Review of Ariana Grande's NEW ALBUM Yours Truly, by Jon Caramanica from the New York Times!!!
ARIANA GRANDE
“Yours Truly”(Republic)
“Yours Truly”(Republic)
“Glee” will begin its fifth season this month, and “American Idol” is busy trying to secure its lineup of judges for the coming 13th season. Together, even though they’re perennially unfashionable, these Fox shows have been responsible for an intense surge of interest in music on television, but they haven’t left much of a mark on the shape of pop.
That’s because both shows are fundamentally conservative institutions, privileging the familiar and the unchallenging. They’re about emulating, not innovating.
Largely by sticking to those codes, Ariana Grande has become the first identifiable post-“Glee”/”Idol” pop star, in that she takes the rules of those enterprises, uses them as a foundation, and innovates atop them. She relates to pop music in the ways those shows do — treating it as a historical inspiration pool and also a sacred text.
But Ms. Grande isn’t a mere covers artist. A onetime child actress — she played Cat Valentine on the Nickelodeon’s “Victorious” and now on the spinoff “Sam & Cat” — she uses the “Glee”/”Idol” template as a jumping-off point to make modern pop-R&B with a sturdy vintage backbone.
For Ms. Grande, the early-mid 1990s are the holy grail. So much of this surprisingly strong album is in debt to Mariah Carey’s first two albums, and several songs were written and produced in part by Babyface, that titan of slow-burn late-1980s R&B. A few songs are riddled with blatant Mariah-isms: See especially the final 20 seconds of “Baby I,” in which Ms. Grande approximates the super-high-pitched vocal trills Ms. Carey excelled at.
Ms. Grande is almost there. She has a lithe voice and is capable of real power, though she doles it out carefully. Like that other child TV star turned pop comer Miley Cyrus, Ms. Grande is 20, but her slide into maturity isn’t moving at Ms. Cyrus’s warp speed. Ms. Grande’s version of adulthood is about expertise, not transgression.
She’s not so innocent that the guest rappers on this album keep their libidos in check, though. “You a princess to the public but a freak when it’s time,” Mac Miller exclaims on “The Way”; “A player so you know I had some girls missionary/My black book of numbers thicker than a dictionary,” Big Sean swears on “Right There.”
They’re expressing thoughts that Ms. Grande can’t quite, both because of the squeakiness of her clean and because of the austerity of her sound. “Yours Truly” is largely sweatless. “I wanna say we’re going steady/Like it’s 1954,” she sings on “Tattooed Heart,” which captures the tenor of this album well. Just as the song structures are traditional, so is the sound.
A couple of songs wink to mid-’90s hip-hop: “Right There” uses the same sample as Lil’ Kim’s 1996 hit “Crush on You,” and “The Way” uses the same sample as Big Punisher’s 1998 “Still Not a Player.” But Ms. Grande’s real innovation is to restore the attitude and power to more traditional pop schemas. “Daydreamin’ ” is clean-cut 1950s-style piano pop, and the striking “Tattooed Heart” has a doo-wop heartbeat. One of the album’s high points is “Almost Is Never Enough,” a bracing torch song on which Ms. Grande sneaks in some gospel-singing enunciation for extra effect. It’s practically Streisandian, startling in its utter rejection of the now, and ripe for some young singer on “Glee” or “Idol” to butcher. JON CARAMANICA
For link to NYT article, CLICK HERE