Lost in the brain cell-decimating discourse over whether the romance between Super Bowl champ Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift is actually some DNC psyop (it’s not) is exactly why hoards of young women care for the pop sensation. Plenty of beautiful young women write bingeable ballads about breakups and BFFs, and of all the pop starlets gunning for awards, Swift doesn’t even necessarily have the most raw talent. But in a culture that applauds arrested development and a lack of introspection, Swift is a rare celebrity that girls identify with specifically because they have grown up with her. As a point of comparison, take Ariana Grande as a foil.
Like Swift, Grande is a millennial chart topper known for her exemplary output, commitment to thematic and aesthetic cohesion, and a history of high-profile romances. But unlike Swift, who spent the pandemic churning out a series of stripped-down albums that met the melancholy moment, Grande took an effective hiatus from pop. She got married to a real estate agent in 2021, started filming the motion picture adaptation of Wicked, and announced her separation from said husband in 2023. Grande found herself in the center of a media firestorm late last year when it turned out Grande was having an affair with Wicked co-star Ethan Slater, who was not only also married but a new father to a baby born in 2022.
Grande was hardly new to this sort of scandal. She had been accused of stealing boyfriends before and had bragged about such predilections in her songs. But at 30 years old, after publicly broadcasting her affair with a married father of a newborn, Grande dedicated her first single in three years, “Yes, and?” to celebrating her destruction of a family.
“Your business is yours and mine is mine,” Grande croons on the single, which obviously samples Madonna’s “Vogue” without crediting the ’90s classic. “Why do you care so much whose d*** I ride?”
Well, the world otherwise wouldn’t care about a divorced woman committing adultery with a married father of a newborn, but Grande has made it the world’s business. Just as she posed for seemingly staged paparazzi walks with boyfriends she allegedly stole from other women, Grande similarly smiled for the camera with Slater, seemingly in celebration for graduating from other women’s boyfriends to another’s husband.
Despite fringe right-wing outrage over Swift and Kelce’s cultural dominance, as Ross Douthat noted over at the New York Times, their romance is almost a textbook Hallmark story, “A story where the famous pop star abandons her country roots and spends years dating unsuccessfully in a pool of Hollywood creeps and angsty musicians, only to find true love in the arms of a bearded heartland football star who runs a goofy podcast with his equally bearded, happily married, easily inebriated older brother.”
But it’s also a story of personal growth from Swift. Whereas once she sang laments of all the ways her romantic partners failed her, Swift has grown to own and make light of her own foibles and flaws. While she once shrunk into silence when Kim Kardashian and Kanye West tried to cancel her with a wildly dishonest video edit, Swift responded to the Soros family’s purchase of her masters by rerecording her music, literally taking ownership of her life’s work. And now, instead of dating yet another emotionally stunted, artsy bad boy, Swift has chosen to date a nice Christian boy from the Midwest who seems to love his family and celebrate her success in equal measure. In other words, Swift has chosen husband material.
Grande has done just the opposite. And as evidenced by “Yes, and?” her lack of emotional growth has rippled from her personal life into her professional life. While Grande’s voice is still technically perfect, her ponytail still technically flawless, her choreography technically meeting all her marks, her music is utterly stagnant, the sort of inoffensive fare you’d be fine dancing to at an overpriced night club, but nothing interesting enough to listen to in the quiet of your own home or car. Grande has become a Peter Pan pop star. Singing, dressing, and sounding the same as she did a decade ago.
Six years ago, Grande released the single “No Tears Left to Cry” as her relationship with the (now late) Mac Miller was deteriorating and she was attempting to overcome PTSD after a Jihadist suicide bombed one of her concerts. The song, an oddly triumphant embrace of hitting an emotional rock bottom, was so painfully resonant to this author at 22 years old, who was going through an eerily parallel set of personal crises, both exogenous and endogenous, that I actually did cry to this haunting yet upbeat lamentation. When Grande was seemingly trying to move on with the devil-may-care ode to self-empowerment, “Thank U, Next,” I was sincerely rooting for her. Even when she begged her hypothetical paramour, “Break up with your girlfriend, I’m bored,” I hoped it was a bit of self-aware humor, not a serious assertion that Ariana Is Not Like Other Girls. I don’t expect much from Hollywood starlets, but when their personal lives are their entire product, it’s not wrong to expect a modicum of personal growth over a decade of trying to keep the public interested.
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And yet, Grande’s music is both more sanctimonious about her own celebrity and irreverent about everyone else than ever. Grande’s boasts of boyfriend-stealing at age 20 could be chalked up to the messy honesty of young artistry. At age 30, it’s inculpatory evidence of a refusal to grow up.
Taylor Swift’s happily ever after may be a little boring, perhaps even predictable. But in a culture that celebrates Peter Pan pop stars, children who look like adults and adults who act like children, happily ever after isn’t such a horrible thing.