FEATURE:
Beneath the Sleeve
Ariana Grande - Dangerous Woman
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AS it turns ten…
on 20th May, I wanted to use the opportunity to dive inside Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman. Not only is Grande an incredible artist. She is a successful and acclaimed actor. Appearing in huge films like Wicked: For Good, Grande is one of the world’s biggest talents. In terms of studio albums, Ariana Grade’s most recent is 2024’s eternal sunshine. Dangerous Woman is Grande’s second studio album. I am going to end with a review for this amazing album that I feel has not gained as much credit as it deserves. Dangerous Woman and its singles were nominated for various accolades, including two Grammy Awards. It helped Grande win Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards. You can pick up Dangerous Woman on vinyl. There are some 2016 interview that I want to get to first before coming to some reviews. Grazia Daily spoke with an artist who they say was going big on her female activist calling:
‘I’m a woman so I face my fair share of double standards and misogyny and ignorance on a daily basis,’ Ariana says. Her message is simple. ‘A lot of women think of the stereotype that comes with the word “feminist”. But there’s not just one type of feminist.
You can be a feminist who gets their hair and make-up done, you can be a feminist who cuts their hair off and doesn’t wear any make-up. Who has lots of sex or who doesn’t. There’s no limit.’
Ariana has clearly warmed to the theme since she dropped that wisdom on Twitter last summer. Then, she described how women were ‘mostly referred to as a man’s past, present or future PROPERTY/ POSSESSION’, a view informed by her experience of dating rapper Big Sean. Her good-girl image also took a slating last year, in a bizarre and overblown story where she was caught on camera licking doughnuts on display in a bakery.
The frustration with all that judgement occasionally finds its way on to the new record, which mostly sounds like grown-up, genre-busting RnB pop, with the occasional insight into Ariana’s life. On Bad Decisions, an empowered twist on the old story of a good girl being led astray, Ariana sings, ‘Ain’t you ever seen a princess be a bad bitch?’ After some cajoling, she concedes that this line is personal. ‘I feel like people are always constantly trying to pin me down as a good girl or a bad girl but I think women can be whatever, and me too.’
It’s a difficulty acutely felt by the female teen star transitioning into adult artist – Ariana was trolled for wearing lingerie in the video for Dangerous Woman. ‘When a young male artist posts a shirtless picture on Instagram the comments will be like “Oh my God, heart eyes, so hot, babe alert!”,’ she says of stars like Justin Bieber who, in the week we meet, posted a nude picture. ‘Like, whatever. If a woman posts a suggestive photo or anything that expresses her own sexuality or confidence within her body, it’s a very different response.’
It’s clear Ariana’s education in female empowerment comes from growing up on a diet of The First Wives Club and pop pioneers like Madonna, whom she recently sang Unapologetic Bitch with. But the lessons started closer to home. She comes, she has noted, ‘from a long bloodline of female activists’, which included her aunt Judy Grande, a Pulitzer nominated Washington Post reporter. Ariana gets out her phone and shows a picture of Judy with renowned feminist Gloria Steinem.
‘I feel like I have to carry on her legacy,’ she says of her aunt, who died in 2008 from breast cancer. ‘I feel like it’s my responsibility to keep the fight going”.
Billboard featured Ariana Grande in May 2016. Like other artists, they say, Ariana Grande was “under pressure to not only prove herself grown and sexy, but that she's somehow lifting up herself and other women as she does”. Even if you are not a huge fan of Grande, you really need to hear Dangerous Woman. I think it is a remarkable album:
“As a matter of fact, Grande appears on the cover of Dangerous Woman in shiny black headgear with long ears. It looks like it was designed for American Horror Story by the cartoonists at Warner Bros. The Super Bunny “is my superhero, or supervillain — whatever I’m feeling on the day,” says Grande. “Whenever I doubt myself or question choices I know in my gut are right — because other people are telling me other things — I’m like, ‘What would that bad bitch Super Bunny do?’ She helps me call the shots.”
Whether owing to her gut, her team or her alter-egos, it has been a grand career for Grande so far. With her March hit “Dangerous Woman” — a sultry R&B track with a self-empowerment message and an arena-annihilating hook — Grande became the first artist in Billboard Hot 100 history to have the lead single of each of her first three albums debut in the top 10. She has sold 1.3 million albums in the United States, according to Nielsen Music; grossed $41.8 million on 2015’s Honeymoon Tour, according to Billboard Boxscore; claims 4 billion YouTube views; clocks in at fourth among all humans on Instagram (with 71.4 million followers) and 18th on Twitter (38.8 million); and will kick off her album release with a performance at the Billboard Music Awards on May 22. And, she says, “I feel like I’m still just getting started — a lot of people forget I’m only three years in.”
Grande’s challenge is with her quote unquote brand. Like all female pop stars entering adulthood these days, she’s under pressure to not only prove herself grown and sexy, but that she’s somehow lifting up herself and other women as she does it. And in her bid to be taken seriously, she has more to overcome than many of her peers. The world first met her as Cat Valentine, the adorably dopey character at the heart of two Nickelodeon teen sitcoms (the second, Sam & Cat, ended in 2014), and she hasn’t quite shaken off that childlike sheen. Her tiny stature (she’s just 5 feet tall), love of Harry Potter (she describes Super Bunny as “my patronus”) and all the animal-themed, Lolita-meets-S&M gear don’t exactly help. Neither did getting caught on a bakery security camera in 2015 licking pastries that weren’t hers while declaring, “I hate America.”
But Grande’s got a not-so-secret weapon in all this: showstopping talent. “She’s a pure singer,” says Macy Gray, 48, who appears on Dangerous Woman’s most soulful cut, “Leave Me Lonely.” “It’s similar to what Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Christina Aguilera have — that power thing. But I didn’t realize that. She does all these pop records where you can get a song across without showing your chops.”
And Grande’s talent is not merely as a singer. Her turn as SNL host in March garnered rave reviews. Steven Spielberg was so impressed he texted Lorne Michaels to say so. (“I can’t tell you how surreal and insane that is for me,” gushes Grande. “My second birthday party was Jaws-themed. My brain almost combusted when I heard it from Lorne.”) Her skits were great, but the real win was the monologue, in which Grande spun Doughnutgate into a showcase for her artistry and self-awareness, singing about her need for a proper adult scandal (“Miley’s had them, Bieber’s had them”) to take her career to the next level. “I was just so happy to be able to make fun of myself,” says Grande. “If you think you’re laughing at me, I promise I laughed first.”
When it comes to the delicate art of signaling her feminist awareness, Grande has proved less of a natural. Instagramming pictures of Maya Angelou, Coco Chanel and her journalist aunt Judy Grande with Gloria Steinem in the lead-up to the release of “Dangerous Woman” felt a bit on the nose when the constituents of Taylor Swift’s woke women’s consortium advertise their membership simply by appearing together on red carpets.
Still, Grande’s feminism is clearly no put-on. “Do you want to see something I saved to my phone because it upset me so much?” she asks me. It’s a collection of tweets from a U.K. radio station with a salacious streak — two praise Justin Bieber and Zayn Malik for showing skin, and two scold Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian for the same. “If you’re going to rave about how sexy a male artist looks with his shirt off,” says Grande, “and a woman decides to get in her panties or show her boobies for a photo shoot, she needs to be treated with the same awe and admiration. I will say it until I’m an old-ass lady with my tits out at Whole Foods. I’ll be in the produce aisle, naked at 95, with a sensible ponytail, one strand of hair left on my head and a Chanel bow. Mark my words. See you there with my 95 dogs.”
In June, Grande tweeted a screen grab of an essay she wrote about her budding independence, capped with a 1971 Steinem quote: “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. She will need her sisterhood.”
Grande’s sisterhood includes her mother and nonna, managers Stephanie Simon and Jennifer Merlino (Grande parted ways with co-manager Scooter Braun in February, though he shares an A&R credit on Dangerous Woman with Republic Records EVP Wendy Goldstein), her fans the Arianators and old pals from Florida: Misha Lambert, now a self-published author, and Alexa Luria, who just graduated from the University of Florida and has 560,000 Instagram followers thanks to her BFF status with Grande.
“I have a bunch of really dope friends I’ve known since elementary school,” says Grande. “They think it’s funny that people want to take pictures with me at Starbucks, because it is — it’s weird. They’re going to keep me healthy and humble. I still feel like Ariana from Boca [Raton] who loves musical theater and dogs. I’m just working now”.
Prior to finishing up with a review from NME, this article expressed how Ariana Grande shed her Pop persona for Dangerous Woman. It is a work that saw her “moving into edgier territory and forging a new musical identity though genre exploration”. Ten years after its release and I feel that it still sounds powerful and meaningful. I wonder whether Ariana Grande will celebrate a decade of Dangerous Woman on 20th May:
“Entering dangerous new territory
The Dangerous Woman era started with the promotional single “Focus,” which was in October 2015. While “Focus” featured the same upbeat, horn-driven energy of Grande’s 2014 smash hit “Problem,” it also teed up the album’s first official single, as Grande coquettishly instructed listeners to “focus on me.”
Emerging five months later, the album’s title track found Grande venturing into moodier territory than the frothy pop of “Focus.” Sparked by an electric guitar, the singer climatically calls out, “Somethin’ ’bout you makes me feel like a dangerous woman!” throughout the track. We knew Grande could deliver arena-sized singalongs, and this slow jam channeled all the great power ballads of the 80s with a hook that promised, “All girls wanna be like that/Bad girls underneath, like that.”
On the other side of the spectrum, “Be Alright” offered a stark contrast to the slow tempo and sensuality of “Dangerous Woman.” Dipping into a deep house sound, Grande’s celebratory single was adopted as an anthem for the LGBTQ community.
Embracing collaborators
A month later, she’d embark on the new course that trap-R&B had laid out in mainstream music, dropping the hypnotic “Let Me Love You,” featuring Lil Wayne. This paved the way for the dance-pop perfection of “Into You,” which signaled that Grande was ready to storm the summer of 2016.
With a belting declaration of love that revolved around thudding EDM basslines, “Into You” is Grande and hitmaker Max Martin at their best. It contained all the hallmarks of a classic earworm, with Grande’s breathy falsetto floating over the thick beats. Grande finished off the album’s advance singles run with the retro-pop, uptown funk of “Greedy,” a song given away with digital pre-orders and which featured a choir of her exuberant vocals over a slick bassline.
Dangerous Woman opens with the swinging doo-wop ballad “Moonlight,” closely aligning with the sound Grande experimented with on Yours Truly. On the deep cut “Leave Me Lonely,” she brought Macy Gray back into the public eye, the latter expertly delivering some Nina Simone theatrics that fit in with the dramatic nature of the song.
A mature transition
Keeping in line with the album’s premise, Grande debuts her “adult” anthem, “Side To Side,” with help from hip-hop’s raunchiest queen, Nicki Minaj. Like many former child stars turned pop divas before her, Grande was consciously leaning into her “grown-up” phase, while at the same time side-stepping all the usual clichés that came with the territory.
One of the best pop and hip-hop collaborations of the decade, “Side To Side” capitalized on the dancehall trend of the time, with reggae riddims and plenty of sexual innuendo packaged in the campy imagery of the SoulCycle fitness craze. Just as Olivia Newton-John made her “body talk” in the iconic “Let’s Get Physical” music video, Grande and Minaj’s cardio-driven duet rode its way to the top of the charts, hitting No.4 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Grande followed “Side To Side” with another collaborative effort on the Future-assisted “Everyday.” As trap-influenced pop started to gain more traction in the mainstream, “Everyday” helped fuel its dominance, paving the way for the trap leanings on her subsequent albums Sweetener and thank u, next.
Evolving the pop formula
Much of Dangerous Woman sees Grande playing with tempos, genres, and time shifts. “I Don’t Care” finds her embracing orchestral R&B to forget a lost love, “Sometimes” ventures into more acoustic pop (a rarity for Grande), and “Bad Decision,” “Touch It,” “Knew Better/Forever Boy” and “Thinking Bout You” all rely on Grande’s powerful pipes and EDM synth-pop production.
With her third album, Ariana Grande found success in evolving the pop formula she’d already established while venturing into uncharted, edgier territory. The gamble paid off, with Dangerous Woman debuting at No.2 on the Billboard 200 charts and notching her first No.1 album in the UK. It was clear that the ascending pop queen was just getting started”.
I am going to finish with NME and their review of Dangerous Woman. 2016 was a remarkable year for music. Some of the best albums of the past few decades released then. I feel that many might have overlooked Ariana Grande or not given Dangerous Woman as much credit as it warranted. This is a reason why I wanted to spotlight it:
“Nine months ago, Ariana Grande‘s greatest act of rebellion was daring to lick a donut in a California bakery, then reacting to the piles of junk food in front of her with the doomed sentence, “I hate America”. Two disregarded apology videos and a Justin Bieber collaboration later, she emerges transformed, donning a leather bunny outfit for the cover of third album ‘Dangerous Woman’; in one of its more understated IDGAF moments she declares simply, “I love me.”
Her 38 million Twitter followers suggest she’s not the only one. Grande came to fame via her role on Nickelodeon’s teen sitcom Victorious and has since carved out a tween-friendly pop career almost as unblemished as Taylor Swift’s – but she’s spent the past few months publicly loosening up, showcasing pinpoint J-Law and Britney impressions on SNL in March and now, with ‘Dangerous Woman’, being what your nan might term ‘risqué’. Club anthem-to-be ‘Into You’ sees her informing a Stupid Boy, “A little less conversation and a little more touch my body“, and pushing her astoundingly malleable voice into what’s known as the whistle register. The frequent comparisons made between Mariah Carey and Grande are apt.
That track was co-written by hitmaker Max Martin, the Swede behind everything from The Weeknd’s ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ to Grande’s 2014 mega-smash ‘Problem’. His hand is in a variety of other tracks on the new album, including lusty disco cut ‘Greedy’ and the waltzing title track, on which she proclaims, “I’m bulletproof and I know what I’m doing”. Nudge-nudge moments come thick and fast throughout the album, most explicitly from collaborators – Nicki Minaj rides a “dick bicycle” on cheesy reggae cut ‘Side to Side’, Lil Wayne pictures her “grinding on this grande” on sultry slow-jam ‘Let Me Love You’.
It’s not only the consistent songwriting clout that elevates this album from recent efforts by Grande’s teen-star peers, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. Even if most of it is co-written, the modish message of empowerment feels honest coming from Grande, especially after an essay she shared last year that railed against the media’s description of her as Big Sean’s ex: “I do not belong to anyone but myself,” she wrote. By the time the sublime closer ‘I Don’t Care’ comes around, it’s genuinely satisfying to hear her put that sentiment on record so resoundingly. “I used to let some people tell me how to live and what to be,” she ponders, “But if I can’t be me, the fuck’s the point?”.
I am not sure whether Ariana Grande is working on a new album, though at the time I am writing this (21st March), there are hints. Fans think they have spotted things that suggest an eighth studio album is coming. By the time this feature is shared, Ariana Grande may have made an official announcement. Many might rank other albums of hers higher, but I feel that the incredible Dangerous Woman is…
UP there with her very best.