Pop Music

At Madison Square Garden, a Buoyant Ariana Grande Continues to Be Her Own Kind of Pop Star

On the scene at the star’s show Tuesday night.
Ariana Grande
By Kevin Mazur/Getty Images.

Ariana Grande is—it’s hard to argue otherwise—a pop star at the height of her powers. She’s put out two hugely successful albums in the past year that spawned two No. 1 singles, and in doing so has pulled off a harder-to-quantify cultural leap, going from someone people were generally familiar with to someone everyone knows. Her romantic relationships and street style are monitored obsessively on a day-to-day basis, but her music remains the central element of her celebrity and appeal, as Grande has let her lyrics (see: “Thank U, Next”) and videos do the speaking on her behalf. And in releasing music as she feels like it as of late—not adhering to the typical pop-star release and promotional schedule—Grande is one of the central figures redefining pop stardom for this next generation.

Taking the stage at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night, the first of two shows at the venue on her Sweetener world tour, Grande was acting nonchalant about all of this, though. Save for a brief reel of some tabloid headlines at the very end of the show, leading into “Thank U, Next,” there was little acknowledgement at all of her being Ariana Grande.

The 25-year-old—who is quite chatty with her fans on the internet—is not one for stage banter, offering a bunch of “How are you feeling, New York!??” exclamations, but nothing in the way of introductions to specific songs or confessional monologues or quippy asides. The production was pretty low-key and sparse as well, a single spherical backdrop—overlaid with different visuals—employed for the entire show. As Grande moved smoothly, casually through hit after hit, the concert almost had the feel of hanging out in her apartment for a house party, rather than in one of the largest concert venues in New York City. The stage was bathed in various shades of red and blue and pink, and Grande kept up a mellow onstage demeanor, occasionally sitting on the edge of the stage with her legs dangling. The entire evening could be accurately characterized as a “vibe” as much as a show.

The crowd—or party guests—comprised what appeared to be hundreds of different “squads,” groups of two to 10 friends, all dressed in Grande merch, most wearing those cross-body fanny packs. There were sequined knee-high boots, shirts emblazoned with “yuh” (Grande’s trademark vocal sound), NASA shirts, cat ears. The mostly teenage and 20-something audience appeared to be rapturously under the spell of their ponytailed idol: It's their party, and they're gonna Instagram Story if they want to. At certain points, there was an almost spiritual undertone to the proceedings, as during opener “God Is a Woman”—Grande positioned on a long table with her dancers, evoking The Last Supper—or when Grande held the microphone to the audience to belt the anthemic chorus of “Breathin” (“just keep breathin’ and breathin’ and breathin’...”).

Grande focused mainly on the songs from those two most recent mammoth collections, Sweetener and Thank U, Next, and the crowd was rowdiest for the propulsive tracks with attitude (“Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored,” “7 Rings”) but also content to belt along for the slower jams. In a section toward the end, Grande ran through some of her seminal previous hits—“Dangerous Woman,” “Break Free,” “Into You,” “Side to Side”—with requisite panache. As excited as the crowd was to hear the older hits, it also served as an interesting reference point, noting how the feel of her music has shifted from that more straightforward pop and balladry work into the more R&B-infused, down-tempo, streaming-friendly sound of her most recent albums.

Watching her onstage—soaring through every high note as if casually tapping the accelerator on a highway, shimmying playfully next to her dancers, strutting through the fans in the front section in an array of intricate outfits—it was hard not to feel a certain sense of endearment and even pride. She has endured such hardships on the public stage—the Manchester bombing, the death of ex-boyfriend Mac Miller—that to see her blissfully and exuberantly buoyant, careering around a stage where she feels comfortable and at peace, is a relief.

She closes the show (before a “Thank U, Next” encore) with “No Tears Left to Cry,” the first single she released following the Manchester attack, a song about finding the strength to carry on after hardship. When she let free the first lines of the song, “Right now I’m in a state of mind, I wanna be in like all the time,” it was very easy—looking around at the fellow concert-goers, their arms in the air, voices blaring, making elated eye contact with their friends next to them—to know exactly what she meant.