After everyone was so “upset” over Ariana Grande releasing a sort of placeholder video for “Breathin'” starring her pet pig, Piggy Smalls, fans and detractors alike can now Comme des Fuckdown–the “real” video is here. And it’s quite celestial, when it’s not utterly grounded in the temporal things that make us all so prone to feeling the weight of the world on our shoulders (even if we’re not dealing with as specific of a problem as performing in the midst of a massive terrorist attack or being the potential fodder for an always looming SNL sketch as a result of having an ex as a cast member on it).
Directed by Hannah Lux Davis (who has also worked on previous Grande videos such as “Love Me Harder” and “Into You”), the premise starts out at the usual place where most people go to cope with their problems when they can’t afford a psychiatrist and the meds he or she can provide: the bar. But before this shot, we see a serene Grande amid clouds that dissolve to the level of smoke one might have seen in a New York City bar before Giuliani became the mayor. Looking stressed and overwhelmed (maybe because there is at no point any bartender available to offer her a drink), Grande is alone in her surroundings at first before the crowds appear, swirling around her in “Ray of Light”-style chaos (thanks for tipping music video directors off to that tactic Jonas Åkerlund). She herself remains a tranquil presence in the eye of the storm called life as she transitions into a bustling train station environment (again, at first appearing alone on a stack of too elegante suitcases that no one could possibly afford before she is faced with the huddled masses fucking up her vibe).
At one point finally lying down on the floor of the station (maybe her hair got too heavy), the barrage of humanity churning around her makes it all the more obvious why she should choose to metaphorically (and in the video, literally) keep her head in the clouds as a means of self-preservation. A way to function amid the disarray–the sheer pandemonium–of existence. So it must be that she finally embraces turmoil by swinging in the clouds at full-force. For if she can’t get a fucking drink in this town, at least she can get a working swing suspended from the air to drown out the voices spurred on by the condition of anxiety (an increasingly congenital one in the twenty-first century–though who knows if it’s truly because of the times or because we don’t have to suppress our feelings and complaints as we once did in the twentieth century).
Though Grande has already moved on to music for her next album (there is nothing like work to mend heartache), manifested in the form of her latest single (a sologamist’s anthem), “thank u, next,” she has not forgotten about Sweetener just yet, melding the “old” with the new by revealing song titles for the upcoming record subliminally in the changing destinations of the train station’s sign (“Needy,” “Remember” and “Imagine” being among them). Destinations that seem to actually change at a slower pace than Grande’s manic musical output of late. Perhaps that’s the benefit of being permitted to stay in the clouds–no one to fucking distract you.
