If you listen to pop music in 2024, you might feel the same way. Even in the streaming era, we are still overwhelmed with choices, and even the simplest forms of engagement often feel like surrender. Perhaps this is why superfans now call their favorite singers “mother” without hesitation, and at the same time imagine them as their heroes, queens or some kind of gods. Here is the complicated part that we should all forget. Pop superstars are just people, rich people who deserve grace as well as scrutiny. In an increasingly unequal world, where capitalism's promise of limitless growth flows like a polluted river through today's pop music, we are rooting for our ultra-rich megastars with ever-higher taxes. As you continue to do so, it starts to feel like brain damage is the problem.
Ariana Grande is here with a captivating new album that wrenches your brain with stealth you can't feel. She titled it “Eternal Sunshine,'' a nod to Gondry's film, which frames the whole thing as a kind of binary puzzle. Granted, Grande's recent love turmoil has been thoroughly glossed over as a clickable pile of digital girlfriend gossip, but her signature, eponymous 2019 breakup anthem ” Unlike “Thank U, Next,” he decided to keep the lyrics ambiguous for these new songs. The perfect softness of her voice masks the details of her broken heart. Did our hero undergo the memory erasure she speaks of in her title song, or is she performing the procedure on us?
Brace yourselves and start with what Grande wants you to remember. When you hear her falsetto hydroplane over the beat of “The Boy Is Mine,” you'll remember Brandy and Monica singing the same words in 1998. When you hear Grande coo over the disco gallop of “We Can't Be Friends,” (Wait for Your Love), she'll be singing along to Robyn's “Dancing on My Own” in 2010. You will remember dancing by yourself to “. Hearing the friendly pop-house overtones of “Yes, And?” will bring you flashbacks. The indelible craze for Madonna's “Vogue” circa 1990 (and Grande's music video will remind you that Paula Abdul's “Cold Heart” from a year earlier was the inspiration). If you check the credits, you'll see Max Martin's name over and over again. That means you'll be reminded of the slew of millennial megahits that the Swedish songwriting giant helped write for Britney Spears, NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys, and more.
All of these could easily be considered influences, but Grande sings them in a way that blurs time, with the softest edges of her voice giving it a pillowy softness throughout “Eternal Sunshine.” It gives you the warmth of a bathtub. The music is supremely appealing, with melodies that follow the general contours of R&B, but without the human catharsis of pain and the hassle of cleaning up. Instead, Grande's well-formed vocal staccato is the most notable musical mechanism, a beautifully breathy phrasing strategy that evokes slamming on the brakes. It's as if Grande is repeatedly asking us to stop, put ourselves in the moment, and savor it. Notice how she inserts a small pause between the words, “Take your time,” in the clever chorus of “The Boy Is Mine.” It's like making time.
And if being here now means Grande wants to forget the past, “Eternal Sunshine” capitalizes on that conceit. She blurs the line between music and listener, while holding firm the line between human being and persona. Unless you want to hit your head over this album's potential paradoxes, you won't get any headaches. When music feels easy to get into, it's just as easy to get out of. Every beat feels frictionless, every melody feels smooth, every reference is so familiar that you might not remember it at all after it's all over.