Ariana Grande’s ‘My Everything’ Encapsulates A Strange Pop Age, From Its EDM&B To Theatrical Ballads To R&B Pop Bops
After 2016’s Dangerous Woman, this album is pretty much known as being up there as Ariana Grande’s best. My Everything marked her real crossover moment, allowing her to collaborate with the most popular artists of the times across several genres, including Nicki Minaj, Iggy Azalea, Jessie J, Zedd and The Weeknd. Anyone who still thought she was merely a TV Disney/Nickelodean personality now knew her as probably the best voice in the Pop industry, and honestly in the running as the next Mariah Carey, whose career wasn’t really hitting in 2014, if memory serves. So the album is memorable, at least for me, on fantastic synthetic hits like “Love Me Harder” and “Break Free”, yet a quick backspin on this vinyl record of yesteryear jogs my memory on just how much I absolutely hate this particular era of Pop music, where uneven core-genres all came together for what I feel was the most unoriginal crossover cash grab in musical history. That’s right, your music from 2013 to say about 2016 is freakin’ terrible, and as much as I loathed the sounds that were being hawked, I honestly can’t blame my little sister Ariana Grande alone, as she was caught up in all the sonic madness, just like every other artist trying to stay relevant, doomed to cater to the most tedious sounds of that zeitgeist. Don’t forget that she was a Soul and Doo Wop diva just an album before on Your Truly. She knows classicism. Would I have preferred for her to grow a pair and go against the grain? Sure, but I admit, the way things were going then, it could have been too big of a risk.
