What Is Ariana Grande Doing?
In her first songs since the Manchester bombing, the singer has triumphed with a rare pop commodity: inscrutability.
In the middle of Ariana Grande’s “God Is a Woman” video, the music cuts out, the pop star disappears, and a gopher screams. The rodent’s a puppet, one of a few who’re poking out of holes in a parched desert, and it shrieks like a man on fire might, or like small furry mammals actually sometimes do. Then the video flashes back to the main show—a purple-blue fantasia of Grande in goddess poses—never to return to gopherville.
Huh? What? Why this interruption? As music, “God Is a Woman” conjures an enveloping swirl of trip-hoppy R&B and soft rock, but the screaming critter jolts viewers out of the reverie. Or maybe it snaps them to attention. It’s a piece of grit in a pudding cup, or a pearl .
