Featured Photo by Ariana Grande
Story by Shamani Salahuddin
Ariana Grande uses music to landmark significant events in her life, inviting fans to experience a front-row seat to her good, bad and ugly.
“Thank You, Next,” released in 2019, addresses her breakup with comedian Pete Davidson and grief following the death of her ex, Mac Miller. The previous year, Grande put out her album “Sweetener” (2018), a tender response to the devastating bombing at her Manchester Arena concert in 2017. Since her playful, flirty release of “Positions,” we haven’t heard new music from Grande outside of collaborative projects. That all changed Friday morning with the anticipated release of “Yes, And?” Grande gets feisty in this bouncy track that listeners online have noted resembles Madonna’s “Vogue.”
In the song, Grande blows a defiant kiss to the haters, telling them to mind their business.
“Do not comment on my body/ Do not reply/ Your business is yours and mine is mine,” she sings in the bridge. If you didn’t know the online chatter surrounding her body-image, divorce and relationship rumors with infidelity in the mix, you do now.
With lines like, “Why do you care so much whose d— I ride?” Grande faces the trending speculation that has surfaced in the past several months.
Grande premiered the “Yes, And?” music video hours after the single’s release. Fans quickly noticed the video was inspired by icon Paula Abdul’s “Cold Hearted” video, released in 1989. In it, she invites critics to the performance of her new song. They enter an industrial room with marble statues of Grande and her dancers.
Fans online connect three of the poses to past album covers: “Yours Truly,” “My Everything” and “Thank You, Next.” The critics enter with judgments of Grande, but after having the heat on them (literally), they have a change of heart. Grande’s wipsy singing hypnotizes the skeptics, and three of them join in on the choreography.
The single merges Grande’s distaste with online speculations on her private life and an effervescent anthem about self-confidence that encourages listeners to be authentically themselves and ignore the haters.
“Yes, And?” marks Grande’s return to music after a three-year hiatus. The leading single of her seventh studio album features her pop princess attitude with a I’m-going-to-be-me edge. The artist teased the new project last year, posting a series of pictures and silent videos of her in the studio on Instagram. On Dec. 27, she confirmed the album coming in 2024 with photographed stills of her blurred red lip and a caption reading, “See you next year.”
To contact Lifestyles Editor Destiny Mizell and Assistant Lifestyles Editor Shamani Salahuddin, email lifestyles@mtsusidelines.com. For more news, visit www.mtsusidelines.com, or follow us on Facebook at MTSU Sidelines or on X at @MTSUSidelines.
