Ariana Grande delivers an unapologetic version of herself

On Aug. 18, Ariana Grande released her fourth studio album, “Sweetener.” While the album was commercially and critically successful, there was a performative quality to the songs and lyrics that felt slightly disingenuous. The majority of the songs felt over produced and seemed to lack a raw emotional core. Only five months later, Grande released “thank u, next,” her most personal and authentic album yet.

In the months following the release of “Sweetener,” Grande’s life became a whirlwind of publicity and personal traumas. In June, she made headlines for her hasty engagement with comedian Pete Davidson after a few weeks of dating. Then, on Sept. 7 Grande’s ex-boyfriend Mac Miller passed away due to an accidental overdose. Struck with grief, Grande attempted to stay out of the headlines, but when her overly publicized relationship with Davidson started to crumble, Grande’s name was plastered all over celebrity news outlets.

As any artist would, Grande took the pain she was experiencing and channeled it into her craft. On Nov. 3, Grande released the titular single from the upcoming album. The R&B and pop inspired single takes a surprisingly at-peace look at Grande’s past relationships, as she thanks her ex-boyfriends (by name) for what each of them have taught her. “thank u, next” received 8.19 million streams on Spotify the day it was released, breaking the record for most streams in a single day for a female artist.

The song was an immediate success. The catchy beat and deeply personal references in the lyrics had everyone talking. The song, coupled with the homage to early 2000s rom-com flicks in the music video, signaled to fans that Grande was ready to open up and be more vulnerable in her music, while at the same time not taking herself too seriously.

Grande’s second single, “7 Rings,” debuted January 18 and sailed to the top of the charts. The song samples Julie Andrews’s “My Favorite Things” and depicts a lavish shopping spree at Tiffany & Co. She buys her friends matching diamond rings, a symbol of their friendship and a thinly veiled metaphor for the replacement of Grande’s engagement ring. The song marks a shift in her focus from romantic relationships to personal growth and self-care.

Then finally, on Feb. 8, the “thank u, next” album debuted. It spent two weeks at No. 1 on Billboard 200 Chart and was met with mostly positive reviews. The album feels more authentic than “Sweetener,” and listeners get a better sense of a sense of Grande’s struggles and who she beneath her carefully branded image.

This 12-track album was written over the course of two weeks and is Grande’s most personal yet. Everything about it feels authentic; Grande puts on no facade. She does not shy away from speaking to the hardships she has faced and instead sings about them with a delicate vulnerability, adding depth to her music.

Music producer Tommy Brown, who collaborated on the album, spoke with NPR Music about working with Grande.

“It was so inspiring to me to see how in charge and how involved she is every step of the way, from the writing to the vision to the storytelling and to even engineering and comping her own vocals,” Brown said.

The album opens with “Imagine,” a soft and tragic ballad about lost love. Grande wrote in a tweet that the song depicts a “simple, beautiful love that is now (and forever) unattainable.” In the light of Miller’s passing, the song reads as even more harrowing and tragic. Grande speaks to missing even the simplest aspects of a relationship after it’s over.

She sings about “Stayin’ up all night, order me pad thai / Then we gon’ sleep ’til noon.” The simplicity of the imagery, coupled with the emotion in Grande’s voice when she sings, captures the pain of mourning a past relationship. Grande’s whistle tones are impeccable and add even more to the hauntingly sorrowful tones in the song.

“Imagine” is followed by several strong and upbeat tracks. “Needy” is lyrically confessional and frank, as Grande lists her personal flaws over simple instrumentals. The lack of production in the song adds to Grande’s vulnerability, and the listener connects with Grande’s experiences. “NASA” is a smooth, catchy ode to self-care and taking time for oneself while “Bloodline” has become a standout hit due to its triumphant energy and its strong, thumping beat.

“Fake Smile,” the album’s fifth track, reveals Grande’s mindset during the tumultuous past months and having to be in the public eye during all of it. The track opens with a sample from Wendy Rene’s 1964 single “After Laughter (Comes Tears),” which gives the song a melancholic and reflective tone. Grande sings about the pressures of fame and its lack of privacy, along with the other traumas she is trying to cope with. She reveals the pain going on behind the scenes.

“I can’t fake another smile, / I can’t fake like I’m alright /And I won’t say I’m feeling fine, / After what I been through, I can’t lie,” the lyrics read.

Not all the songs on the album are quite as strong. Track seven, “Make Up,” is entirely forgettable and stands out as sounding immature and frivolous compared to the rest of the album.

Following “Make Up,” however, is “Ghostin” which might be the album’s strongest track. Grande opens up about experiencing Miller’s loss during a time when she was still engaged to Davidson. The complexities of this situation appears in the song, making it even more tragic. The instrumentals are soft and haunting. Her voice evokes such emotion from the lyrics, and listeners will be captivated — “Though I wish he were here instead, Don’t want that living in your head, / He just comes to visit me, / When I’m dreaming every now and then.”

The album closes with the unapologetic “Break Up with Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored.” This song samples ‘N Sync’s “It Makes Me Ill” and is utter fun. While the music video was met with a bit of controversy, it has still emerged as a fan-favorite. This is presumably due to the catchy and seductive beat, as well as the casual immorality of the lyrics.

Overall, Grande’s album is a triumphant work that emerged from hardship and created a raw and authentic perspective on grief, heartache and struggle, all while maintaining an air of confidence and hope. The songs mark a healing process and a shift in mentality for anyone attempting to overcome lost love, identity struggles or personal traumas.

In an interview with Billboard, Grande spoke about the healing nature that the production and release of this album has had on her mental state, saying “I made it with my best friends over the course of a really small period of time, and it kind of saved my life.”

Written By: Alyssa Ilsley — arts@theaggie.org

The importance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

People often have distinctive and even nostalgic memories of the first time they saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 cult classic where newly-engaged and straightedge couple Brad and Janet stumble upon the mansion of cross-dressing and highly sexually active Dr. Frank-N-Furter, played by Tim Curry. There, they meet a cast of seductive characters and enter an evening of heavy sweating (more, more, more, more).

Afton Geil, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student, saw the the show live at UC Davis her first year as an undergraduate; Camilla Mariscal, a 2018 UC Davis alumnus, said their dad saw the show when it was first released on a date in San Francisco, adorned in fishnets and a tuxedo top. In whatever form it is viewed — either a live performance, a shadow cast lip-sync or simply the original movie — the sexualized and liberating musical has left its mark on viewers and the general population.

The first time Summer Schulze, a third-year cognitive science and linguistics major, saw the film version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at age 15, she instantly had to watch it another four times — she was hooked.

“It was edgy, it was so groundbreaking for the 1970s,” Schulze said.

Upon coming to Davis, she joined Sensual Daydreams, the on-campus Rocky Horror Picture Show cast. Each quarter, the group holds casual auditions and puts on a Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast production.

“We hold auditions every quarter, but it’s really open and pretty much anyone can join as long as you’re dedicated,” Schulze said. “Shadow casting is where we act out the movie as characters while it plays in the background. We do callbacks and have a bunch of props and physical gags.”

Mariscal clarifies that while the group loves the show, “it’s not a big production theater troupe; we are not going to take ourselves too seriously.”

Since its creation by Richard O’Brien in 1973 and later adaptation to film by Jim Sharman, the Rock Horror Picture Show has been a means of sexual liberation in the midsts of the punk revolution. The show is interactive with call-backs and innuendos that have managed to keep the attention of audiences for decades.

“It pushed the envelope in so many ways, carved the path for exciting rule-breaking theater and films yet to come,” said Mindy Cooper, a theater and dance professor at UC Davis. “Cross dressing, sex, wink-wink nudge-nudge innuendo, power struggles … strong female role models, sci-fi meets romance, it has it all. For me, Frankfurter was the ultimate pathway to non-cis acceptance. Tim Curry was an up and coming established actor with real acting chops, sex appeal to everyone and chutzpah to boot. Everyone found him hot […]. He made wearing fishnets and heels divine in an age when it was not yet. His charm and defiance against prototypical casting choices helped carve the path for acceptance.”

The initial impact has continued into the present day, as Rocky Horror actors still connect to its seductive plot, timeless music and liberating themes. Such a type of production attracts a specific demographic together, according to Schultz.

“We have these events called bondage parties, instead of bonding parties,” Schulze said. “We all get together and sometimes we go to events or have a little party. We are a fairly close-knit group, and share a lot of like mindedness in identity and sometimes politics. It’s nice to have a group where you are free to correct people if they use the wrong pronouns or have your breasts out, where you can’t always do these things freely elsewhere.”

Such community has been instrumental for many of its members in finding their own identity and becoming all the more comfortable with themselves — the intention of the show itself.

“Joining the cast was a really great thing for me,” Schulze said. “Freshman year was when I was really struggling with body issues. Being in a show where everything is kinda about owning sexuality and an eccentric and weird way was really great. It was about dressing sexy and feeling sexy.”

The Sensual Daydreams community has had tangible impacts on Schulze. At one of the most recent shows, she was able to perform without a shirt.

“Traditionally a lot of our biologically female characters who play Rocky usually wear a bandeau because Rocky just walks around in gold spandex,” Schulze said. “Mostly the guy castmates who play him will walk around shirtless. But I was like, ‘I wanna do that too,’ so I just wore pasties and I had my breasts out. This is something we can do this space that you can’t do in other spaces.”

Such acceptance that yields personal identity has also translated to understanding one’s sexuality and gender alike.

“I auditioned around the time I was coming out as gender fluid and pan sexual,” Mariscal said. “This club has allowed me to experiment with drag, with my gender dysphoria, with performance. Our main rule is that anyone can join, but you can’t be a d—. It’s been a loving, beautiful place.”

Not only has the Rocky Horror Picture Show helped Mariscal define their sexuality and gender, it has helped them play within those arbitrary definitions.

“I am female bodied, but when I first came out I remember saying in my audition I only wanted to play the male characters because I spent so many years pretending I was a cis female and I wanted nothing to do with the color pink or skirts,” Mariscal said. “I played Frank last show, and my costume was pink as hell. But it was ok for me to mix things together and figure out what I was most comfortable with. I really changed since joining this cast. There are no gatekeepers in our cast, saying that we are this gender or this sexuality and that we have to play this character a certain way.”

For Schulze, such concept of fluid acceptance can be applied to “anyone in an outgroup, any person who feels outcasted or can identify with some aspect of the movie.” The Rocky Horror Picture Show stands as an emblem for all forms of acceptance.

“If you want to wear modest clothes, if you want to come out tits ablaze we will applaud you,” Mariscal said. “We want it to be a loving supportive place for however you want to be. [We hope] we can you laugh or we can make you feel like you have found a community. I have known people where they have been able to discover their sexuality and gender because of this show, like if we can do any of those things then it’s worth it to me.”

Written by: Caroline Rutten — arts@theaggie.org

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to Camilla Mariscal as “she.” Mariscal’s pronoun is “they.” The Aggie regrets the error.

The bond between poetry and politics has not died — only intensified

In recent years, the sale of poetry books has experienced a surge from young buyers looking to make sense of the world. In 2018, UK book sales monitor Nielsen Bookscan showed that poetry sales grew by over 12 percent last year, equating to 1.3 million volumes of poetry sold in the United Kingdom, adding up to £12.3 million in sales (roughly $15.5M USD). In Canada, during the years of 2016-2017, poetry sales increased by 79 percent. While in the United States, there was a compound annual growth of 21 percent within the same time frame. All these numbers pose the question: what’s driving the need for poetic literature in the 21st century?

Andre Breedt, managing director of Nielsen, a market research firm, said that sales are booming because poetry offers comfort in times of political upheaval.

“Poetry is resonating with people who are looking for understanding,” Breedt said. “[It’s] a really good way to explore complex, difficult emotions and uncertainty.”

The audience that’s contributed to this rise in popularity is young women — 41 percent of these buyers are between the ages of 13 and 22, making teenage girls and young women the biggest consumers as of two years ago.

The question of what draws these young readers to the craft has been explored by Katy Shaw, professor of contemporary writings at Northumbria University in England, who said that poetry is no longer being used to passively reflect, but to actively engage.

“Poetry as a form can capture the immediate responses of people to divisive and controversial current events. It questions who has the authority,” Shaw said. “Writing poetry and sharing it in this context is a radical event, an act of resistance to encourage other people to come round to your perspective.”

Shaw is referring to a poetic movement on Instagram — the “Instapoets” — where short and easily digestible poems are written by young, fierce poets and shared to the social media platform. The coordinating hashtags have created a multi-million person movement.

The leader of this movement is Rupi Kaur. The 26-year-old poet reached international best-seller lists with her first publication, “Milk and Honey” which has sold 2.5 million copies sold worldwide. She has been deemed the queen of “Instapoets,” and her Insta-peers are only building a larger poetic presence on instagram by posting their concise, yet powerful poems that address themes of race, sexuality and gender.

The saying goes, it’s never a good thing when poetry makes the news. Kaur and her peers have created an interesting divide in the poetry community; they are blamed for rejecting the fundamentals of the craft. Nevertheless, her social media presence is strongly contributing to the rising popularity of poetry among young adults. Such growing popularity might just accomplish poetry’s intended purpose on a much larger scale, which is a rising awareness of the self that results in united benedictions.

Kaur may receive some criticism for her newfound way of circulating poetry, but the buck should stop there. According to Rebecca Watts’s argumentative essay, “The Cult of Noble Amateur,” social media has a dumbing effect on poetry; the technicalities of the craft have been reduced to revolve around self expression rather than larger, sweeping topics, creating “personality poets,” as she refers to the Insta-poets. Curtailing poetry in this sense, however, does not negate the fact that personality poems have young readers thinking about what it means to be human in an unrelenting era, as Kaur’s themes suggest.

Though the rise of political poetry or even the recent spike in its popularity did not begin with Kaur and the social media movement. The predecessors are the Beat poets. Beat poets, specifically, were figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and UC Davis’s own Gary Snyder who wrote to rebel against the conventions of mainstream American life. Not to compare Allen Ginsberg to Kaur, but their mass popularity, “rejection of the craft” and themes of liberations are distinctly similar to hers.

The beats — a name that embraces social weariness, down-and-outness but also the idea of a beat in adherence to piece of music — questioned the society they lived in and sought to step out of it. As described by the Poetry Foundation, “[they] helped to spearhead a cultural vanguard reacting against institutionalized American values, materialism, and conformity.”

Closing our eyes to the generational gap between the two movements, they seem similar at first glance. Considering the forms of structural oppressions the beat poets were attempting to unearth, Instapoets can then be thought of as a product of the beat generation, or rather an evolution of tackling social problems.

The former may have been dealing with themes of capitalist consumerism and the latter with the voice of morality within the self. However, addressing both fields go hand-in-hand in the politics of tomorrow. The beat poets attacked the normalized utilitarianism so present in American culture and the systems that promote such a lifestyle. The Insta-poets are in the process of finishing the battle in addressing the self that accepts these regularities of oppression. Pablo Picasso said it best, “[Art] is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.”

Tracy K. Smith, poet laureate of the United States, talks about the variety and potential of political poetry in her recent article written for the New York Times. In it, she says political poetry is a means for owning up to the complexity of our problems, and that even the righteous may be implicated by the wrongs they decry.

Smith said, poetically, “Poems willing to enter into this fraught space don’t merely stand on the bank calling out instructions on how or what to believe; they take us by the arm and walk us into the lake, wetting us with the muddied and the muddled, and sometimes even the holy.”

Smith said that poets who are willing to expose their internal voice are not doing so just to be a seraph on the shoulder. Poetry means to be interpreted through an out of body experience where one may contemplate the self, the ego and the world in which it resides. The poet’s job is supposed to provide that means of trascedency.

There is no wrong way to share poetry, but there is a wrong way to read it — poems should not be interpreted as fluffy language simply meant to dazzle the mind. Poems are meant for the heart; they’re meant for united movements towards the light of tomorrow. But it starts with the individual and the requirement for them to sit, breathe and read every word as if each one was a poem itself.

Written By: Clay Allen Rogers – arts@theaggie.org