From our vantage in an already-shock-and-awe-filled 2017, the national outrage that ensued over Ariana Grande getting caught on camera licking a stolen doughnut while expressing her disdain for Americans at an L.A. pastry shop in 2015 — a gaffe that got the singer’s 2016 White House appearance canceled — suddenly seems almost heroic. Still, it’s the best scandal the Nickelodeon-star-turned-pop-princess has under her belt — an important first step in the trajectory of a pop star transitioning into adulthood.
Grande doesn’t just get away with swearing and showing a little skin nowadays; her very relevance depends on shaking her squeaky clean roots. In the wake of DoughnutGate, the transition was complete upon the 2016 release of Dangerous Woman — the singer’s third studio LP, and a coming-of-age album from a budding pop star that makes a potent case for the validity of Top 40 pop on the whole.
Branding concerns aside, Grande has always relied on her powerhouse vocal chops to rise above and beyond a seemingly endless stream of disposable contemporaries in the Top 40 game. The singer is armed with a four-octave range she channels with expert precision into an effortless silky-smooth croon. Grande sings circles around her peers while avoiding the cartoonish melisma and pyrotechnic maximalism of divas past. Unfortunately, outside of pop fandom, to self-described fans of “real music,” Grande’s Olympic-level pipes will never compensate for the fact she doesn’t write her own material. While no one’s ever attacked Paul Newman’s status for just playing the starring role and not having actually penned his lines in Cool Hand Luke — for some, the idea of pop music as an ensemble production under the blanket of a singular brand isn’t an accepted version of artistic credibility.
Regardless, the wrecking crew behind Dangerous Woman is a creative juggernaut, albeit one that would be considerably less enigmatic without an angelic figure to sell it. At the helm are Swedish hitmaker Max Martin and his protégé Ilya Salmanzadeh, who wrote and produced more than half the tracks on the album’s deluxe edition, filling the record to capacity with hooks galore. The result is a batch of sultry, disco-powered R&B soft-bangers that never quite climax as effectively as the club jams of Grande’s 2014 sophomore effort My Everything, but they go above and beyond in burying the dreamily saccharine ingénue ballads of the singer’s 2013 debut Yours Truly. Martin and Salmanzadeh’s contributions lean on traditionally sophisticated styles like funk, blues and soul. The other half of the album contrasts, with a synth-driven, beat-heavy swirl of computerized sonic bliss courtesy of producer Tommy “TB Hits” Brown — a relative newcomer welterweight by comparison, who has worked on every Grande record since Yours Truly.
Taking a cue from Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce, Lady Gaga’s Jo Calderone and Nicki Minaj (who’s featured here on the track “Side to Side”) as Harajuku Barbie — or hell, perhaps David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and Eminem as Marshall Mathers — Grande assumes an alter ego (Super Bunny) on Dangerous Woman’s title track. It’s a tried-and-true technique for soliciting creative energy from a different perspective. But in Grande’s case, it’s not so much to step out of her own skin, but to make the public more comfortable with the skin she grew out of.
Like virtually all pop records, Dangerous Woman hinges on the subject of love. On the surface, Grande’s love is a life-changing event that carries her through a three-act arc of coming-of-age melodrama. But additional listens expose the protagonist less as a hapless victim of biology and hormones than a calculated opportunist. The antagonist in songs like “Moonlight,” “Dangerous Woman” and “Everyday” is a prototypical bad boy who takes all the blame for exposing the singer’s edges. The lyrics place responsibility at his feet (he’s the enabler), instead of at her own (she’s an independent offender).
At the end of the day, Dangerous Woman is an alter ego that exists for our sake, not for Grande’s. It’s a role she must play to navigate the transformation from child star to adult woman, because it’s easier to deal with a pleather-clad sexpot longing for a bad boy than an imperfect girl who licks doughnuts as an act of rebellion. Sure, she’s got the talent, but Grande, the Swedes in the control room, Super Bunny and the Dangerous Woman all know that for a lot of people, that’ll never be enough.
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