-old Floridian just played God in her own music video, God Is A Woman. She literally smashes the glass ceiling. Evangelical YouTubers are shook. God Is AWoman, and the album it comes from, Sweetener, will define Ariana Grande. This isn’t prophecy, it’s just observation. Grande in 2018 is more bold and more influential than the voting public believed former Disney stars could ever possibly be. Sweetener is the endpoint for pop music. Everything that came before was just tuning up. This was a long road to walk. In 2013, she released her debut album. Its lead single, The Way, was everything to a certain brand of person (the brand who wished Macklemore was around when Mariah Carey released Daydream ). Besides her vocal range, music likers resonated with her occultish tendencies, exposed in an interview with Complex . Grande described the time she was creeping it up in Kansas City’s Stull Cemetery, apparently “known as one of the seven gates to Hell on Earth.” While in the car, she smelled sulfur, “the sign of a demon”, and saw a fly, “another sign of a demon”, and then took a picture which had “three super distinct faces… the faces of textbook demons.” Well, a person is entitled to their beliefs. The ken to recognise demons from textbooks might come from her mum. By all accounts an adoring and encouraging parent, Mama Grande was “goth before goth was goth” and used to bring animal parts home so her children could paint the walls with blood. “I would go to the butcher, get heart organs or lungs, and then be like, ‘Ariana, Frankie, this is a heart.’ The kids would paint blood on the walls. I remember Ariana’s little handprints.”

Experiencing something like that first-hand, you think of everything differently… everything is different

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AUGUST 2018

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