Ariana Grande found her voice on Dangerous Woman

Back in the summer of 2015, things were looking dicey for Ariana Grande. The singer had just been caught doing just the sort of thing that makes people capital-H hate celebrities: she had waltzed into an L.A. donut shop, clad in her signature oversized sweater and high ponytail, and—in front of security cameras, her boyfriend Ricky Alvarez, God, and everybody—began licking a tray of donuts. As she licked away, she murmured, in a voice made sticky with granulated sugar, “I fucking hate Americans. I hate America.” Sated, she removed her tongue from the pastries and inserted it promptly into Alvarez’s mouth. A timestamp at the bottom of the CCTV footage contextualizes—and criminalizes—her tirade: July 4.

Grande had, at this point, only recently broken into the world of pop stardom. Months after Victorious went off the air in 2013, she released her debut album, Yours Truly—a sweet, girlish LP replete with doo-wop-inspired love songs. My Everything came a year later and cemented Grande as a mainstream starlet, positioning her rather precariously between the musical worlds of fairytale whimsy and adult horniness ten years before Sabrina Carpenter got big. But by 2015, the center could not hold. Grande had, as TMZ succinctly put it, “tongue[d] new BF…and an innocent donut!!” and her music would have to change in accordance with her loss of good-girl brownie points.

That summer, between performing shows on her Honeymoon Tour and licking stuff, Grande was already chipping away at LP3—which she wanted to call Moonlight, in honor of its first song. The album turned into something more mature, more complex; something befitting the cultural moment of 2016, a feminism-friendly musical landscape that also saw Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Rihanna’s Anti top the charts. Grande was twenty-two at the time, coming to grips with the less savory elements of adult fame. She needed to release an album that would explain herself without coming across as sheepish or apologetic (she did say sorry for the donut thing). As Grande continued work in the studio, she realized the title “Moonlight” just didn’t carry enough oomph. She wrote another song, and then another. A new name emerged, one that she felt better described the artist she wanted to become. So, ten years ago this week, Grande released an album that would define her entire career trajectory thereafter: Dangerous Woman.

In a Billboard interview days after the album’s release, Grande described Dangerous Woman  as a “22-year-old girl comes into her own trying to balance growing up, love and a lot of other bullshit along the way.” The album is, indeed, a transitional one, as Grande finds the multilayered vocal runs and cheeky, purring flirtations that now define her style. Both the control and the joy radiating from the music placed Ariana in the echelons of her genre, setting her up for the cultural domination that would accompany her next album, Sweetener. The popularity of that release sometimes overshadows conversations of Dangerous Woman, but Grande’s third project more than deserves its flowers.

Take, for example, “Into You,” a masterclass in flirtpop (a subgenre I have just made up to accurately describe the sheer entirety of Grande’s dominance therein) that sees the singer switch mid-song from coquettish beseechment to lustful demand. Heady synths pound and pulse as she moans, “A little less conversation and a little more touch my body,” as harmonies climb atop each other toward her explosive (dare I say orgasmic?) soprano. For a legion of sexually timid young teen girls—and I may be universalizing my own experience—Grande’s libido was something of a revelation: Here was a former Nickelodeon starlet who, instead of experiencing the societal dumpster-fire of a reaction that accompanied Miley Cyrus’s still-underrated Bangerz era, was allowed to embrace her sexuality and her femininity in tandem. On the Dangerous Woman cover, Grande tilts her head suggestively in a latex bunny mask, striking a balance between the girlish and the libidinal and flourishing in it.

“Side to Side” is still one of the best pop songs of all time. As Bill Hader’s Stefon would say, this song’s got everything: a vaguely reggaeton-inspired beat, Grande rapping, pre-MAGA Nicki Minaj. I forced my parents to play its thwopping rhythm and innuendo (not unlike Jason Derulo’s “Trumpets”), the latter escaping me at the time (sorry, Mom). At risk of outing myself as a failure in this regard, it’s a song that makes you wish you were good at sexy dancing. Come back, Nicki; the kids miss you. 

Dangerous Woman continues on a generational run from there: next comes “Let Me Love You,” featuring none other than Lil Wayne. Grande’s enthusiasm about working with rappers and R&B stars—the album also features Future and Macy Gray—was still something of a rarity for pop princesses in those days, and it prevented the soul-inspired parts of Dangerous Woman from entering “tone-deaf parroting” territory. “Let Me Love You” excellently presents Grande’s signature vocal weave, and Wayne delivers a verse worthy of his own albums.

The album has its softer moments, too: “Moonlight,” which, despite not being the right choice for the title, is an adorable, shimmery doo-wop number reminiscent of Grande’s Yours Truly. “I never knew, I never knew you could have moonlight in your hands / ‘Til the night I held you,” she croons, with all the pathos of a besotted Ronette. “Thinking Bout You” is a sexy, pleading paraklausithyron that activates something in me like a sleeper cell whenever I hear its opening thump—not to mention it’s still one of the most underrated songs on Dangerous Woman, if you can call one hundred and eighty million Spotify streams underrated. But few songs better encapsulate the confused, desperate need of teenage hormones than “Thinking Bout You.” It’s an anthem for daydreaming, self-mythologizing, and maladaptive crushing—a prime example of Grande’s unique ability to romanticize the listener’s life for them. It’s hard not to feel like the center of the universe when you hear a love song by her. That the object of said affections was then donut-licking accomplice Ricky Alvarez and is now Ethan Slater, who abandoned his wife and one-year-old daughter for Grande and is best known for SpongeBob: The Musical, might put a damper on this effect for some, but not for a true Arianator.

Dangerous Woman’s titular song is also the most indicative of Grande’s musical evolution. It’s a sultry, Bond-girl-esque manifesto of self—a paean to female sexuality, not to mention that it was originally written with Carrie Underwood in mind. A “dangerous woman” was, to Grande, someone unafraid to step into her own. Over a glam-rock guitar and, funnily enough, Charlie Puth’s beatboxing, Grande challenges, in a lyric befitting of the pink-pussy-hat feminism of the era: “Don’t need permission, made my decision, to test my limits.” This marked a turning point for not just Grande, but her fans who greedily accepted her heel-turn toward the adult sensuality she’s largely synonymous with now.

After Dangerous Woman’s release, Grande’s life spun precariously out of her control. On May 22, 2017, a suicide bombing at her Manchester tour stop killed twenty-two and injured more than a thousand. A year later, her on-again, off-again boyfriend, rapper Mac Miller, was found dead of an apparent overdose at his Los Angeles home. Grande was treated as if she were made of glass: cooed over, belittled, patronized like a sick child. Her music was no longer the focus of her celebrity now that the tragedies surrounding her were too big to ignore. But Dangerous Woman showed that Ariana Grande wasn’t helpless—that she held within her enough strength and self-possession to make it to the other side. The album marked the beginning of a long stretch of pop homers that would see her reach the 21st century’s musical Olympus. It proved she could be silly and sensual and self-confident. To quote Nicki before she turned to the dark side: Ariana run pop, indeed.

Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.

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