hyacinth

Well last post of the night. I think part of why Cynthia and Ariana were so confusing to people was because they were algorithmically illegible. like Ariana being in wicked at all was extremely divorced from her public persona and Cynthia was this classically trained posh sounding theatre actress who dressed in a very high fashion way but was doing a blockbuster kids musical. There was not a single situation that either of them were in where it didn’t kind of seem like they were teleported there. also most people overwhelmingly network within their social milleu so likely the idea of being friends with someone outside your race/exact age/level of social and cultural capital (ariana is largely more socially privileged/famous than Cynthia but Cynthia is rada educated and 1 away from a EGOT and has arguably more cultural capital as a result) meant people immediately thought the relationship MUST be fake because THEY could never genuinely connect with someone they considered “beneath” them. I think misogyny/misogynoir/homophobia absolutely played a huge role in how they were read by the public as duo but also the fact they COULDN’T be easily read and sorted into neat social categories factored into that as well

thinking about this through the lens of Ariana as always and of course it’s fascinating to me how arianators like hate how much she likes wicked/glinda because it’s not congruous with her persona or the persona THEY liked. but she always liked those things and it’s very likely her interest in musical theatre led to her singing voice developing the way it did. even in her deep blackiana era (which also seems to be the nadir of her personal life) she would still make musical theatre references in her lyrics. people are so intensely resistant to the idea that someone could occupy both a pop rnb cultural space and a kind of bullyable nerd cultural space because you can tell they’re dying to call her cringe but can’t deny the impact her music has had on them and they can’t rectify that dissonance. But that dissonance is so important because that’s where personhood comes from and that’s what makes people interesting. and as our lives become more algorithmically dictated it will genuinely be more and more important to behave in ways that algorithms would consider unpredictable

and part of the power of west side shawty is that there’s no real reason why an Italian American secretly unofficially dating an Albanian American should have a song called that but it adds to its overall cultural commentary value. like yeah the secret leaked gay love song called west side shawty. but there is something very beautiful about how out of touch it was with the overall themes of boygenius sapphism it was kind of white gay woman outsider art in a way. kind of like when lana did the music video for summertime sadness where she and Jaime king played suicidal gay lovers who both killed themselves for whatever reason. Or when she did that cover that was like “my gay lover is cheating on me with a man and I want to kill her” which they used to play at the corporate thrift store I worked at during the pandemic except they would censor the line about masturbation so the whole store would go temporarily silent for like 10 seconds in the middle of the song.

thinking about the secret verse of west side shawty where she says she’s a bottom and eats pussy twice a day that was ultimately removed from the pronounless implied male love interest final version. west side shawty the media artifact you are

my hope is we get a predatory wasp of the palisades from ariana soon. sufjan was kind of glass closeted for years too but we all knew because of the wasp song. let’s get a song about her being 16 watching liz gillies get stung by a hornet at child star theatre camp. then I’ll relax about this

and if i said that eternal sunshine is not about spongebiq planting his seed but is, in fact, a post-modernist masterpiece about de-constructing the grand narrative of ariana grande through pastiche and pluralism what then

you would be correct