Why Ariana Grande Is Stepping Away

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0:57Hey, everyone. Heads up that today's show talks a lot about disordered eating. If that's something you're not really in the mood to hear about right now, maybe listen to yesterday's show.

1:13How many different versions of Ariana Grande can you name? Because Slate's Saatchi Cole, she can name a whole lot of them. She was like a cutesy redhead on Nickelodeon for a few years. Then she kind of came out with the big ponytail. And then there were the rabbit ears, you know, these skater skirts with little bra tops, puffer jackets. Maybe this is typical for someone who's been famous since they were a teenager. But until Saatchi started listing all of these off, I got to say, I had not fully processed what a chameleon Ariana Grande's been. Her latest look, though, it stuck around for a couple of years.

1:55What we have now is this, like, Audrey Hepburn cosplay, you know, trying to be in more musicals and get more involved in theater. And Twinned With It seems to be a lot of personal distress, at least, or a lot of personal news. For me, I feel like it was promotional stuff for Wicked, where I really was struck by how wispy Ariana Grande was. and not just her body, but like her whole presentation. Like she has this deer in headlights look that she would do on every photo shoot. Yeah. She looks lost. She looks like she needs help. Her makeup has changed a lot too, where it's these very natural colors on the face, like wispy eyelashes, smaller nails, natural colors.

2:43She's always in butter yellow or light pink or white.

2:50She is also very, very thin. Satya and I are not the only people to have mentioned this. Your group chats have probably also popped off. And before we go much further, I just feel compelled to say that I think Ariana Grande is enormously talented. Just Google her impersonating almost anyone, from Britney Spears to Eugene Levy. She's a technical genius. But her body seems to be withering. It feels terrible to say that out loud, partially because Ariana Grande doesn't want us to. You know, every time she's been asked directly about this or it's kind of come up, she has said, this is the healthiest body I've had.

3:33You know, the one that you're comparing me to. That was not a healthy body. I was taking antidepressants. I was drinking. Several things can be true at once. But what we have here is someone who is on purpose giving us a visual that is very weak. I don't know what's happening. But being silent isn't a great option. I cannot look at any more emaciated bodies in public and just keep my day moving. I don't have it in me anymore, Mary. I remember this in, like, the early aughts, and, like, we couldn't say anything because it really wasn't, there wasn't any room. I don't think I can do it again. So how surprised were you when earlier this week Ariana Grande announced she was taking a step back from public life?

4:14I was not that surprised. Here's what I found really interesting about the statement is that it puts it on us, right? Instead of releasing it as an Instagram, it's her rep going to people saying she has withstood an amount of criticism and scrutiny from the public that has been exhausting. And she's handled it with aplomb, but she needs a little bit of a break. It's a little look what you made me do. It's look what you did. You know, she talked at her concert in Chicago right after the statement came out, and she said this was a planned break. I've always said I was going to take a bit of a break.

4:49I've been working nonstop for such a long time. That, I think, is true. She said it was thoughtful and empowered, which I was like, interesting choice of words. Yeah, listen, here's the thing. We are ostensibly talking about someone who perhaps has an eating disorder, right? And eating disorder is rooted in the need for control. And for the rest of us, Saatchi says, this creates a real problem. To talk about it is to take away some autonomy from this person who is very clearly telling us, I need some control. That sucks. And I don't really want to do that to someone. But to not talk about it is to treat this like it is normal and that it is OK.

5:36Today on the show, we're going to talk about Ariana Grande, even though we wish we didn't have to. I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next? Stick around.

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9:14Okay, let's do a little Ariana Grande 101, if we can. like one of the things I've realized over the last week is how long Ariana Grande has been famous because you know she sort of existed at the periphery of my you know knowledge for so long like you can find video from 2008 of her recording songs for the musical 13 and she's talking about like I'm just a girl from Florida who happened to get this role on Broadway with my friend and like everything about her her hair her face looks totally different than it does now and she sort of springboards from that to Nickelodeon, the show Victorious, a real rocket ride.

9:55And part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is that you've reported a lot on the culture of Nickelodeon kids shows, how warped it was around that time. Do you feel like that gives you insight at all into what's happening now? I did a profile of Jeanette McCurdy, and Jeanette was on Sam and Cat with Ariana. And so she wrote a memoir a couple years ago called, I think it's called I'm Glad My Mom Died. Yeah. I'm Glad My Mother's Dead or something like that. Yeah. It's a great, it's a really good memoir. It's a good memoir. It's excellent. But in it, she talks loosely about this pop star co-star that she has.

10:33She doesn't name her, but it's obvious. It's completely obvious who it is. And, you know, she's not portrayed as like fiendish or cruel, but as somebody who is getting a lot of attention. And for Jeanette, you can see this makes sense. These are children. We're talking about children who are working together, right? So they have the brains of children. So for her, she's like, well, why does Ariana get to do this? Or why does she get to leave earlier? Whatever. Now, in reality, she gets to do that because old girl's got to work, right? Like Ariana has been a workhorse for about 15 years straight.

11:05She's been extremely famous for at least 12. Yeah. That's crazy. She's 33. It's a lot. It's a lot of work for at a very pivotal and early time in your life. Every decision she's ever made has been picked over. And her scandals have been like mostly about boyfriends. So like relatively muted, I'd say, frankly, like no big, big, big scandals. Jeanette's memoir is revealing because it explains how deeply hostile that workplace was for kids and for adults. I can't imagine being a young person and trying to come up in that kind of ecosystem. You have Dan Schneider who created the show and was really the architect of a lot of Nickelodeon programming and the temperament of it, who was, it seems up to no real good.

11:52Like kids were, people were overworked. Everybody was exhausted. Everybody felt taken advantage of. He's spending a lot of time with the younger female cast members. is like there's something going on there. I'd also say there are very few child stars who exit that system unscathed. It's not a good place for kids and they don't come out of it generally without some stuff to deal with, even ones that continue to work and seem to be, by all accounts, well-adjusted. I mean, Drew Barrymore is a really good example. I mean, she seems to have a beautiful life. She's outside running in the rain, but boy, does she have some tough years, right?

12:26Yeah, for sure. Struggled with addiction and everything else. Yeah. So after Nickelodeon, Ariana Grande primarily focused on singing for like a really long time. Yeah. Yeah. In 2017, there's a terrible tragedy. There's a bombing at Manchester Arena where she had been performing. But she keeps going and then she takes on the Wicked movies. So she's had just she's done a lot. When did the concerns about her body creep in? If you were on pro-anorexia and pro-eating disorder blogs on Tumblr 10 years ago, she was already there. So it depends on who you ask. Because there are kids who have grown up with her and have looked at her very slender body.

13:15I don't know if it's natural or not. It doesn't matter to me. The way she looks is the way she looks. So she has a thin body, objectively small, thin and short and teeny tiny. Right. That's kind of her thing. Yeah. And she has for a long time kind of been like iconography for kids with eating disorders. This is pretty common. I mean, Kate Moss was that for like me and a little bit older, like Paris Hilton. when Hilary Duff got really, really, really thin. I remember all the girls like cutting out that photo of her in like a little shirt dress and putting it in the locker because it was really inspiring that someone who was of, we thought, average size could lose all that weight.

13:53God, these are sick memories, Sachi. I know, but this is what, I mean, this is being in high school in a summer. Yeah, no, this is just existing in the world. I get it, but like, ugh. Yeah, and it's so gross, but it's so common and it's so generational. So Ari has been in that conversation generationally for a really long time. Eventually, she started addressing it in her songs, right? Like she would release songs and talk about it. She's released a couple songs saying that she doesn't want people to talk about her body, that people have, you know, sort of suggested that she needs to lose weight.

14:21I think she probably felt something about her size, which is, again, super common and such is her right. The beginning of the public discourse about her body started with Wicked, I'd say. She was doing so many interviews. Yeah, she was doing a ton of interviews, even in the run-up, because she was thin in the movie. So even before the movie's release, when she's starting to, there's footage of her in rehearsal and backstage and like, what's going on? I remember seeing accounts that were zooming in on all of the food that was in her dressing room and talking about how it was all sugar free. And there's, you know, that there were always sort of these like what, you know, eating disorder lollipops that you eat that are like appetite suppressant lollipops that exist on the market.

15:05The Kardashians were marketing them for some time. Looking and making and casting sort of these sort of assessments, factual or not. The reality was that people had already at that point latched on and said she has an eating disorder because she had gotten quite thin. But if you think about how thin she was back then, which is now three years ago almost, and how thin she is now. She's so much thinner. She's so much thinner. And she released the song Petal this year, which is I feel like where everyone began to focus. Because there are a few shots there where you really can see her rib cage. It's so loud, man.

15:43It's the way she looks in that movie video is loud. She looks ill. She looks skeletal. And like at some point, I think in the video, we should explain what the video is about, which is the plot of the video is that Ariana is one of many actresses repeatedly trying out for roles, auditioning in front of old men, rejected again and again and again. And it ends in this horrific way where she gets a chainsaw and murders them and is covered in blood and comes out and gets applause for it. And I really thought, like, I was driven to look at the video because of everyone saying she looked so thin. To me, the actual content of the video itself was much more upsetting than how thin she was.

16:28Because the message of it was not a healthy message. it was I accept the judgment of these people so much that in order to silence it and make myself feel better I need to kill them and be applauded for it versus you know a healthier reaction of like I see this judgment I don't need to deal with that I go in this other direction come with me I'm so much better than this BS do you know what I mean like that's like the healthier like example to set, I feel like. But instead, it's gory, it's gross. And then on top of it all, she's really, really thin. Oh, I found the chainsaw scene the least objectionable part of that music video.

17:20I don't mind that part at all. I don't mind that part at all. That's okay. everything else around it yeah I'm like that's totally fine like I and and I know what you're saying about like that about what it means I I have some thoughts about maybe what another interpretation might be but um there's no way to watch that video and not watch it in conversation with her thinness yes it's impossible first of all she is noticeably thinner because she has put herself in a room with a bunch of other women. The sequence of the music video is audition room. So it's her with all these different women of different ages and sizes.

17:58And they're doing a little dance kind of in these chairs in the waiting room. That is the most consistent part of the video. It's seven minutes long, almost seven minutes long, this video. So she she's putting herself in comparison on purpose by design. Look at me and then look at her. And they're all doing the same movement. So it allows you to see like really like how everybody's body is moving. She goes into these audition rooms and she's trying to transform into these different versions of herself. And she's painted herself in a corner here because now we have to look at the body because that's what's presented to us.

18:30She puts on, she's offering it. She wears a very, very tight black outfit that's like Sandy from Greece, which shows off her chest and her shoulders, which are especially thin. Her chest is very skeletal. I find it painful to you know look at i find it painful to look at i'll also say you know i've heard a lot of people sort of be like well this is like a audrey hepburn thing like audrey was naturally thin audrey was starved by the nazis and then when she came to the united states had to stay thin because of the studio system which demanded that she stay on these rigid rigid diets everyone she's being compared to in this body type and in the styling because she is wearing these like 50s and 60s style dresses, they are people who have had disordered relationships with food, forced or otherwise.

19:26Right. And yet she manages to make herself look like the pinnacle of disordered. Right. Even worse. Yeah. So she does all these like different outfits. And one of them, she's wearing a full breastplate because to like make herself look like she got a boob job, essentially. But it's the full neck down breastplate, which is like really jarring. And then also like in that, in the breastplate, she's wearing a cow print dress. So then it's like, well, are you saying that you are cattle and you're up for sale? Or are you making a weird comment about being voluptuous that I don't want to have to think too hard about because it like makes me feel funny.

20:02But what's to me also more bizarre, it's actually, oh, twist, the whole thing was a movie. And she walks off set and walks outside and there's paparazzi and, you know, people asking for her autograph. and I found it a really it was like a tricky line that she was sort of trying to walk which is that she doesn't want to listen to a particular type of criticism because it's cruel and fair but she still wants access to her fans and she still wants to sort of be in this place well and the first thing she does after she sort of hacks these people to death and like walks on like oh it's a set she goes to the male director and says do you need it again can I do more can I do and like I was just like oh this is like You're like a Russian doll.

20:49Yeah. Here, you know, where you're stuck. Right. So the video is a Russian doll, and then it feels like her feelings might be too. And then because it feels like she doesn't have maybe full resolve of that, I feel unresolved. You will feel unresolved. You know, the album felt— And maybe that's intentional? Possibly. I don't know. Again, like, all I've really understood about any of this is that we don't know anything because she won't tell us. And she doesn't have to, but because she won't tell us, we're left with these really confusing questions and feelings. I mean, she is a public figure. It's inevitable to guide your own feelings about the world.

21:25We look to celebrity. That's why they're there in a big way. And this one feels like it's a strange one. I feel like every time we talk about her, it feels like when you're walking down steps and you think there's one more and there isn't. and your foot like slams into your body. Yeah. And you don't have the catharsis of finishing the step that you're anticipating. And that's how this has always felt to me where it's like, what can anybody say? She doesn't want us in this. It's her right. But I witnessed it so much. I witnessed so much about her body. And she's asking me to look at it. She's releasing things for me to look at.

22:00She's still on tour for another month. She just, you know, the album came out, what, a week ago? This music video came out a week ago. She's giving it to me, but telling me like, you know, it's very stretch limo with tinted windows. Like, look at me, but don't look inside. Like, but then, but your car's so big. Exactly. But this was made for me to pay attention to. I was just standing here. Exactly. And, you know, that, like, it's painful. I found the music video, like, a really heartrendingly earnest look at someone who I think is really conflicted and very ambivalent about the position she finds herself in.

22:42Sachi and I will be back after a quick break.

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24:00You know, you mentioned in your article that you wrote for Slate about Ariana Grande that so many people are comparing her to Karen Carpenter, who was also a singer, had anorexia, but never really admitted it, died. But in some ways, the more I thought about Ariana Grande, day, the more I thought about her transition as like in conversation with someone like Michael Jackson. Because Michael Jackson, first of all, we always knew him from childhood. So it's like we have these images of like how he's evolved and how he looks different. And it's an extreme difference. But he's also asking us to look at it, you know, the same way that she is.

24:41And I'm not saying anything about her having any of the other problems Michael Jackson did, but I'm saying in the way that she plays with image. And it kind of helped me to take it out of the disordered eating space, which really makes it about like women, culture, feminism, all these sorts of things. So just be like, no, no, this is like disordered in this way. It's about performance, you know? Yeah. I mean, maybe. Yeah, I think the tough part about trying to find a comparison point for her in a lot of these more tragic figures is that she hasn't had, like, a work fuck-up.

25:16Scaachi Koul: Like, she hasn't, you know, Amy Winehouse's name— Right, like, she's known for the donut scandal. Right, like, come on, be for real. That's nothing. I'm not hanging my head on that. Like, she's had—it seems like she's been alleged she's had a couple affairs, which, like, God, grow up. Like, whatever. In Hollywood, like, what? Like, what do I care? But she's never, like, faltered on stage. She's never released an album that has been like, this is garbage. Like, she hasn't gotten the full Britney Spears treatment or the Amy Winehouse. Even Karen Carpenter, the way they talked about Karen Carpenter in the tabloids, much crueler, I think, still than how, you know, a tabloid publication still would talk about Ariana Grande today.

25:57all those people had real failure in a professional sense and real scandal, including Michael Jackson, right? That also makes the aesthetic stuff that they're offering both a distraction and kind of like an avoidance thing. So in this case, she is so adept. She's touring. The fact that she is touring is the number one argument against what everybody else is saying because the amount of energy that she must be using to do this is superhuman because a like a person eating a lot and like training like crazy would still find that exhausting. I don't know what her schedule is, but it seems again, she's quite thin.

26:36So yeah, but she's doing it. And she you know, the way that she's decided to announce this leave is with notice. She has a month of shows left. Right. Like even that is organized. You know what I mean? Yes, it is because it's thoughtful and it's by choice. And the thing that she doesn't want if indeed she does have this disorder, which even if she doesn't, right, but let's say she does for the sake of our argument here. The whole point of all of this is to indicate that she has a handle on everything, that she is in control. So of course it's going to be I'm announcing my leave. It's going to be in a few weeks so everybody can get used to the idea.

27:11Like, I hope it's a real leave. I don't know what she'll do with it, but I hope she takes real time. But it is all in pursuit of I need to feel like I have some control. And this is someone who hasn't. She's been in the industry machine since she was a teenager. Yeah. It's what's happening with her in conversation with a bigger cultural shift. Like we're in the age of GLP-1s, right? Everyone can lose a lot of weight if they want to, and they beg the right doctor or go to the right website. Yeah. Yeah. Is part of the reason this is happening because the American perception of health is somehow changing again or maybe reverting to form?

27:59We have always had very thin women in our culture, and we have always been quietly curious about what's been going on with them. What I think is different is how we are curious this time. What do you mean? I remember seeing girls this thin again in the early aughts. We saw Paris get very thin. Hillary got super thin. Lindsay Lohan. Do you remember Nicole Richie? Yes. She lost all that weight. So thin. She looked a little like this. She did. She did. She was tiny, too. Tiny, tiny, tiny. And she has admitted like I was too thin. Actually, a number of these women have. Hillary, too. I was too thin.

28:34I shouldn't have been that thin. I recognize that maybe it was like a bad example to set. And now I don't I don't live like that. And by the way, I'm saying this about people who continue to still be thin. So thin. They're still very, very slender. Like I'm talking, this is a difference of 15 to 20 pounds on like thin, short people, right? But we've seen this before. What feels different now is the way we're talking about it and what we are curious about specifically. Are we talking about it better? I don't like those words. Don't put a value on it. I can't trust them. But when Nicole Richie was losing a lot of weight, everybody was like, oh, my God, she's anorexic.

29:16What a whore. I don't know how we made that jump. Nice leap there. Yeah. Big leap. And she's on crack. Like it was about that she was a drug addict. She's on heroin. She's doing cocaine. Like that's all that it is, which I don't know. Maybe it was. But the conversation was about what's like to shame her and her behavior and make the weight loss still as her weight gain was about morality. In this case, it feels like there is a mix of genuine concern. You can feel it. Not just in terms of her fans who are like, I'm worried about this person, but the rest of us who are watching it. And I feel concerned about myself and everybody else who has to witness it.

29:53I feel very anxious for all of the younger girls in my family about them having to witness that. It wigs me out every time I talk to a woman with kids who's like, my daughter thinks about that. A lot of I was reading about all these women who are like, my daughters have cut her photos out and put them up on their walls. And it stresses me out to see this very skinny person being the example for my kid who's already struggling in middle school. That is a louder conversation. We were having that conversation 20 years ago, but it's much louder now. And I'll be grateful for that. I don't know if it's better, but it's more evolved.

30:29And I'll take that. So is what you're saying, because you've said it's impossible to talk about this, right? Well, we can talk about it. There's just no winners. Right. Yeah, you get nothing out of it. But are you saying the way to talk about it is like individual one-on-one conversations? Like I just wonder like how we come at this from a place of concern while also like acknowledging other people's bodies or their business. It's funny because I'm like going to say something that sounds antithetical to my whole job, which is to like write my thoughts. Yes. And send them into the world. But like I wrote that piece because I was like everyone I know is talking about this and nobody knows like what to do with it.

31:14So all my group chats every day I wake up and everyone's like, did you hear about this? Did you see this? We talk about it at work. We're in Slack talking about it. And then there's like every so often on somebody on like Blue Sky who says something about it and then everyone talks about it for a bit and then we get nervous and then we run away. But I do kind of think like, yeah, you should be talking to your friends about this. You should be discussing it with your group chat. You should be talking to your kids. You should be talking to your siblings. Like this actually is the place to have one-on-one conversations of like, what do you think this is?

31:48And is this something that you aspire towards? Or what does it make you think about how thin everybody's getting? And that like GLP ones are more available. So this sort of kind of worrying body transformation is much more accessible to the average person. I think it is like a one on one conversation to be had. I know that Ariana's body and this news of a break is launching a million conversations between teenage girls and their moms and nobody wants to have it and everybody's embarrassed and everyone is crying. But like, you know, I remember my mom pulling me aside and being like, all your pants are big now.

32:27Like, what the hell is that? And it's like, you know what? The thing is, is when someone notices in that way, it kind of stops the train. And that is what I think everyone's trying to do is to indicate to someone who's really far away from us. We have a very bizarre parasocial relationship with her. She's a stranger, but we don't feel that way. But it's a million people waving their hands and saying, I notice it. And I'm telling you that I see it because I'm hoping that it'll stop your train. It feels like both sides here, like the audience and Ariana Grande, feel kind of trapped in their roles.

33:01Like she's trapped under the glass of us, everyone looking at her. We're all trapped because we have to look at her. Yeah. And she is, I mean, again, that's a very tough thing about being like a pop star is you end up being a really complex mirror for a bunch of people you don't know. And like we've been here before. This has happened again with Brittany or Amy or Karen or, you know, whomever else. Like this is a tale as old as time. Yeah, I feel like we just can't stop ourselves. Like one of the first stories I ever did for TV news, which is one million years ago, was about pro anorexia websites.

33:38And like, this is that. Again. Same thing. Listen, man, I know. Sugar-free gum, cabbage soup. We've all been there. Sachi. I know. We live in hell. Sachi, I'm really grateful for you coming on the show. Thanks for doing it. Thanks for having me. Sachi Cole is a senior writer at Slate. And that's our show. What Next is produced by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme, and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations.

34:22And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky. I'm Matt Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.

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