Ariana Grande has been appearing in the news cycle once again after a brief hiatus. This time, she’s making noise for calling out Kanye West’s anti-semitic tweets and for encouraging young people to register to vote in the midterm elections in which “important” issues are at stake, like abortion access, climate change and trans rights. She also posted photos of herself on the set of the film adaption of the Broadway musical Wicked, in which she will play the role of Glinda the Good Witch (set to release in 2024). 

Clearly, Grande is an important cultural figure — but important in what sense? Like many other pop stars, her public persona is an amalgam of glitzy style, unswerving careerism and sociopolitical posturing. Grande parades around her “authentic” and “liberated” lifestyle, all whilst accommodating herself to mainstream expectations. She is hardly the only corporate pawn whose public image is mired in the cognitive dissonance of our times. What makes Grande stand out from her peers is her capacity to make such a contradictory and artificial persona so tantalising. 

Most importantly, she loves the gays, and the gays love her

Needless to say, Grande’s vocal ability is remarkable. She can belt and coo and travel with facility between ranges, meanwhile shifting between modish styles without challenging the artistic status quo. She checks all of the boxes of diversity and inclusivity, whilst simultaneously toying with the dogmas of political correctness. She is a girl boss who is out of touch with what makes her an actual female. She has reached the upper echelon in the hierarchy of gay icons, whilst nothing about her image has anything remotely to do with a homosexual artistic sensibility. 

The equivalent of Mattel manufacturing an Instagram Unicorn Frappuccino Barbie doll, Grande is a walking paradox. She is fake but delicious, calculated but alluring, perfectly reflecting the mass culture’s obsession with plastic beauty and substanceless moral causes back to us — with a sugary sheen. She fools the public in a manner similar to (as alluded to in the title of her fourth album) artificial sweeteners. 

Grande supports the right causes and takes to virtue signalling on social media. Her song titles are in all lower case letters and use text lingo — an echo of the lack of soul and originality in her live performances. She prances about the stage posturing with her posse of dance — enough Black, Asian, Latinx, ethnically ambiguous, curvy, femme-cisgender gay and genderqueer dancers to check off all of the boxes of representation necessary to stave off accusations of bigotry and exclusion.

Yet she is a serial cultural appropriator. Despite occasionally playing up her Italian roots (when it’s convenient for her), she occupies the role of the rootless, ethnically vapid suburban white girl who tries on different cultures for diversion. She uses trap beats, speaks in AAVE and proclaims her solidarity with Black girls on the basis of having a weave. She emulates Japanese pop aesthetics in her videos and then takes the liberty to “asianphish” — drawing her eyeliner on extra sharp and narrow. 

“Ari” is a “liberated woman” who curses gratuitously and has tattoos. Most importantly, she loves the gays, and the gays love her. Her upcoming role in Wicked only serves to further cement her gay icon status, in which she revels. She never tires of boasting about her indebtedness to gay cultural markers and posting sycophantic videos of herself fawning over her “twink” brother, Frankie. 

Whilst most gay icons’ stories have profound existential depth, mired in paradox and tension, marked by both glamour and pain, triumph and tragedy — all these things are foreign to Grande’s public image. Her story is not one of drama, tension or tragedy; it has been manufactured by corporate elites and stamped with a rainbow flag emoji and #PRIDE #LOVEISLOVE hashtags. She is not an icon for homosexuals. She is an icon for the LGBTQIA+ … which is to say for those who experience homosexuality not as a condition of being in tension between the order of nature and the powerful urges of the flesh — between creatureliness and the design of the Creator — but as mere “self-expression”.

To her credit, her voice hearkens to the heavenly, and her lyrics and delivery speak to her artistic wit — enough of a reason to believe that she is indeed capable of embodying a more original and grandiose public persona. She is more than able to emulate the goddess-like posturing of her predecessors Mariah, Celine and Whitney — all of whom embodied the true sacral power of their feminine genius. She could very easily enter the pantheon of divas upon whom have been bestowed the gift of powerhouse vocals, for the sake of pointing us to an ideal realm that surpasses the heights of worldly beauty. 

Sex for her is merely a form of self-expression and consumerism

Instead Ari settles for “hip”, blasé millennial posturing that is devoid of existential complexity. She’s also a judge on The Voice, placing a cherry on top of her insipid careerism.

Grande is divested of the ancient, natural powers which speak to the archetype of the “Great Mother” — which include both pagan notions of the sacralization of female sensuality and fertility, as well as Christian notions of the life-giving and sorrowful mother. The only metaphysical convictions she ascribes to are “mindfulness” and Manifestation techniques, which ultimately boil down to individualistic consumerism with a New Age veneer.

In her video for “34+35”, she aptly emulates Maria, the transhuman android who is used as a puppet by hidden elites to control the bewildered masses in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis. Her body is no longer a vessel of the transcendent life and death force. Her eroticism doesn’t speak to the cosmic tension between the finite and infinite, sacred and profane, lack and possession. Instead, it speaks of an unimaginative, bourgeois, self-referential construct of identity. Accordingly, sex for her is merely a form of self-expression and consumerism, rendering the body, the source of Ariana’s vocal power, a product moved along an assembly line. 

Grande stands for the fluidity of our times — that is, she stands for nothing. She gives us what we want, duping us into thinking our empty values and cognitive dissonance lead us to a life of glamour and moral coherence. She is Lang’s Maria, captivating us, goading us on to continue in our path, whilst the very ideals we claim to value demolish the remaining vestiges of substance, blinding us to the chaos that we are bringing upon ourselves. If only we dared to look at the ingredients on the package of sweetener, we’d see how artificial it all is — and we’d question why we are so allured.