Loading summary
Transcript112 lines
- [00:02]
Pepsi Advertiser
Late night bites with friends already hard to beat that first too hot bite of fries you couldn't wait for, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Now that hits different. Suddenly, the energy kicks back in, the night goes longer and the laughs don't stop because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi, zero sugar. Today,
- [00:29]
Campside Media Announcer
Campside Media.
- [00:34]
Natalie Robomed
From sony music entertainment and campside media, this is infamous. I'm natalie robomed.
- [00:39]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
And I'm vanessa grigoriadis.
- [00:45]
Natalie Robomed
So you might have heard that last week pop star Ariana Grande announced she was taking a step back from the public eye following persistent scrutiny about her weight.
- [00:55]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Now, Ariana Grande has long been known as a perfectionist. Republic Records Monte Lippman, who signed her when she was still a Nickelodeon star in her teens, though he was very intrigued by her YouTube videos of singing Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. He once said, the one thing I'll say to her every now and again is Ari, perfect is not always about being perfect. It's those flaws that people can relate to. Now, no one outside Ariana Grande's personal circle knows the reason, if any, that she appears to have lost weight. As CNN said, her health is private, but we do see her image everywhere. And the space between these two premises is filled with speculation and arguments about whether it's right or wrong to speculate.
- [01:43]
Natalie Robomed
That complexity is on full display in her most recent album, Petal, particularly in the new video for the single Petal, which you may have seen. It shows Ariana Grande in, in this 1950s dress, repeatedly auditioning for a role at a company called, quote, Fame, Inc. And in the video, as she's auditioning, Ariana is critiqued by a panel of men who tell her that she is, quote, unattractive, inauthentic, could stand to lose a few pounds, and that they miss the old her. Until Ariana finally takes a chainsaw to the old man criticizing her. And in the lyrics, she defiantly sings, I don't need someone to save me because this music and I will never die. This episode, we're going to take a look at Ariana Grande and her career. How she went from Nickelodeon star to surviving a suicide bombing at one of her concerts to helming the wicked blockbusters. We're also going to, ever so delicately, because we know this is a sensitive matter, get into the speculation around her weight, what that conversation tells us about culture right now and how we treat female celebrities in general.
- [02:50]
Campside Media Announcer
Maybe when I was younger and it was like sort of during my first few years As a pop star, I really struggled with boundaries and not being able to say no when I needed to.
- [03:03]
Natalie Robomed
This week we're talking to Britney Spanos, the amazing writer of the substack Brit pop. She came on to talk about Taylor Swift a while ago and we're so very happy to have her back. Britney, welcome to Infamous again.
- [03:15]
Britney Spanos
Thank you for having me.
- [03:17]
Natalie Robomed
Okay, so let's talk about this new album and this new video. As a longtime Ariana Grande watcher, what did you make of it?
- [03:26]
Britney Spanos
Yeah, I mean, you know, there seems to be something that's happening with both Petal and Eternal Sunshine where it feels like she is very much responding to her audience or responding to the public at large versus something more, you know, interpersonal matter of like a relationship, a Thank U Next style of an album. And it's a very new mode for her. You know, this isn't something that she had typically done in her previous albums. They really seem to reflect the romantic dramas in her life. Positions was about her new marriage and Sweetener followed the relationship as she was getting in with Pete Davidson. And then Thank U Next was a response to the breakup of it. You know, her albums typically were channeling and responding to the romance in her life. And both Petal and Eternal Sunshine, which preceded Petal is so much about the public and how they're responding to her body, her audience. It seems like she's even taking a lot of aim at her fans in the songs.
- [04:26]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
And of course you've written about her fans.
- [04:28]
Britney Spanos
Yeah, I mean, hate that. I made you love me is the first single and a lot of fans immediately responded to it as if this song is very much taking critique of the parasocial relationship that they have with her and the type of very in depth speculations that happen around her, around every aspect of her life. And in the age of social media, more so than ever, the fans are kind of picking apart every single detail of how they're presenting themselves, what their lives look like, what they look like. So many people took that as not a breakup song or a song about a guy or a crush or anything like that. It felt like it was a very much a song about this push and pull between her and her fandom.
- [05:11]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
So who are her fans? Like, how would you demographically or psychographically characterize them?
- [05:17]
Britney Spanos
There's obviously a large, and still is a very large amount of her fandom that is very young girls. Right. She was a teenager when she came onto the scene and she was starting off her career with this very like bubbly pop Music. But I think as she's gotten older, her fandom has very much expanded in a lot of ways, I think through Wicked and also through the growth of her music, moving into more of an R and sound increasingly. So. Over the course of her last few
- [05:42]
Natalie Robomed
albums, she sold over 90 million records. She's got 50 billion streams, and she's got a couple of Grammys.
- [05:48]
Britney Spanos
What are you talking about?
- [05:49]
Natalie Robomed
Yeah, with the acting, latest films just gone past 700 mil.
- [05:53]
Britney Spanos
What?
- [05:53]
Natalie Robomed
She happens to be the seventh most followed person on Instagram with 700 or, sorry, 376 million followers. And she's got a cosmetic line and fragrance line that's earned just over a billion.
- [06:03]
Britney Spanos
She also has a very large gay fandom. She's very big in the LGBTQ community. That's through a lot of her activism. But she's also one of the. The modern pop divas, in the style of many of her heroes, of course.
- [06:15]
Natalie Robomed
I mean, it's very interesting that, as you say, on the. On the last two albums, both this Petal and Eternal Sunshine, which was her previous album, there is this breaking of the fourth wall and the engaging with the fans directly, it seems. And what you said earlier about this kind of tension of her appearance and having to be everywhere and how people relate to it, I mean, it actually makes me think of Charlie xcx on her most recent album, the COVID of it decided to put three men who aren't her on it. And she's talked about wanting to break away from the pressure of having to be on the COVID of every album as a female pop star. And, I mean, I think in the pedal video, like, we really see Ariana kind of breaking down in some ways, the Persona she has built for herself. Like, as I said, she takes a chainsaw to these men that are critiquing her, and then she ends. Ends the video by being covered in blood, just all over, dripping over her perfect little eyelashes and her face and just all over her gown.
- [07:13]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Yeah. And, I mean, there was somebody who wrote about Petal the title as well. Right. This isn't saying I'm a rose in the concrete. This is saying, like, I'm a petal. I, you know, maybe fall off, I wither, I die. You know, it's very heavy stuff. I mean, I find the album to be quite heavy. I mean, what do you think, Brittany?
- [07:32]
Britney Spanos
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a kind of looming darkness, I guess, in the sound of her music that has really come through. I found, you know, Positions didn't really have it as Much. But it has come through since Think Ux. There's been obviously a very intense series of traumas that she has dealt with. Of course, Think U Next followed the Manchester bombing. It followed the death of Mac Miller, her ex boyfriend. It seems like she's trying to push out the baddie Ariana. You know, that sort of made her famous and made her such a big pop star, made her much more than just a former child star into a pop star. Right. Was that kind of like bad bitch music that she was sort of emulating and increasingly making a part of her sound in her image at that time. But, you know, it feels like she's trying to poke it through, but it almost doesn't feel like it delivers all the way because there is such a kind of heaviness that kind of also comes through at different points throughout the album.
- [08:25]
Natalie Robomed
I mean, these kind of hints of darkness that seem to be poking through is very interesting because that. That's not at all how I conceived of Ariana, thinking of her as a Nickelodeon star. But when we were doing research for this episode, I went back and found a Billboard cover story about her. And it talks about her childhood growing up as a quote, very weird little girl in Boca Raton, Florida. And I mean, she said to the journalist, I always wanted to have skeleton face paint on or be wearing a Freddy Krueger mask. And I would carry a hockey stick around. I was like a mini Helena Bonham Carter. And she says, for my fifth birthday party, we had a Jaws theme and all my friends left crying. I mean, I still am that way, but when I was little, it was more concerning. There was a stage when I was three or four where my parents thought I might grow up to be a serial killer.
- [09:13]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
And okay, I do want to just say one thing, which is the writer, who is Lizzie Goodman. The next line she puts in is, instead, Grande embarked on a show tunes inspired career, which I was like, okay, Lizzie, that's like a little bit of shade there. You know, you can see. I mean, we've probably all three of us had this experience. You go interview somebody very young and they are telling you, like, what a weirdo they are.
- [09:40]
Britney Spanos
Yes. Yeah.
- [09:42]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
And then you're like, but the other side is theater kid. Okay, was that fun to be a little kid?
- [09:47]
Campside Media Announcer
And Annie.
- [09:48]
Britney Spanos
It was fun to be a little kid.
- [09:50]
Campside Media Announcer
And Annie, what a part, what a big part.
- [09:53]
Natalie Robomed
She, as I said, grew up in Florida and her parents divorced when she was 8. And that seems to have had a real impact on her. Where did she go from There, you
- [10:03]
Britney Spanos
know, she obviously started with Broadway, was the first step that she took. I think also people kind of forget that the timeline was that she did Broadway even before she was on Nickelodeon. And so in 2008, she made her debut in 13 on Broadway, and then almost immediately after that, moved to Nickelodeon at a time that was obviously a big moment still for Nickelodeon. She was on Victorious and then on the show Sam and Cat. That was still very much a star making vehicle at that time. That was the tail end of the kind of Disney, Nickelodeon era of creating actually very viable stars. This is a time when Zendaya had her own show on Disney and there were, you know, kind of the post Miley Selena Demme era. But this was a point when she could still very much become a household name from being in a children's show.
- [10:51]
Campside Media Announcer
Yeah.
- [10:51]
Natalie Robomed
And Victorious, we should say, was produced by a man called Dan Schneider, who would eventually become the subject of the documentary choir on Set, which exposed the dark side of these kids shows and the inappropriate behaviors some of these kids say they experienced. I mean, Ariana Grande has not said that that's something she experienced, but she has said that she was shocked by the sexual innuendo that she found when she went back through old scripts.
- [11:17]
Britney Spanos
Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of conversations that have arisen from any of the actors from these shows at these times. And obviously some had very dark experiences with Dan Schneider, and they've been very open about that and some were kind of left out of it. It does seem like there was almost preferential treatment in the people who could be obviously moved to be stars and people who could be allegedly exploited by this man in power. But, you know, I think with a lot of the Victorious cast, they talked about how unsupervised they were. You know, they've talked about being able to drink a lot on set or they would show up drunk or they'd party a lot. There was, you know, a lot of the kind of, you know, usual, I guess, things that high schoolers were maybe not at the excess of some other child star antics that we've seen, but there definitely was a little bit of this, you know, newfound celebrity looseness to how they were able to exist on these shows. But yes, Ariana has kind of stayed out of the conversations that have come up around Dan, but it seems like Ariana was a little bit maybe protected and very. It's very close with her mom, very close with her brother. Her dad is present. But I know they've had sort of a kind of rocky relationship over the years, but it seems like she is maybe a little bit more protected than someone like Jeanette McCurdy, who obviously had a very tense relationship with her mom and with her family.
- [12:33]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Right. To put it mildly. Yeah. If people have read that book, right? What is it? I'm glad my mom's died.
- [12:38]
Britney Spanos
I'm glad my mom died. Yeah, I'm glad my mom died. So very, very straightforward way of talking about that relationship. Yeah.
- [12:50]
Natalie Robomed
It's August, which means it's the dog days of summer over here and I'm doing everything I can to stay cool. Luckily, I have some great new pieces from Quint that are helping me do just that. We're talking great cuts, perfect fits, and all of the quality you'd expect from a luxury designer brand. Lately I've been wearing the Italian high leg bikini bottom in black on repeat for beach days and pool parties. It's the perfect little brief that pairs so well with basically any bikini top. I'm also very taken with the stretch cotton jersey boat neck tank in pink. It's got a very narrow neckline, just the right amount of stretch and it looks really good with low rise shorts or a mini skirt or a classic MIDI slip skirt. Upgrade your everyday Download the quints app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com infamous get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com infamous
- [13:52]
Pepsi Advertiser
the perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends and now that's next level. Suddenly the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing and the food tastes better because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi, zero sugar. Today
- [14:17]
Natalie Robomed
you're listening to Infamous from Campside Media.
- [14:20]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
So her mom, Ariana's mom ran a telephone and alarm system company and her dad had a graphic design firm in Boca Raton when they were growing up.
- [14:30]
Natalie Robomed
Here she is talking about her childhood on Amy Poehler's podcast Good Hang, which you'll hear a bit more from later too.
- [14:36]
Campside Media Announcer
My favorite movie was Best in Show from a really young age I which is so strange, you know, to be a child and to really love that. I don't know, I was really young. Did you love that style of, you know, that like mockumentary style? I did. Yeah, I did. I loved like dry humor and it made me feel so close to my family, like laughter. My dad and I bonded over our favorite movies and what kind of. What's your dad's sense of humor? We love Jim Carrey. We love, you know, all the Adam Sandler movies and, you know, that kind of thing. The Christopher Guest, of course, what is
- [15:12]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
the relationship with a father, you know, and, like, does her mom work with her? Is she, like a momager or what's. What's the deal?
- [15:20]
Britney Spanos
From my understanding, I don't think her mom is technically her manager. I don't think her mom has ever been her manager. I know that she's had actual music managers work with her, sort of Scooter Braun for many years, things like that. But it does seem like she has a very tight relationship with her mom, you know, within the divorce, sided with her mom and had much more kind of a, again, a tense relationship with her father. It seems like her father's been off and on present throughout things. It seems like their relationship has ebbed and flowed because her family tends to stay close throughout her career, obviously. Her brother, Frankie Grande, has created his own lane and career in entertainment.
- [15:54]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
He was on Big Brother.
- [15:55]
Britney Spanos
He was on Big Brother. He's done shows on and off Broadway. He was just in Titanique on Broadway. He has his music career as well. But, you know, it seems like often when she's touring and it's not a very rare occurrence for Joan, her mom, and Frankie to be on tour with her and sometimes, I guess, depending on where she's at with her father at the time, which is a very, again, very classic pop star type of relationship with the dad.
- [16:23]
Natalie Robomed
Frankie Grande is also like a great character in his own right, and they seem to have been incredibly close. And she, I think, has credited him for a lot of her advocacy and gay rights and LGBTQ issues. And I do just have to say, one time, many years ago at this point, I was doing karaoke at a place called Oil Can Harry's in the Valley, and Frankie Grande was there belting show tunes. But, yeah, I mean, he also is very much a theater kid, which, like, she is too. And so right after Nickelodeon, she starts singing, and in 2013, she releases her first album, Yours Truly, which includes features from both Mac Miller and Big Sean, both of whom she would eventually date. But, like, what was her sound back then and how did she come onto the scene?
- [17:08]
Britney Spanos
Her sound then, you know, she was very interested in making an R and B album, and the sound was sort of bridging the gap, it felt like between what Ariana wanted to do and wanted to be as a singer. You know, she's someone who looks up to those very iconic classic vocalists, of course, like Aretha Franklin or a Patti LaBelle. Like, she loves that sound, but it seems like it bridged the gap between child star to R and B artist, especially white teenage R and B artists. So it's a little bit more doo wop, but it definitely is a showcase of her vocals, for sure. There's definitely a big element of this album is to really make it very clear that this is a young girl with a very powerful voice, but the sound itself is very teeny bopper pop music.
- [17:52]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
And what do you think of her, like, high pony, miniskirt, over the knee boots look that went along with that. And by the way, like, super spray tan, right?
- [18:02]
Britney Spanos
Oh, yes, very, very tan. But she's from Boca Raton, we must not forget. She's Italian, from Boca Raton. But yeah, I mean, this is a classic pop star look, right? Like, it became a very iconic look. So there is a lot to say about this image of Ariana, the pop star that very much separated her from her character, Cat Valentine, who had the, you know, blood red dyed hair. This was her setting the tone for who she is and became, you know, the best looks that a pop star sort of is introduced with ends up becoming the emblem of them and becomes the. The totem or the avatar for who they are and how people represent them. It became a Halloween costume. You know, it's like you want to be a pop star who can create a look that someone can recreate for Halloween's to come and people will know who that is.
- [18:50]
Natalie Robomed
Yeah, and we should say that that high pony, that very distinct visual cue of the time of this sort of mini skirt over the knee boots, crop top, was a deliberate styling choice that was made in tandem with so called image architect Laura Roach, who was her stylist at the time and has since become pretty famous in his right for.
- [19:10]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
For working with Zendaya after this in 2015. She's 22 and she's caught on this surveillance camera licking a donut and saying, like, I hate America, I hate Americans. I mean, I remember this pretty vividly, like she's waiting to buy something, so she picks up a donut and just licks it and puts it back for somebody else to eat it. What did you make of that?
- [19:33]
Britney Spanos
It was funny because it's like the weirdest form of rebellion possible. You know, it is like such a. It's such a theater kid form of rebellion. You know, like, that was kind of the vibe I got from it where I thought it was very funny. Like, it was just so ridiculous. This was kind of the era of like Justin Bieber doing some really insane stuff in comparison, right?
- [19:55]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Caligula in Calabasas,
- [19:59]
Britney Spanos
he's doing really. He's at the Anne Frank house writing. I wish he had been a Belieber. Like, he is doing some really out of pocket stuff. And here's Ariana licking a donut. Like, it was so ridiculous. Like, I felt very. How old was she? Like 22 at the time. I felt like a very 22 year old thing to do.
- [20:15]
Natalie Robomed
Here she is talking about that time on the Smartless podcast, which you've heard a couple clips from already.
- [20:21]
Campside Media Announcer
It's a. It's kind of a really specific and strange thing to become a public person at like a really young age and then to have kind of all this normal growth that happens in everyone's life, 20s and young, teen years and whatever it is, in front of an audience and in front of people who, you know, don't have to have every mistake that they've ever made flashed in front of them and like reminded every two seconds. It's like, it's interesting, it's like a funky thing. But, you know, all we can actually do is grow and like be human, become more and more human, I think, in the face of being dehumanized and objectified.
- [21:04]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
What about the Manchester situation? You covered that.
- [21:07]
Britney Spanos
Yeah, I mean, so in 2017, Ariana was doing the Dangerous Woman tour at this point. And you know, of course, Dangerous Woman at this period was the album that very much pushed Ariana into the next level of her career. Right. This was Ariana becoming very big pop diva. This was Ariana becoming huge celebrity, tabloid celebrity at this point. Her on and off relationship with Mac Miller was being covered nonstop. I think she had already dated Big Sean or was dating Big Sean at this point. This was a tour that was being like heavily covered. This was a tour that was, you know, selling out arenas across the world. And at her concert in Manchester, there was a suicide bomber who had entered the show. And how many casualties?
- [21:52]
Natalie Robomed
22 people died.
- [21:54]
Britney Spanos
I mean, it's just a horrible thing as any person, for any person to experience, not only in the crowd, but also as an artist. To have something as tragic as that happen at your own show with your fans, where you're trying to create this sort of safe space environment of the ideal of what an artist wants to create for their fans and for something so violent and so tragic and to have your own fans die at this show is a tremendously horrific thing that is deeply unrelatable for even other artists to experience. And it created a lot of trauma and paranoia and PTSD for Ariana in the aftermath. You have her concert still. Clear bags are the only thing allowed at them, which is not common at venues outside of football stadiums, which, if you go to concerts regularly, football stadiums obviously always have just clear bags. But most arenas, you know, an MSG at Barclay center, most arenas around the world do not enforce the clear bag rule. You can usually just bring any small bag to it. Ariana's concerts, no matter what venue she's at, enforces the clear bag rule, and that is still happening. You know, the security situation at her tours are much more intense than the average pop star tour.
- [23:05]
Natalie Robomed
500 people were injured. It's incredibly intense. The next year, her ex boyfriend and collaborator, Mac Miller, died of an accidental overdose. The year later. I mean, what happened with Pete Davidson as well around this time?
- [23:17]
Britney Spanos
Yeah, I mean, you know, the. The Pete and Mac relationships were happening sort of back to back. Obviously, Mac Miller had suffered from addiction for a very long time, and it seemed like Ariana was offering support as a friend for many years on top of that and sort of helping with the Pete Davidson relationship that was happening as well. Obviously, there's a lot of comparisons between the two of them. Pete is someone who has suffered from mental health issues and addiction and things like that. Throughout and around the time that Mac had died, there was another experience she had with after her and Pete's breakup where Pete was locking himself in his, I believe, his dressing room in snl. And I remember there was a lot of tweets that she was saying, like, literally having to publicly plea with him to let her in so that she can make sure that he's okay. It's very deeply traumatic to deal with not only a friend or a partner who overdoses, a friend or a partner who is potentially suicidal. And dealing with their very, very deep mental health struggles is horrific. And when you're in your mid-20s, you just don't have the resources or the capacity to know how to even process or deal with something like that. On top of, again, that following a year after your concert is bombed and your fans are injured and fans of yours die.
- [24:32]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
And so how would you contextualize then, the marriage that she has during COVID
- [24:38]
Britney Spanos
she marries someone who is not a celebrity, which is this kind of moment of very deep privacy that she seemed to be reveling in through this point where we're all at home and celebrity Culture kind of shifts a little bit at this time. He's a real estate agent. He's someone who is completely outside of the entertainment industry in this way. The response from her fans and from kind of people who followed her career and followed her relationships in any way was very positive because it was someone who was. Seemed a little bit more stable, seemed a little bit more grown up and with his life together and not bringing in the same level of stress that the relationships that she had had previously had caused for her.
- [25:20]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
What did you think when she got cast in Wicked?
- [25:24]
Britney Spanos
That was something that was very clearly a lifelong dream for Ariana. That was something she was not quiet about for many years about. You know, she was very, very open about the fact that she really wanted to be Galinda. She wanted to be in the Wicked movies whenever they made the adaptations. And something about Wicked was that it was many, many years they had been trying to make this movie happen. Many casts were in the mix for it. So it was kind of a perfect timing thing. I think there was a lot of people who knew that if anyone's going to be capable of this, it was Ariana.
- [25:54]
Campside Media Announcer
Like, I trained my voice for months before my first audition because Glinda's voice is so different than mine. How did you train it? I trained with my vocal coach, Eric Vitro, and it just takes muscle memory. So for weeks and weeks and weeks, I'd go every day. I was. I was a coach on the Voice at the time, and I was going in the mornings to Eric and then my acting coach, Nancy Banks, and we would work on random things, not even Glinda related things, just to sort of get the muscles moving. And I hadn't acted in a long time and I. It was important to me to get ready for the audition. And, you know, I just spent every day going to retrain that falsetto, operatic area of my voice because I wasn't using it for a long time. And you can hear the quality change if you look through, like the voice notes from way back then. Like, the first week I went, there was so much air seeping out. And then slowly but surely, like week after week, there was more purity and more clarity.
- [26:58]
Britney Spanos
She had been on Broadway once already. She's someone who's shown off her acting and clearly her singing chops for many years. This was kind of a role made for her. So I think the general reaction was excitement. Anyone who was a recovering theater kid at all was excited to see that it was her and Cynthia Erivo, who had been cast as Elphaba And Glinda.
- [27:19]
Natalie Robomed
Yeah. And then she embarks on this huge press tour for Wicked, where it just felt like she was everywhere. And the next big public relationship really was between her and Cynthia Erivo, where they're everywhere together and being best friends and getting matching tattoos and all of that. But there does wind up being another controversy around this time, and that was around reports that she was dating her Wicked co star, Ethan Slater.
- [27:44]
Britney Spanos
Yeah. So Ethan Slater is a Broadway actor. He's been sort of in the Broadway theater circuit for a long time and was cast as Bach, who's a character who has an unrequited crush on Galinda. So obviously, the Wicked movies are immense. Right. Like, they are two very long movies made from this musical. Just like many, many months, maybe close to a year of them filming. It was a very long time that they spent making these two very indulgent, very massive blockbuster films.
- [28:16]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
I love them. I have to say. I love them both.
- [28:19]
Britney Spanos
Yeah. I mean, the second one, I was a little like, we could have. We could have had one. But this one, lovely, perfect, amazing. But it seems like the cast is becoming very close. We saw it on the press tour, but we were also kind of getting glimpses on social media, and she was sharing a lot of stuff with Cynthia. She's also sharing a lot of stuff with Ethan. The two of them were starting to date around this time. They went public shortly before the press circuit for the first Wicked.
- [28:44]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Right.
- [28:44]
Natalie Robomed
There was something incongruous with this relationship and the kind of old Hollywood glamour that she was depicting as the good Witch, you know, I mean, his ex wife proclaimed that she was, quote, not a girl's girl, which was one of the biggest insults you could say at this time. So that's happening in the background. And also during this time, I mean, she appears to lose a lot of weight. She starts looking different and people are noticing and they're commenting about it online. To the extent that in 2023, she releases a video addressing the concerns about her weight. And she says, quote, I think we should be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people's bodies, no matter what. She also basically says that she's healthy and there's nothing to see here. I mean, what did you make of that video?
- [29:30]
Britney Spanos
I mean, not just the video, but also just the images. At that time, there was something very strange that was going on where it was. Both her and Cynthia seem to be much smaller than they were before filming Wicked. And I think there was a level of being like, you know, there's so much training that went into this movie, right. They are literally dancing and singing and they were filming for months. And, you know, I think with any artist, there is a level of the body changes as you're doing this, level of like, high activity, high rehearsal. We see this with anyone that tours often, that's on Broadway doing massive blockbuster movies. But there was something very, I think, strange to a lot of people watching her and Cynthia not only appear much smaller physically than they had been when they were even just cast in the movie, but there was also this kind of intensity to their touring. There was so much crying and so much of this, like, very deep emotional response that was happening that didn't seem, even by theater kids standards, to be very normal. I think she also was open about a lot of the struggles that she had with Post Manchester Post, Mac Miller Post, you know, kind of this very deeply horrendous period of her twenties that she experienced being on antidepressants, drinking a lot, like, trying to cope in unhealthy ways that she had been very open about. And that we did know was part of her experience and obviously a very, very common experience for people who deal with very intense traumas.
- [30:52]
Natalie Robomed
Yeah. And, I mean, she said that the back and forth between how the public perceives her has been really hard for her to navigate mentally. I mean, she told Vanity Fair, quote, I was this approach, funny redhead on Nickelodeon, and everyone liked me. And then I had one too many hit records and everyone decided that I was an evil diva. And then other terrible things happened, and all of a sudden I was this hero and this victim. And so she really seems to be caught in the middle, but also feeling a kind of whiplash with how the public is treating her and reacting to her.
- [31:23]
Britney Spanos
Yeah, I mean, this is the. The. The basic experience of the female pop star. Right. Like, it is such a horrible cycle that we put women through who are public. You know, that is something that had been experienced for Ariana. There were moments when she maybe looked a little bit different in a photo or look, you know, slightly a different angle of her or something where they would be like, well, she. She looks like she's like, gained weight or she maybe she's pregnant or things like that. That was happening for many years for her. That has happened to so many of her peers, so many of her heroes, repeatedly. And it's a horrible cycle that's just like, no one ever learns how much that. That deeply traumatizes all of these women repeatedly. It's why so many of them crash diet and put their bodies through Absolute hell to look a certain way at all ages. Why people will completely change their entire image to maintain something for this public that's going to hate them no matter what.
- [32:16]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Yeah. I mean, I think that adding the GLP1s that a lot of people are taking who are, you know, not overweight, but they want to control their eating. Plus the fact that some people who are overweight are taking them and now becoming much skinnier. Like, the whole culture is just so confused about all of this. You know, it wasn't that long ago that you could go on Fenty from Rihanna or all these different lingerie sites and see bodies that were all different kinds of bodies if you wanted to buy some underwear. Right. Maybe Fenty's still doing that. There are some places that are still doing that, but they're less and less. Like the Victoria's Secret, you know, show is coming back and everybody's going to be an angel and everybody's going to be thin. And so we really have whipsawed a bit as a culture right away from
- [33:14]
Natalie Robomed
this body positivity movement or time that we were in maybe 10ish years ago, right?
- [33:19]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Yeah. And it's not even positivity. It's just like normalcy to me.
- [33:23]
Britney Spanos
Yeah.
- [33:23]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
You know? Yeah. Just this is what people really look like.
- [33:27]
Britney Spanos
I mean, even that didn't come without its own sort of constant shaming with it. Right. We were able to have people who were a little bit bigger on stage or on screen, but they still were relentlessly tormented online and called horrible names repeatedly. And so there's never been an even neutral time for especially women in the public eye to exist in a body of any kind. You know, it's like, it's just like horrible. Like, it's just kind of crazy. But, yeah, we're now in a time where it's like, I think even as a result of that, we're watching every person, not even just women, but, you know, I think for. For women specifically, like, we are watching every woman in the industry waste away right now. We've never seen pop stars or celebrities be this thin.
- [34:27]
Pepsi Advertiser
The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends, and now that's next level. Suddenly the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing and the food tastes better because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi. Zero sugar. Today,
- [34:51]
Britney Spanos
the Hulu original series Furious, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
- [34:55]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Plus, there are three victims we know of the Suspect is female, white, late twenties.
- [35:00]
Britney Spanos
Female. Serial killers kill for power, control.
- [35:04]
Natalie Robomed
I believe there is a deeper motivation here.
- [35:06]
Britney Spanos
You have no idea who you're dealing
- [35:08]
Natalie Robomed
with and you are going to end up dead.
- [35:11]
Campside Media Announcer
I've been waiting for you.
- [35:13]
Britney Spanos
Watch the Hulu original series Furious, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus for month of subscribers, terms apply.
- [35:23]
Pepsi Advertiser
This is infamous from Campside Media.
- [35:26]
Natalie Robomed
Even just talking to you about this, it really exposes the conundrum of this conversation, which is that this is really hard to talk about. We have this idea that we shouldn't talk about or comment on people's bodies, but, like, multiple things can be true at once. We can visibly notice with our eyes that people are looking thinner. And to me, if I'm being really honest, Ariana Grande, she looks sick and she could be sick, but she's also saying that she's not sick. Like multiple things can be true at once. And we as a culture have a problem talking about people's bodies, especially women's bodies, and tearing them apart, whether for being too big or too small or too whatever. And also there's research that suggests that something like anorexia is a socially contagious disease, meaning that people might see images of somebody being very thin and be influenced by those images and kind of want to emulate them. Or that people with a history of disordered eating might be triggered by those images.
- [36:26]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
There was a story in Mother Jones basically interviewing a therapist who works with eating disordered patients. And she was saying that every time there's a media story, therapists hear about it and they hear things like, I'm so mad. I have to work on my recovery and this person's being glamorous for changing their body in such a profound way. Or this makes it so much harder for me to stay committed to treatment. Or, you know, it's so unfair people like her get to live in this weight loss world. I'm trying to live outside of it. And there's just like so much sadness about the way people's bodies are judged and, and evaluated. And it really reminds people who have eating disorders with their own private, personal experiences of being judged and bullied and excluded because of the way they look and is very retraumatizing the administration this
- [37:16]
Britney Spanos
week, just a few days ago, maybe yesterday, they unleashed a new trove of UFO files. Interesting things in there. Triangular craft, weird lights over an army base, a stick like figure with large eyes. That was just an Ariana Grande video.
- [37:32]
Campside Media Announcer
I'm sorry, that was,
- [37:35]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
you know, it is the Thing of people don't want to be told publicly. You need to get treatment. Right. That's supposed to be a private conversation with your loved ones. And the group scrutiny is the really challenging part.
- [37:52]
Britney Spanos
Yeah, I mean, just to add on to like how complicated it is. You know, I think what I've. I've seen and witnessed online, just being someone who's covering pop music, whose entire feeds are just constantly whatever the pop star discourses of, of the day or the week or the month. What happened the day that Ariana released Petal, both the album and the music video for the single was shocking to me. It was really hard to go online that day because it was just like these close up images of her kind of exposed ribcage and clavicle and zooming in on her shoulders and zooming in on any part of her where it's very visibly bony and very visibly thinner and, you know, much smaller. It was just like a constant feed of it everywhere. It was hard to go on any social media platform without being confronted with that. And I'm grateful that I am in a place in my life where I do not have issues with disordered eating the way I did when I was younger, watching people be very, very thin on screen in the 2000s. But I cannot imagine what it would be like for someone who is still struggling with that or in recovery from that, or having to be confronted with that every, every second. And I think what I've felt in watching all of this is that I, as a journalist and as someone who's not interested in diagnosing any public figure whatsoever. Right. Like, I'm not interested in saying what she has, what's going on. I think we are. We very clearly know she's been through a lot in her life, but I could say that if this is what people think is helping or going to save her, it is absolutely not. These close zoom ins, these almost like it's gone into shame. Like it's really like it's kind of shocking how much shame is now very prevalent in the conversations versus there's a better way of just saying we can't normalize that this is what the female body looks like. Not everybody can or should or will look like this. I think that's an important conversation to have because I think it's an important reminder to especially young women who maybe think that they should look like this. And that's not what we should ever encourage. But yeah, I think it is really wild because it has veered so much into shame. And that is really Heartbreaking and scary to me to see because, again, we don't know what is going on. But I cannot imagine the toll on someone's mental health of having to watch people kind of zoom in on your body parts constantly.
- [40:30]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
So she's now announced that she's going to take a step back, right. Publicly. She's canceling her role she had in a West End revival of that Sondheim show, Sunday in the park with George, and not doing publicity for the Ben Stiller Focker in Law movie. But are we going to keep seeing her? Because she's just put out an album. I mean, there must be other videos banked, promos banked.
- [40:52]
Natalie Robomed
And she's on tour.
- [40:53]
Britney Spanos
Yeah, she's on tour until. Yeah, I think the tour ends September. I know it ended in North America, and I think she still has European dates. You know, she's potentially probably gonna be hounded even more so by paparazzi to get a glimpse of her in a way that kind of feeds this beast that we're already in with it. But, yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem like she's going to do any. Any public things for a while, even after that. Like, I. I'm curious what's gonna happen. I'm sad for her that she's not doing Sunday in the park with George, because that seemed like something that she had been wanting to do for a long time. But also, like, I. I do really hope that just kind of stepping away from this type of conversation and hopefully doing whatever is best for her in this moment is what she's actually going to do for a while. It seems like it has been pretty nonstop work for the last few years of two Wicked films, two albums and another film coming out this year.
- [41:45]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Yeah, and I would just end by saying, you know, it sounds somewhat disingenuous to say we wish Ariana well, but, you know, if you have somebody in your life who's struggling, you know, maybe you can hear this story and think of a way to approach him or her. So thanks, everybody for listening to Infamous this week. Thank you so much, Brittany. And we will have a link to Brit pop Britney's amazing substack in the show notes if you guys want to check that out.
- [42:15]
Natalie Robomed
That's it for Infamous this week. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and review. It really helps people find the podcast. For more updates and to get in touch, follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Infamous Pod. See you next week.
- [42:45]
Britney Spanos
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back.
- [42:53]
Natalie Robomed
So I thought it would be fun
- [42:55]
Britney Spanos
if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal, so there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com switch upfront payment
- [43:07]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms.