On Ariana and Pete
In mid-June of 2018, it became public knowledge that Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson were engaged after less than a month of dating. The emergence of this sudden romance has taken hold of the public imagination — not merely because its subjects are glamorous, but because it has brought together two individuals whose lives are particularly emblematic of their generation. Like an estranged Artemis and Apollo, these deities have united under constellations of spirit and survival.
They were born within five months of one another. She was raised in Florida (epicenter of the first great American crisis of the new millennium), and he was raised in New York City (site of the second). Her parents were corporate professionals who divorced when she was still a child; his father was a firefighter who died in 9/11. The girl from a house divided performed on a cruise ship at the age of eight and starred in a TV show for the duration of her teenage years. The boy who’d been left behind frequently acted out in school, and at one point tore out his hair until he was bald. She suffered from anxiety. He suffered from Crohn’s disease and borderline personality disorder. She turned her focus to music; he turned to standup comedy. At the age of nineteen, Ariana released her first studio album, Yours Truly. At the age of twenty, Pete landed a role in the cast of Saturday Night Live.
In his comedy, Davidson emphasizes how incomprehensible the 9/11 attacks were to a seven-year-old boy. He remembers receiving a present upon his father’s death and considering it fair compensation. He jokes about wearing his father’s fireman gear while smoking weed. His stories viscerally embody the burden that all Americans his age were tasked with bearing: he has been obligated to remember something of which he has no clear memory, to grasp a disaster for which at the time he had no context. Growing up in a nation that thinks of itself as traumatized generates a strange disparity between a child’s lived experience and their inherited reality. Davidson has brought that disparity to the fore in his comedy, making him a figure of empowerment for a generation disillusioned by its place within a declaredly dangerous world.
On the subject of danger, at this time last year Ms. Grande had arrived at a place in her career where she was playing the spiritually lethal role of siren. Her music videos had her sporting bunny ears. She pranced about in gym clothes and licked her lips while peddling a stationary bike. She was submitting to something far outside herself — to have lived by it much longer would have risked personal as well as artistic annihilation. Enigmatically, things came to a head with the bombing of her concert in Manchester. Suddenly, the petite Grande found herself at the mercy of not only international geopolitics but her own sublimation of self. It appears to have spurred her into spearheading an informed reevaluation of her public image; it is often the cataclysmic shifts in life that inspire us to live by our personal needs, and in recent months Grande has emerged as a refreshingly positive cultural force.
The change from Dangerous Woman to Sweetener is distinct — whereas the former is inconsolably lurid, Grande’s new album expresses powerful, healing sentiment that dovetails beautifully with the revisionist sensibility of Davidson’s comedy. What we are witnessing now is a breaking of the surface: the airy singer is divining herself towards a more celestial sphere, in the arms of a boy who has pulled himself from the depths. Both are children of the post-9/11 era, and are representative of an America that has come of age in the shadow of tangible international disorder. This is a couple uniquely poised to embody the healing perspective afforded by their generation — two wayward angels guiding one another into light.
