Micha Frazer-Carroll on Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next

Ariana Grande is 5ft tall – but I felt smaller than that as I wept over the digitised hot-pink ransom note delivered to my phone that November evening. Was this some kind of sick joke?

No – while Grande’s scrapbooked cover artwork for her new single was an homage to Mean Girls rather than to kidnap, some crucial part of my adult capacity to control my emotions was indeed held hostage. When I say I cried over Thank U, Next I mean in my bed that night; but I also had a little cry on the tube, a blurry-eyed moment in a toilet cubicle at work, and let a noble solitary tear slip off my waterline about 20 minutes later at my desk. I was a repeat button possessed.

The song soared above the record for reaching 100 million plays on Spotify, and while I account for about half of those, the song was earth-shatteringly popular. But why did the single quietly, but surely, shake the table – what built its success?

A string of pearls and slicked-back baby hairs, on the surface Grande’s your average teen icon, but in actuality she’s cracked disparate markets, mainstream and marginalised. The 25-year-old has prodded at gay icon status by speaking up on LGBT+ issues – on Saturdays you’ll guaranteed to hear Grande-esque digital boops running under the noise in sticky Dalston queer bars. Her just and genuine response after being flung into the centre of the Manchester tragedy also cemented an emotional tie with Britain.

Like everyone else, indie-inclined men also listen to her. Sweetener was well-reviewed by Pitchfork, NME, Rolling Stone and the New York Times, and more often than not it was male critics sitting on the bylines, nodding in approval. Simultaneously, her upside-down sleek white ponytail was blown up on vinyl sleeves, and people began talking of her “body of work”, a descriptor rarely afforded to young women in pop. For aficionados, Grande is finally, officially “good music” (although if you’re quiet enough, you can still detect the preface of a silent “actually”). Supporting too are feminists invested in the praxis of pop music, the kind who read Foucault into Janelle Monaé. As an artist, she’s competed, and won, in every event at sports day; people are on her side.

The general public have followed her lower points, too – after Manchester she spoke of her PTSD, saying: “I don’t think I’ll ever know how to talk about it and not cry”, and the incident at Aretha Franklin’s funeral piled on the live-broadcast trauma. When her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller died – a wound of life-changing proportions that sparked her subsequent break-up – Thank U, Next was born. Read widely as a new type of break-up song – for me, it was instead a song about trauma. We saw her processing in real time – a lone diary entry via synths and Spotify.

In inspecting the song’s success, memes are both a product and a proponent – the hook “one taught me love, one taught me patience, one taught me pain”, charting her three major romances, did the rounds on Twitter as a joke format. Meanwhile, no one dared mock the gently clumsy half-rhyme that follows: “Now I’m so amazing”, which sets out the song’s message: stepping away and prizing yourself when you’re in too much pain to proceed with your circumstances. À la Lemonade, the fandom was polishing up its baseball bats and ready for an angry break-up hit. But it wasn’t about that – this song was the love note that set the tone for a quieter type of processing.

Like most women I know, I have survived things. I share that information selectively, a privilege Grande never had. We’re living through a time where discussions around trauma are louder than ever – scripts are shifting seismically around sexual violence, but other traumas too. Among this, Grande has become a public face for hurting deeply and bobbing back to the surface: “How she handles pain, that shit’s amazing.”

I wouldn’t call myself an “Arianator”, but like everyone else, I felt for, and fell for the song. Following her story from a distance, I very sincerely hoped that she was OK. Not as a fangirl, just as a woman who has also survived. When I say I wept it’s part joke, but beneath the surface it’s also because when I allow myself to think about it, sometimes I wonder whether I still might break; if I’m hurt one more time, how will I handle it? Can I handle it?

As I want for Ariana, I want for myself to be OK. Lucky for me, there’s some strange magic in this blurry, lo-fi, grown-up lullaby that tells me I will be – I can be.