In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
Ariana Grande was just 25 years old when she landed her first #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, but she was no ingenue. She was a show-business survivor in many different ways, some of them quite literal. At that point, Grande had already released four albums and sent 10 singles into the top 10. She’d been through multiple career stages — child Broadway star, kids’-TV sitcom fixture, sunny-frothy R&B diva, robotic dance-pop hitmaker, femme fatale, game sketch-comedy joker, center of public fascination. If anything, Grande came off as the kind of old-school, focus-grouped teen-pop star whose place in the zeitgeist was diminishing. She was a creature of the song machine, and that was a liability in a world that moved at the speed of the internet. Grande could crank out hit after hit, and a lot of her singles were truly great, but none of them quite had enough juice to take her all the way to #1. That changed when Grande seized the means of production and made a song that cannily commented on all the conversation that surrounded her.
If any colleges ever offer degrees in pop stardom — don’t count that possibility out — then “thank u, next” should be the focus of countless term papers. It’s a textbook example of how a star can work the pop and pop-culture machines to her advantage, grabbing control of her own narrative and scoring her biggest-ever hit in the process. In fall 2018, Grande was one of the best pop stars that we had, and she put everything that she learned — poise, pettiness, slick vocals, sleek hooks, the illusion of effortlessness — into one song that was carefully engineered to sound as casual and tossed-off as possible. You couldn’t make a song like “thank u, next” if you hadn’t spent much of your life inside the song factory, but the track itself almost exists as a rebuke to that machinery, a signal of a new thing that was still coming into being.
Before Ariana Grande released “thank u, next,” she found herself in a strange position. She was out promoting a very good album, one that had already spawned multiple hits and moved her image into its next stage. But that album was all about overcoming terrible adversity and finding love on the other side. Shortly after its release, it was out of date. Grande was in the midst of a series of interlocking personal crises, and her situation was incompatible with the long rollouts that an A-list pop record traditionally demands. So Grande instead dropped a surprise event-song that resonated like a rapper’s diss track, even if it didn’t include any actual rapping or dissing — not overtly, anyway. Her timing was perfect. Suddenly, Grande was a pop titan rather than a mere star.
In some ways, “thank u, next” was the culmination of at least a decade of hard work. Ariana Grande started chasing stardom when she was very, very young, and she was such a gifted and charismatic kid that doors just opened up for her, as if by magic. Ariana Grande-Butera grew up in a well-off Italian-American family in Boca Raton, Florida. (When Grande was born, the #1 song in America was Janet Jackson’s “That’s The Way Love Goes,” which feels appropriate.) Grande’s father was a graphic designer, and her mother ran a company that she inherited from her own parents. It’s something about communications systems for boats? I don’t know. Grande’s parents had roots in Brooklyn, but they moved to Boca Raton because her grandparents retired there. Her parents broke up when she was a kid; she was already singing and acting by then.
As a little kid, Ariana Grande played roles in kids’ musicals in South Florida, and she sang on cruise ships. When she was eight, she sang the National Anthem before an NHL game. Grande has long insisted that her parents are not stereotypical stage parents, and that seems to be true. But they were still down to support her dreams of stardom, which is something that most talented kids cannot say. When Grande was 14, her mother took her to Los Angeles to meet with managers. Soon afterward, she got a part in 13, a Broadway musical with a cast composed entirely of teenagers. Up until this moment, I assumed that the stage show was an adaptation of Thirteen, the Evan Rachel Wood kids-out-of-control movie. I don’t know why I thought that. It turns out that 13 was way more innocent and cutesy than what I’d imagined. It’s about some kid’s bar mitzvah, and Grande wasn’t the lead. Still, it was a big opportunity for her, and it led directly to her next break.
13 ran on Broadway for a few months, and then Grande and her castmate Elizabeth Gillies flew to Los Angeles to audition for Victorious, a Nickelodeon sitcom about kids at a performing-arts school in Hollywood — a perfect vehicle for a theater kid like Grande. She and Gillies were both cast on the show, which debuted in 2010. (Grande and Gillies are still close; they make goofy Halloween videos every year.) I have never watched Victorious because I am an adult, but my understanding is that Grande’s character Cat Valentine was a lovably daffy scene-stealer type. The show was mostly conceived as a star vehicle for Grande’s fellow young singer and actor Victoria Justice. (Justice’s highest-charting single is 2010’s “Freak The Freak Out,” which came from the Victorious soundtrack and peaked at #50.) Grande didn’t get to do that much singing on the show, but she got a few chances, and she made the most of those moments.
Victorious was one of the creations of Dan Schneider, the now-notorious Nickelodeon impresario whose creepy-ass behavior toward child actors was the subject of the 2024 documentary series Quiet On The Set. Victorious had a four-season run, and it was canceled in 2012. After that, Ariana Grande was cast as one of the leads in the spin-off sitcom Sam & Cat, which lasted another season. Grande has never said anything specific about the fucked-up things that may or may not have happened during the production of those two shows, though she has repeatedly said that it’s important for show-business kids to have mandatory therapy in their contracts. It’s hard to believe that her time on Nickelodeon was a wholesome experience. In 2022, Grande’s Sam & Cat co-star Jennette McCurdy published the bestselling memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, all about her own traumatic experiences as a show-business kid. As it currently stands, the child-actor system should probably be illegal. Instead, it seems to be where we get most of our pop stars these days, Ariana Grande very much included.
Grande started making serious attempts to break into pop music while she was still on Nickelodeon. She would post cover songs on YouTube, and she’d go back and forth between singing and acting on weekends, dying her hair red to play Cat Valentine and then brown again for pop-music purposes. At some point, she signed on with mega-powerful Justin Bieber manager Scooter Braun and got a deal with Republic. In 2011, Grande released her debut single “Pull Your Hearts Up,” a pretty-bad pop song that was written by Boys Like Girls member Martin Johnson and interpolated the “hey-yay-yay” bit from 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up.” “Put Your Hearts Up” is basically sub-Kesha early-’10s teen-pop, and it never charted, though it went gold on curiosity factor after Grande got famous. In any case, Ariana Grande didn’t really want to make songs like “Put Your Hearts Up.” Instead, she wanted to be an R&B singer.
This was a strange ambition for a white teenager to have in the early ’10s. At that point, R&B had largely faded from mainstream pop, though it had some cool-kid appeal as acts like the Weeknd and Frank Ocean were on the rise. But Grande wasn’t trying to make that kind of R&B. Instead, she was interested in the kind of fluttery, starry-eyed pop-R&B that Mariah Carey made in the ’90s. Show tunes and Mariah Carey hits are pretty much Grande’s twin north stars. She’s got the same gift for pillowy melisma that Carey always had, and she knew how to show off her range without burying a song’s hook. Grande kept recording for a couple more years, appearing on fellow Nickelodeon kids’ records and appearing on a remix of the UK singer MIKA’s “Popular Song,” which notably sampled “Popular,” from the big Broadway hit Wicked. (That “Popular Song” remix peaked at #87. Last year, Grande’s version of “Popular” peaked at #53, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)
In 2013, Ariana Grande found her sound and scored her breakthrough. “The Way” is about as shimmery and bubbly as an R&B song can possibly be. The track, built on the same sample that Big Pun used on “Still Not A Player,” was originally written for the onetime American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, who co-wrote it, and Grande recorded it with the doofy young white rapper Mac Miller. The video has a loopy, childish charm, and you can already see sparks between Grande and Miller, though they wouldn’t become a couple until years later. The song got a big record-label push, and it took off, peaking at #9. (It’s a 7. Mac Miller’s highest-charting lead-artist single is the posthumous 2020 track “Good News,” which peaked at #17.)
When she recorded her debut album Yours Truly, Ariana Grande worked with R&B veterans like Babyface and younger songwriters like Victoria Monét, the Atlanta-born artist who would become arguably Grande’s most crucial collaborator. (Monét is now a star in her own right; her highest-charting single is “On My Mama,” which peaked at #33 in 2023.) Yours Truly built on the sound of “The Way.” It went platinum and turned Grande into a real-deal pop star. The LP debuted at #1, and a few of its follow-up singles reached the Hot 100. One of those songs was “Right There,” a team-up with the Detroit rapper Big Sean, which peaked at #84. For a little while, Grande and Sean were an item. (Big Sean’s highest-charting lead-artist single, 2012’s “Bounce Back,” peaked at #6. It’s a 6.)
After the success of Yours Truly, Republic put more of its muscle behind Ariana Grande. On her 2014 album My Everything, Grande worked with Max Martin, the biggest pop producer of that time or any other, as well as plenty of other boldface-name talent — Zedd, the Weeknd, Childish Gambino. She moved away from the throwbacky R&B of Yours Truly without fully leaving it behind, and she pulled in more flourishes of candy-colored EDM and pop-rap. My Everything was packaged as a ready-made blockbuster, and that’s what it became, even if it didn’t quite send any songs to #1. Lead single “Problem” had everything that a big pop single of that moment could’ve possibly needed — an exuberantly committed vocal, Max Martin hooks, one of those honking horn-loops that was so popular at the time, an uncredited Big Sean whisper-chanting on the hook, a guest-verse from the blowing-up Iggy Azalea. It’s also a really great song. But “Problem” got stuck at #2 behind “Fancy,” that summer’s other big Iggy Azalea track. (It’s a 9.)
Even without a #1 hit, My Everything cemented Grande’s superstar status. If you play it today, it sounds like a ready-made greatest hits album. Four of that album’s singles made it to the top 10. A fifth, the absolutely masterful “One Last Time,” got stuck at #13, but it’s one of Grande’s most-streamed songs today. It might also be my favorite Ariana Grande track. Grande toured arenas for the first time behind My Everything, and the album went quadruple platinum. She dipped her toe back into acting in 2015, doing a brief arc on the Fox kitsch-horror show Scream Queens, but that was just a side gig. At that point, she was a full-time pop star, famous among people like me who’d never seen any of those Nickelodeon shows. I remember being at Coachella in 2015 and realizing that the kids there would’ve been way more into an Ariana Grande headlining set than the guitar-centric acts like Jack White and AC/DC who were actually there. Sure enough, Grande would headline the fest a few years later.
While the My Everything album cycle wound down, Grande had her first real public controversy, and it was the dumbest, silliest shit. In 2015, TMZ posted footage of Grande and her then-boyfriend, the backup dancer Ricky Alvarez, in a donut shop in LA. While they waited in line, Grande picked up a couple of donuts, licked them, put them back, and said that she fucking hates America. From where I’m sitting, that’s A-plus pop-star weirdo behavior, but Grande had to apologize on TV multiple times, the way K-pop idols have to do for every little infraction today. Around the same time, Grande released what was supposed to be the lead single from her next album, but the song didn’t resonate the way she wanted, and it became one of those orphan singles that never goes anywhere. That happens all the time with pop stars, but the difference this time is that the song in question, “Focus,” was a pretty big hit. Grande had reached the point where she could just pretend like a song never happened after it peaked at #7. (It’s a 7.)
Grande faced some growing pains on her next album, 2016’s Dangerous Woman. It happens. She’d reached the point where former child stars have to prove that they’re grown-ups, and she attempted that task through the clashing signifiers of relatively explicit sexiness and stormy torch-song balladry. But she was still working with trusted collaborators like Max Martin and Victoria Monét, and the result still turned out better than one might expect. Dangerous Woman went double-platinum, and it sent a couple of singles into the top 10. The biggest one surged late in the album cycle. “Side To Side” was one of Grande’s tracks with frequent collaborator and future Number Ones artist Nicki Minaj, and it’s a robotic pop-reggae thing about having the kind of sex that leaves you walking funny the next day. Pretty fun! (It’s an 8.) While promoting the record, Grande hosted Saturday Night Live, and she was great at it. Her latent screen-comedian side, forged in the fires of Nickelodeon sitcoms, was still there, waiting for its moment.
Something terrible happened while Ariana Grande toured behind Dangerous Woman. In 2017, a suicide bomber attacked an Ariana Grande show in Manchester, killing 22 people and injuring hundreds. Grande might’ve been trying to make adult music in that moment, but her fanbase was still dominated by little girls. The shrapnel-bomb went off in an area outside the arena, where parents were picking up their kids after the show. The youngest victim was eight years old. It was horrifying. I can’t imagine what that was like for Grande, but she really showed up in the aftermath. Just a couple of weeks after the bombing, Grande was back onstage in Manchester, playing a massive televised benefit to raise money for the victims’ families. The world watched as she performed through tears, singing Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back In Anger” with Coldplay and Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” with Miley Cyrus. I don’t know how a celebrity is supposed to behave under those circumstances. There’s no owner’s manual for that kind of thing. But I don’t think anyone could’ve handled it better than she did.
It feels ghoulish to talk about the effect that the Manchester bombing could have on something as grand-scale unimportant as a pop star’s career path, but we’re all ghouls here, so let’s do it anyway. Grande looked different after Manchester. That experience, not the latex S&M masks, is what made her look like a grown-up. For a while, Grande was on the all-star benefit circuit. I first saw her live later in 2017 after right-wing terrorists ran wild in Charlottesville, the city where I live. She played a big show that the Dave Matthews Band set up at the local college football stadium, and she only sang a few songs, but I thought those few songs were great.
Through all that, Grande was in what appeared to be a loving, mutually supportive relationship with Mac Miller, the guy who rapped on her first hit single. Miller, like Grande, had grown up in public, and he’d earned a measure of critical respect. He’d started out as a blog-hyped frat-rap goofball, but he’d evolved into a fascinating sonic explorer who got playfully experimental with his own production and who rapped about his own issues with disarming forthrightness. They were an adorable couple. When Grande sang on Miller’s 2016 single “My Favorite Part,” the song didn’t crack the Hot 100, but it was a worthy entry into the young-celebrities-in-love canon.
With all that in mind, it was pretty shocking when Grande broke up with Mac Miller and then almost immediately got engaged to stoner comedian and Saturday Night Live cast member Pete Davidson. Those two became an immediate online fascination. This was the signal event that turned Davidson into someone who was famous less for his comedy and more for his track record of dating women who should be way, way out of his league. The term “big dick energy” went into widespread use because of a tweet that attempted to describe why Grande might be attracted to Davidson. Also, they adopted a pig together? I wonder what happened to that pig.
The relationship stuff was all strictly sideshow for an artist as career-minded as Ariana Grande. The music was still the big thing. Grande signaled the beginning of her next album cycle when she released “No Tears Left To Cry,” a swirling, dramatic dance-pop anthem about heartbreak, with the obvious subtext of the Manchester bombing looming in the background. “No Tears Left To Cry” pulled off an impossible task: it allowed Grande to get back into the business of making fun pop music. It’s also a great song. (“No Tears Left To Cry” peaked at #3. It’s a 9, and a couple of my Stereogum co-workers are annoyed with me for not dropping the full 10 on it.)
“No Tears Left To Cry” came out in April 2018, and Grande followed it with the full-length Sweetener in August. That album kicks ass. Former Number Ones artist Pharrell Williams produced much of Sweetener, and it’s the funkiest and most playful thing that Grande made to that point. She shows breezy, lighthearted charm all over the record; it’s the work of a pop star with nothing left to prove. Sweetener depicts Grande as someone who’s made it through tragedy and found new love, and its rollout was impeccable. The LP’s second single, the Max Martin production “God Is A Woman,” reached #8. (It’s a 7.) But almost immediately after the album came out, real-life events intruded.
In September 2018, Mac Miller died of a drug overdose. He was 26. Grande was devastated. Online, some of the most ghoulish ghouls out there — ghouls way more ghoulish than any of the ghouls reading or writing this column — blamed Miller’s death on Grande, based on the ridiculously flawed idea that Miller was only getting high because he wanted to get over Grande. Republic ceased promotion of her next single, which unfortunately happened to be called “Breathin.” (It still peaked at #12.) Once again, Grande was made to mourn in public. She put out a statement saying that Miller was her “dearest friend,” and she broke things off with Pete Davidson soon afterward. And still, she had to go out and promote an album that had a track literally called “Pete Davidson.” This was not ideal.
So Ariana Grande made a new song, and she used that new song to talk about the four ex-boyfriends mentioned earlier in this column. The circumstances of Grande’s “thank u, next” release might as well be part of the song’s text. When Grande’s breakup with Pete Davidson made the news, a new season of Saturday Night Live was getting going, and Davidson was still in the cast. Doing the promo bits for a November 2018 SNL episode, Davidson joke-proposed to Maggie Rogers, that week’s musical guest. (Rogers’ only Hot 100 lead-artist hit is 2019’s “Love You For A Long Time,” which peaked at #45.) A pissed-off Grande tweeted and deleted this message: “for somebody who claims to hate relevancy you sure love clinging to it huh.” She followed it with the phrase “thank u, next.” (The widespread convention of all-lowercase song titles already existed, but it really picked up steam around this time. I won’t generally honor that choice in this column, but the lowercase letters feel weirdly crucial in this case.)
Actually, Ariana Grande was already working on her song “thank u, next” when she and Pete Davidson were together. The track went through a bunch of different lyrical drafts, and it emerged out of the same song-factory process as most of Grande’s hits. In this case, though, most of Grande’s collaborators were her best friends. There are eight credited songwriters on “thank u, next,” and it’s a fully functional production, full of hooks and precise lyrical phrases and subliminal ear-candy effects. But it also comes off as a casual, conversational unburdening, as if it’s a late-night studio-session product that Grande decided to throw onto the internet the moment that it was done. That’s its magic — the shine of the pop machine, the immediacy of social media.
Grande talked about that process in a Billboard cover story after “thank u, next” reached #1: “My dream has always been to be — obviously not a rapper, but, like, to put out music in the way that a rapper does… Bruh, I just want to fucking talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do. Why do they get to make records like that and I don’t?” When “thank u, next” came out, it didn’t have the anticipation-stoking rollout that so many big-deal pop singles get these days. Instead, it came off as real-time commentary. The song appeared online at 11 p.m. one night, just half an hour before Saturday Night Live hit the airwaves. Grande knew that Pete Davidson would tell breakup jokes, so she made sure to get hers in first.
“thank u, next” didn’t come into being when Grande woke up one morning and decided that she wanted to call out all her exes. Instead, the track started with Tommy Brown, a Pittsburgh-born producer who sometimes goes by the name TBHits. (Every time I see that nickname, I think that “TBHits” could’ve been the name of this column. Also, I really fucked up when I was six and decided that I wanted to be “Tom” and not “Tommy.” “Tommy Breihan” was a much cooler name; my whole life could’ve turned out different. Too late now.) Brown got his start as a producer for rappers like Meek Mill and T.I., and he started regularly collaborating with Ariana Grande from her debut album on. Brown made a lot of songs with Grande, but those tracks almost never became singles. For a while, Brown was in a couple with Victoria Monét, another regular Grande collaborator.
One day, Tommy Brown was in a songwriting session with Social House, a duo from Pittsburgh who wrote and produced songs for other artists and who sometimes made their own fluffy pop-rap confections. These days, we can accurately describe Social House as one-hit wonders, since Ariana Grande appeared on their 2019 single “Boyfriend” and helped it reach #8. (It’s a 6.) When that song was out, I took my 10-year-old daughter to her first concert, an Ariana Grande arena show. Social House were the openers, so they’re technically the first act that my kid ever saw live. She doesn’t really remember them, though. In that studio session, one Social House guy played a watery three-chord keyboard loop, and Brown liked it. The three of them turned it into an airy, catchy beat, and they brought it to a songwriting session with Ariana Grande and her close-friend collaborators Victoria Monét and Tayla Parx.
Like the aforementioned Monét, Parx is a singer and an aspiring star in her own right. Monét’s career has taken off in recent years, but it was in limbo for a long time. Parx still has yet to make a real hit of her own. Monét and Parx are both Black women, while Ariana Grande is a white woman who knows how to sing R&B. There’s something a little ooky about Grande becoming a gigantic star while her co-writers were stuck at the starting line, even if it’s a tale as old as time. Back then, people would sometimes call Grande out for adapting a blaccent, doing rap ad-libs, or going around with a tan so deep that lots of people didn’t know she was white. My friend just sent me a funny TikTok, from earlier this year, where a teacher told her disappointed students, “Ariana Grande is just white. You can’t pick her for Black history Month.” These days, Grande’s speaking voice is completely different, and she says it’s because she had to change it for her role in Wicked. Maybe she’s just one of those social chameleons who naturally adapt to their surroundings. It’s pretty weird! But that’s pop music for you. The racial dynamics at work in so much of Ariana Grande’s music have never ruined that music for me, but they must be acknowledged.
Tommy Brown has taken credit for the “thank u, next” title; he says he heard a cashier say it at Home Depot. Grande has said that it’s an expression that she sometimes used with Monét and Parx. Maybe they’re both right. Maybe the phrase came up in a songwriting session and then entered their conversational lexicon. The three producers and the three songwriters worked on the track together at a studio across the street from the New York apartment where Grande was living. Two more songwriters — Chicago-born Njomza Vitia, who goes professionally by her first name, and LA-based song doctor Kimberly “Kaydence” Krysiuk, both have credits on “thank u, next” so they must’ve taken passes at it along the way. The track went through multiple drafts and revisions, and there was lots of conversation about whether Grande should include her exes’ actual names. She wasn’t sure where things were going with Pete Davidson at the time, so she recorded multiple versions with multiple possible outcomes. Somewhere, there’s a version of “thank u, next” about being happily married to Davidson — an alternate-reality artifact that exists in our world, even if we’ll never hear it.
The final version of “thank u, next” is a masterful piece of pop-culture myth-maintenance that also works as a great song. Musically, it’s light and playful, with keyboard hooks and basslines and drum tracks elegantly layered in ways that never sound too complicated. Grande’s voice has that butterfly quality. It floats in mid-air, but it doesn’t exactly glide, and you can hear all the work that she’s doing when you listen closely enough. She regularly pulls off so many showy vocal tricks that she sometimes swallows her words, which isn’t a problem when she’s singing broken-English Max Martin lyrics. But for “thank u, next” Grande manages to enunciate without losing all her stylistic tics. The lyrics on this one are important, and they hit their targets.
Pop stars have been commenting on their public lives and personas since the very beginning of pop stardom. It’s a requirement for the job. When you’re getting into and out of high-profile relationships, you have to acknowledge them in your music, even if you do it obliquely. There are ways to do that. Taylor Swift famously never mentions her exes by name, even though her fans can almost always figure out exactly what she’s talking about. Grande could’ve gone in that direction with “thank u, next,” but instead she goes straight to the specifics: “Thought I’d end up with Sean, but he wasn’t a match/ Wrote some songs about Ricky, now I listen and laugh.” It’s like the moment in a rap feud where the shots stop being subliminal and the haymakers really start flying. I love that moment. I loved it here, too, even if Grande didn’t go straight for the jugular.
In that “thank u, next” opening verse, Ariana Grande proclaims herself “thankful” for Pete Davidson, and she describes Mac Miller as “an angel.” The song’s message is straightforward enough: Grande learned valuable life lessons from all these relationships, but they did not define her. She’s her own person, and she’s growing. On the second verse, Grande sings that she’s “met someone else” and that her new relationship is coming together beautifully: “I know they say I move on too fast, but this one gon’ last/ ‘Cause her name is Ari, and I’m so good with that” — a therapy breakthrough in pop-song form. But even if the text is warm and generous and full of gratitude, the pettiness still finds its way in.
Consider the hook: “One taught me love, one taught me patience, and one taught me pain.” She doesn’t say which is which, which makes a funny line funnier. The best part is “patience.” If I’d ever dated Ariana Grande, I would lose sleep worrying that I was the one who taught her patience. I love the understated sass in the chanted song title. It’s a nice little way for her to say that she is fully done with these people. She doesn’t necessarily want to go full Kendrick on them, but they are no longer useful. Their function is complete. Now, Grande can continue on her journey to fulfillment, and even if she doesn’t get there, “least this song is a smash.”
In a lot of ways, “thank u, next” is understated. It doesn’t have big beat-drops or belt-it-out notes. It slides so gracefully that the passive-aggressive bits don’t necessarily register at first, which makes them burn so much harder on repeated listens. Grande was already the focus of a whole lot of public attention before “thank u, next.” By releasing the song when she did, she made an internet water-cooler moment for herself. The song was good enough to withstand the attention, and its breezy bump kept it in rotation after the novelty faded. I’m sure that plenty of people who don’t follow Ariana Grande’s dating life were able to enjoy “thank u, next,” but I have never met any of these people, so I couldn’t say for certain.
When “thank u, next” came out, it did huge streaming numbers, and that’s what easily pushed it to #1. Radio caught up, and the song lingered for a long time. The music video arrived a few weeks after the track came out, and that probably earned a few extra weeks at #1. Working with director Hannah Lux Davis, Grande restaged scenes from the teenage comedies and rom-coms that she loved: Mean Girls, Bring It On, Legally Blonde, 13 Going On 30. A bunch of Grande’s old Victorious castmates make cameos, as does Grande’s friend Troye Sivan. (Sivan’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit, 2015’s “Youth,” peaked at #23.) Victoria Monét and Tayla Parx play cheerleaders in the Bring It On part. Kris Jenner does the Amy Poehler cool-mom bit from Mean Girls, which is kind of funny. Some of the actors from the real movies show up, too. Jennifer Coolidge has said that her White Lotus comeback really started when Grande brought her in for an encore of the Legally Blonde salon scenes.
The whole extended “thank u, next” moment was a lot of fun, and it led to Ariana Grande doing exactly what she said she wanted to do. She released music just like these boys. A few months after Sweetener, she dropped a whole other album called thank u, next. There’s no shared consensus on Ariana Grande’s best album, but that one is my favorite. Once Grande had her first #1 hit, she did not have to wait long for her second, or her third, or her fourth. Since “thank u, next,” Grande has become the kind of star who can seemingly will her way to #1 whenever she wants, or who can take another artist’s song to the top by showing up on a remix. We’ll see a lot more of her in this column.
GRADE: 9/10
BONUS BEATS: The 1975 leader Matty Healy has a few famous exes of his own, so maybe that’s why that band decided to do a weirdly jazzy take on “thank u, next” with a bunch of gospel-style backup singers in a 2018 visit to the BBC Live Lounge. Here it is:
(The 1975’s highest-charting Hot 100 single, 2013’s “Chocolate,” peaked at #80.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Every year, the Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche picks a pop song to cover during the holidays, and then he sends it right over to Stereogum. It’s a really nice annual tradition for us. In 2018, Lerche did “thank u, next,” and he sang the song mostly in Norwegian. Here’s his version:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I’m so fucking grateful for the check. Buy it here.
