The Aesthetic Failure of ‘yes, and?’

Ariana Grande is back.

I want to start this off by stating bluntly that I do not care about the cheating scandal.

To give quick context: in 2023, Ariana Grande began a rumoured affair with ‘Wicked Pt. 1’ co-star and Broadway actor Ethan Slater. This allegedly overlapped with both of their marriages and the birth of his first child with his wife of five years, Lilly Jay. Neither performer have publicly acknowledged the scandal prior to this song.

You need this context because that is the most obvious and interesting biographical aspect to a song that is explicitly about confronting public opinion. Grande’s last three albums have been explicit responses to newsworthy moments surrounding her, and this will likely be the fourth in that series. But, for the first time in a while, it will not be from the perspective of Grande as the ingenue. She’s overstepped what people are willing to forgive.

Not me, though.

For starters, I don’t particularly care about three quarters of this romantic scandal. But more importantly, all my favourite women in entertainment cheat and get cheated on. It’s the circle of tabloid life. Betrayal should add zest to entertainment. I can feel for the injured parties, but I ultimately don’t think it’s a capital offense. If it was, I would never have bothered watching a Greta Gerwig film. In the grand scheme of bad behaviour in Hollywood, Grande’s crime rank soundly at about a 3/10. Bad enough to actually make the news, but not actually able to harm her career.

Which is why I was shocked by ‘yes, and?’, the lead single of her upcoming record ‘Eternal Sunshine’. Because this is not just an explicit callout to the haters. It is a tackling of narrative that, for the first time in her career, actively makes her sound much worse than it needs to. What is meant to be a musical shrug manages to convey an immense amount of insecurity.

Lyrically, it’s a mess of cliches and generic empowerment lines paired with subtle nods to the whole media circus surrounding Grande that fall flat. The improv-tastic title suggests a playful tone that does not carry over to the rest of the song. The Madonna samples indicates fun is just around the corner. Grande’s girlish delivery gives the impression we’re not taking things too seriously. It runs at 3 minutes and 35 seconds of underwhelming bitchiness.

The biggest crime is the sample.

For starters, I think it takes a special kind of talented producer to sample an already classic hit and create something equally undeniable. You’re fighting against not just your own potential inadequacies, but the cultural memory of the song you’re sampling. Which is why the decision to build this comeback single on the foundations of the 1991 cultural juggernaut that is ‘Vogue’ is an odd one. This is not a good enough beat to justify its own existence.

Grande has done dance music before – good and bad. But even at her worst (Break Free) she has never failed like this. It's not just that Beyonce remixed ‘Vogue’ into ‘Break My Soul’ in 2022, rendering the conceit of sampling the Queen of Pop significantly less ballsy. But more that Max Martin’s extremely competent and clean production manages to sterilise the sample. What makes Madonna’s classic hit so infectious is just how flamboyant it is. The strings on the hook in particular uplift the foundational drums and synths to new heights. Grande replaces them with nothing.

But more than just a boring beat, even Grande herself sounds…bored. It’s an intonation that clearly reaches for the monotone confidence of a Britney Spears – particularly on ‘Piece of Me’ – without reflecting on how different ways of singing sit in different throats. Where Spears can inflect in the subtlest ways to suggest a smirk behind the affectation, Grande sounds, at best, condescending and artificial.

Or maybe the ‘Wicked’ vocal training has drained her of the ability to vocalise outside of the style of a Broadway style ingenue. @hennyondatok on TikTok once described Grande as a “very talented mockingbird”, and that has never been more obvious than it is here. She sounds lovely. Technically perfect, in her usual sense. But where a decade of pop singing previously had landed with her using a touch of rasp to humanise her, this is a mix that sounds very…bright. It’s breathy and light in an incredibly odd way – making her sound almost like a very young girl. Particularly when paired with her latest speaking voice, which sees her almost whispering most of her “performed” speech to something sitting between Marilyn Monroe and a literal infant.

Worse still is how this vocalisation rubs up against her actual words. Where they’re not store-brand self-confidence bravado that this version of her cannot pull off, they’re obvious and clunky. Nods to allegations about her plastic surgery and alleged eating disorder probably work the best, even if it feels strange to pair them with allegations of homewrecking. The song isn’t unsalvageable, just poorly put together.  

This isn’t a criticism of her talent, it’s a callout that none of this is meshing together. Her voice doesn’t fit with the tone of the song, which is poorly conveyed by the lyrics, which doesn’t sit right on the beat, which is itself unbearably bland. You’re left with a song that manages to match the Selena Gomez atrocity ‘Single Soon’ in both dullness and weird mean-spiritedness.

The music video is fine. An ode to Paula Abdul’s ‘Cold-Hearted’ that sees Grande step through well-choreographed moves that compliment her abilities and hide the fact that she’s not a particularly impressive performer. There’s a weird statue bumper for the intro and outro that should feel stranger than it is.

All of this is a just second reference to music that is better than what we’re listening to. In every respect, she’s outclassed by the originals. Abdul responded positively to the ode, and it is nice to see her be referenced in a real way. But ultimately, it’s yet another signifier that you’re meant to think of this as classic dance music. The line-up is Madonna, Paula Abdul, and Ariana Grande.

It doesn’t convince me as someone with ears, but maybe you’re different.

It's all an aesthetic mess. The whole production is a testament to Grande’s desperation for a hit to distract from a media circus she probably could have weathered by simply releasing something good. She’s thrown together music before, but never has a lead single felt so rushed and poorly thought out. The slap-hazardness of ‘Thank You, Next’ worked for almost the same reasons this doesn’t. She created a song that felt honest, and explicit, and unshackled from her media narrative. It clearly wasn’t in retrospect, but you could reasonably listen and enjoy it. The song worked on multiple levels. This will likely lose to Jack Harlow and his mediocre attempt at Drake meets G Eazy.

‘yes, and’ is her flailing to respond to backlash she’s probably too famous for, and looking stupid in the process.