2018 was two and a half months ago now, which is a weird concept to acknowledge. Despite this, it is asked that you remember popular music from 2018. What artists do you think of? An artist I think was incredibly important to the year 2018 was Ariana Grande. Not only did she release an album that people accepted with high reviews, but she also released “thank u, next,” a song that will presumably be remembered for decades.

  But now it is 2019, and after doing so terribly well in 2018, you would think that Grande would thrive even more. She released another album in February, and two of her songs are currently in the top 100. That is incredibly impressive to some, while others have determined that Ariana peaked in 2018 and that she is unimportant. In this year of 2019, you either adore or hate Ariana Grande.

  Her troubles began with her album release on Feb 8, 2019. The album entitled after her incredibly popular song, “thank u, next,” felt rushed to some. Which makes sense. It was her second album she released within the span of six months. From this album, however, a couple of songs released would become incredibly popular.

  The first song we will address is her song entitled “7 Rings.” The song itself was greeted with mixed reviews as some individuals, including myself, found her sampling from “The Sound of Music” bad. The song sampled is entitled “My Favourite Things” and it is already bad enough. We are all already force fed the song in the winter, as somebody somewhere decided that that particular song was a Christmas song for some reason.

  While some people have that issue, other people take issue in the fact that it feels like Ariana Grande is appropriating a culture she is not apart of. This conceptualization, for some, branches out into people’s idealization of Ariana Grande’s personal life. People claim she has been appropriating black culture, entitling her “Apropriana,” which, even if you disagree with this perception, is quite clever.

  The next song that created controversy was her song entitled “Break Up With Your Girlfriend I’m Bored.” Besides the song concept being in bad taste to some, other controversy took place. With her music video, some individuals found it appropriative in nature, claiming she was using gay imagery to bring in LGBT viewers.

  As well as this incident, Ariana Grande is also set to headline Pride in Manchester. And People Were Not Happy About That One. Ariana Grande is a straight woman who is headlining a Pride Event that people have to pay to get into. I think a lot of this conception of Pride however is that Pride has evolved so so much from what it was originally intended, and Ariana agreeing the headline just encourages the issues people have been having with Pride, giving it a popular problematic face.

  The world has changed within the past couple months, and Ariana Grande has gone from an unproblematic individual who wrote a Bop of a song, to someone who a lot of people are learning to dislike. Whether your opinion is positive or negative in regards to Ariana, she is seemingly here to stay.