Ariana Grande is the stranger after all

photo by Katia Temkin

The morning of her first LA show at the Crypto Arena, Ariana shared on Instagram stories that she was “excited for tonight’s countdown”. Every show on her tour opens with a 15-minute countdown ‘till showtime, and apparently this one would be special. As the descending numbers flashed on a rounded screen, the entire arena rose to their feet, anticipating something. Somewhere around the halfway mark, I started to hear yelling and cheering. All of a sudden everyone in my line of vision was turning their heads away from the stage, away from the screen altogether. What the hell was going on? I whipped my head around looking for trapeze dancers descending the ceiling or Lady Gaga making a grand appearance, but all I could see were people dressed in black lace and red gloves. Suddenly, my sister’s best friend Caroline turns to face me, my sister and my girlfriend. “It’s JOAN!” She yells through a satisfied grin. She is, of course, referring to Ariana’s mother, Joan Grande. I laughed out loud. This wasn’t the infamous surprise, by the way. The surprise happened a couple minutes before the end of the countdown—track name “kiss me” for Ari’s upcoming album petal flashing on screen. But Caroline didn’t even catch it. She and thousands of fans were fixated on the mother of our favorite pop star. With Ariana Grande, it’s always a family affair; and at an Ariana Grande show, we feel like an extension of it. But in every good dysfunctional family, one therapized young woman eventually has to put her foot down.

The Eternal Sunshine Tour, Ariana’s first tour in seven years, disrupts the enduring link between artist and audience through a tactful narrative of temporality and negotiated identity. “Cause I’m still the same but only entirely different,” she sings on her ballad “Hampstead”, sitting on a stool at the furthest end of the catwalk in the middle of the arena. Over halfway into the show, it appears to be the most vulnerable we see her all night—the band the quietest, the crowd the quietest too. Her hair wrapped up in a bun, eyes closed most of the song, and her voice projecting in perfect emotive clarity. “I’d rather be seen and alive than dying by your point of view,” she insists. “Hampstead” comes right after a light-hearted rendition of “Honeymoon Avenue”, the first song on her debut record and a longtime fan favorite. Ariana thanks the crowd for sticking with her from the past to the present. This specific song coupling is constructed to connect a line in time directly from her very first iteration of pop artist to the one on stage now. It’s like a hand reaching out to us in the audience, an acknowledgement of the evolving fan/artist relationship. It acts as an emotional anchor for the fans during an otherwise mercurial production—Ariana’s whole setlist is configured this way, weaving old and new music together in conversation to interrogate her fluid pop celebrity.

The live performances are all connected by visuals that follow Ariana through memory and trauma. A visual introducing the second Act shows Ariana falling through a tunnel of hands, a la Jim Henson’s The Labyrinth. Except in this version, every hand is Ari’s own. Not strangers, not monsters, not journalists “clinging to their papers and pens”, not exes or family or friends or fans. Just her own two (times a thousand) tattooed hands. By making all the hands her own, she acknowledges her many competing identities and iterations–the endless barrage of different Arianas desperate to lead her in different directions. Where lyrics like “Me and my truth, we sit in silence” may sound like she’s on the outside of a narrative she can’t control, Ariana’s twist on the Labyrinth tunnel turns the responsibility inward. She’s internalized every projection of herself, even though they aren’t really permanent. At the start of the show, Ari is unable to contend with time and how it shapes her understanding of self, so she succumbs to the uncertainty and falls down into darkness. Between the third and fourth Acts, visuals show Ariana joining her inner child in the (literal) gardens of her mind. She’s led through a hallway holding rooms with various versions of her across time, dressed in outfits from famous public appearances or life chapters, like that of the One Love Manchester benefit concert or the signature look from her debut album. By the end of the sequence, Ariana rejects a memory-erasing machine that she initially considers at the top of the show. It’s a deliberate choice not to reject or conceal those timelines of her life and identity, but perhaps metabolize them like complex carbs and use them to her advantage.

The show’s consistent excavation of public vs. private self re-contextualizes all of eternal sunshine’s music. Now, it felt like the love-song-addressing-her-relationship-to-the-public vehicle accounted not only for “we can’t be friends” or “hate that i made you love me”, but even for songs like “past life” and “twilight zone”. “past life”, sounds like a song addressing fans who might have met her during the Sweetener / thank u, next era of her career (one of great success but also major trauma) and demand to know why she’s changed. Ariana’s response seems clear: “You think I’m lost, but that’s just how you found me. Well, maybe I’m the stranger, after all.” “twilight zone” becomes an introspective, reflective version of that same message. On a dreamy, hazy track whose namesake literally operates in another dimension, Ariana asks herself about the trauma-born caricature, “Does she know you’re not who you say you are, ‘cause I might give her a call? Or was I just not me at all?” All of this culminates in my favorite final act of a concert I’ve ever seen. Ariana starts with “hate that i made you love me”, which acts as an exclamation point on the separation between artist and fan. Then she performs “we can’t be friends”, and it lands with more weight sung live. Ariana’s big, sticky feelings about the public linger like a secret we weren’t supposed to know. As the final strings of the song fill the room, Ariana prances across the expanse of the stage, waving goodbye to the crowd, to the audience, to the public who she can’t help but be shaped by. She’s about to disappear behind a door in the house at the back of the stage. As I watch her go, sandwiched between my little sister and my girlfriend, each a monument to my history and my future, I feel bloated with yearning. I think about the infinite versions of myself fighting for a voice in my own mind tunnel. Even as my scarred and hairy hands seem to pull me towards completely different identities, I think about how they all share something in common: loving Ariana Grande.

Just as I’m about to resign to the truth that maybe Ariana Grande can’t love me back, lightning strikes at the Crypto Arena. A loud, alien-like light force fills the center of the venue, beckoning my favorite pop star back into its belly. The once raucous crowd seems to suck in its breath all at once, rapt by the sudden shift. Ari is transfixed on the light when she lifts her mic back to her mouth and sings, like a compulsion, “Don’t want nobody else around me, just need you right here.” Singing “supernatural”, she slowly makes her way towards the light as her dancers fill the space around her. Their hands all find and surround her, much like in the beginning of the show when she’s falling down the tunnel of her own. But Ariana is not falling now. In fact, she’s ascending. As the song reaches its peak, the now infamous image materializes in front of us and Ariana ascends up into the ceiling, effectively choosing to relinquish the control she fought for the entire show. But she’s not giving the control back away, she’s just letting go entirely. It’s as if she understands now that there’s no fixed identity in time; because time is not fixed. Rather than hide from her own fame and success in fear that it might change her, she embraces the uncertainty with an understanding that nothing is permanent. As Ariana disappears into the rounded screens at the top of the venue, a visual shows her settling into place with both her inner child, and a new, grey-haired future version of Ari. She rests her head on her shoulder. Meanwhile, I rest my head nowhere as it rattles around my neck like a plastic Hawaiian hula girl going eighty on the I-5 as I try to make sense of it. There was an inherent tension in the Eternal Sunshine Tour show: Ariana working through trauma, accepting her competing identities, and embracing her future as a star who’s here to stay, all while establishing a careful distance from her audience to do so. It seems obvious… like what? Boundaries work? Ariana’s production certainly proves that in its emotional restraints, but it ironically does so by cutting Ari open and letting us peer inside to look where the light spills in.

Honestly, watching her perform this year, after last seeing her during the emotionally volatile Sweetener Tour in 2019, felt like looking at the moon through a telescope. At the same that I could sense she was more herself than she’s ever been, she also felt further away than she’s ever felt. But the moon is exactly where she’s meant to be in space, and I am exactly where I’m meant to be on Earth. And the special part is, that even at arm’s length, I could still see her heart beating.