This post originally APPEARED on stereogum.com
Ariana Grande was just 25 years old when she landed her first #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, but she was no ingenue. She was a show-business survivor in many different ways, some of them quite literal. At that point, Grande had already released four albums and sent 10 singles into the top 10. She’d been through multiple career stages — child Broadway star, kids’-TV sitcom fixture, sunny-frothy R&B diva, robotic dance-pop hitmaker, femme fatale, game sketch-comedy joker, center of public fascination. If anything, Grande came off as the kind of old-school, focus-grouped teen-pop star whose place in the zeitgeist was diminishing. She was a creature of the song machine, and that was a liability in a world that moved at the speed of the internet. Grande could crank out hit after hit, and a lot of her singles were truly great, but none of them quite had enough juice to take her all the way to #1. That changed when Grande seized the means of production and made a song that cannily commented on all the conversation that surrounded her.
If any colleges ever offer degrees in pop stardom — don’t count that possibility out — then “thank u, next” should be the focus of countless term papers. It’s a textbook example of how a star can work the pop and pop-culture machines to her advantage, grabbing control of her own narrative and scoring her biggest-ever hit in the process. In fall 2018, Grande was one of the best pop stars that we had, and she put everything that she learned — poise, pettiness, slick vocals, sleek hooks, the illusion of effortlessness — into one song that was carefully engineered to sound as casual and tossed-off as possible. You couldn’t make a song like “thank u, next” if you hadn’t spent much of your life inside the song factory, but the track itself almost exists as a rebuke to that machinery, a signal of a new thing that was still coming into being.
Before Ariana Grande released “thank u, next,” she found herself in a strange position. She was out promoting a very good album, one that had already spawned multiple hits and moved her image into its next stage. But that album was all about overcoming terrible adversity and finding love on the other side. Shortly after its release, it was out of date. Grande was in the midst of a series of interlocking personal crises, and her situation was incompatible with the long rollouts that an A-list pop record traditionally demands. So Grande instead dropped a surprise event-song that resonated like a rapper’s diss track, even if it didn’t include any actual rapping or dissing — not overtly, anyway. Her timing was perfect. Suddenly, Grande was a pop titan rather than a mere star.
