Posted by If you’ve looked at any girl’s Instagram story in the past 48 hours you’ve probably seen that Ariana Grande dropped a new song Saturday night called ‘Thank u, next” and to no surprise, it’s a banger.
The internet lost it’s mind, as they always do for surprise drops, but I’m not sure if they really get the message.
It seems like everyone’s calling this a “diss track” but I am yet to find a diss? I think people see a song about an ex and just assume they’re putting the person in a body bag. The way people were talking about this song I thought I was gonna get some Pusha T-like bars from Ariana about Pete Davidson’s dead dad or something but NOPE, all very nice stuff by my standards. You can read the lyrics here and see for yourself, but I can’t find any sign of animosity from either her or Pete. I mean look at the first lyrics,
She’s thankful for Pete, she talks about how it just didn’t work out with the other guys, she says great things about Mac Miller…it all seems very pleasant if anything. She’s learned a lot from her past relationships and she’s moving on. This should be a pretty normal ideology. Then I find out this on top of it.
Ariana Grande‘s Thank U, Next is on its way to becoming an iconic breakup anthem, but what do her exes Pete Davidson, 24, Ricky Alvarez, 26, and Big Sean, 30, think about being mentioned in the hit? Well, they must have been cool with the lyrics about them because the 25-year-old singer admitted to sending the song their way first. “They heard it before it came out,” Ariana tweeted the day after the release, along with a heart emoji and a smiley face. Via Hollywood Life
What a sweetheart! She let them hear what she was gonna say before it came out. Even if it was a horribly mean diss track it doesn’t matter if you tell the person before. Drake certainly wasn’t asked by Pusha T if he could tell the world he had a secret biological son, but if he hit him up before and Drake said “yeah sure sounds good” it still wouldn’t really be a diss track.
The only tensions that were sort of raised came earlier this week after Pete Davidson made a joke about his breakup in his SNL Promo for Saturday’s episode by proposing to Maggie Rogers the musical guest.
Pete’s a comedian and he made a very lighthearted self-deprecating joke about the split. He copes with humor just as Ariana copes with music. Ariana responded to this on Twitter (supposedly) shortly after.
There are a lot of things wrong with this tweet. First of all, Pete made it pretty clear he liked all the attention he was getting from dating Ariana. Which he made public on late night shows, SNL, and any time anyone asked him anything during their engagement.
Not to mention this engagement news obviously made Pete a huge star, but Ariana also got engaged about a month before her new album dropped? And made a song on the album named after her fiance? I’m not saying either of them weren’t truly in love, but it did consequentially and coincidentally help both of their careers.
However, this tweet did numbers and caused every boring buzzfeed-esque news outlet clamoring to turn the smallest celebrity interactions into full blown war zones, to report on the “toxicity” of the breakup. You can see this from this clip from “Awesomeness TV”, a company I can only think was created by a 13 year old girl who got an iPad with iMovie on it for her birthday and wanted to start a Youtube channel where she can discuss Justin Bieber fan fiction.
She dragged him! She threw shade! Pete Davidson is a huge a-hole and Ariana is slamming him into irrelevancy! Except…
Yeah, Ariana deleted that previous tweet, probably realizing it wasn’t fair, and tweets this. Again, it comes from an extremely rational and empathetic place. Everyone thinks Ariana was throwing shade by releasing the song just a half hour before SNL premiered. I guess people thought it was meant to overshadow Pete? But I think if anything that made more people want to watch SNL to see what Pete was going to say. And they would’ve watched this segment on Weekend Update.
Pete took a moment to make a sincere point at the end of the segment on Ariana and it clearly came from a genuine place. Saying,
“I know some of you are curious about the breakup, but the truth is, it’s nobody’s business,” Davidson said. “Sometimes things just don’t work out and that’s OK. She’s a wonderful, strong person and I genuinely wish her all the happiness in the world.”
It seems like these two just realized it didn’t work out and they want to move on and wish each other the best. Ariana has some angelic pipes and Pete’s one of the funniest comedians in the game right now. For two young stars, it actually seems like one of the most mature breakups of all time. There’s no beef. And if there is beef it’s like farm-to-table, organic, vegan beef.
I think social media led to the tainted view of this song’s message…and I love social media. I love twitter. The amount of geniusly stupid memes I see on a daily basis make it one of the best inventions of all time automatically, but it also makes me want to lose my mind sometimes. People take things that are great and over-glorify them to maddening ends *cough* The Office *cough*, everyone gets mad about every political move even if it’s made by some random state representative from Nebraska or something, talented people lose amazing opportunities for making jokes on the site 10 years ago (RIP James Gunn) and people want to pick a side on a breakup where they don’t need to.
I remember when Ariana first got engaged to Pete everyone got mad at her because of Mac Miller. Then the other side defended Ariana for leaving the “toxic” relationship. Then when Mac died people are tweeting about how Mac’s like “smoking a blunt in heaven not giving af about Ariana”, which is just an incomprehensibly crazy statement. And now that Ariana broke up with Pete everyone’s either yelling about how Ariana dumped his ass cuz he’s a loser or they’re mad at Ariana for dumping Pete because he’s more sad than usual now. It’s all just over-opinionated garbage from fans who think they know what’s going on in a celebrity’s life from the few things they do in the public eye, when it’s obviously much more complicated than that.
I love Ariana. I love Pete. So just, relax, and see that this “beef” the media is hyping up is nothing but a mature end to a relationship that was bound to end sometime soon anyways. Remember, THEY ARE BOTH YOUNGER THAN 26 AND ONLY DATED FOR A MONTH. I think we all expected this to end in a drama-filled divorce after 3 months like Kim Kardashian and that brick of a basketball players’ marriage and thank God it didn’t even live long enough to see that. Instead of getting angry, we can just be pumped it led to this pop-banger and all agree that no matter what “side” of this split you’re taking, it is that this happened in the first place.
P.S. Still would’ve liked to see that wedding though.
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