Ariana Grande – Hate That I Made You Love Me

We close the month with the song which has just put another crack in Sam Fender & Olivia Dean’s aeons-long rein of the UK charts…

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[5.00]Josh Winters: There’s a distinct tension between wanting to carefully orchestrate an emotional sanctuary and being utterly exhausted by the theater of public perception. Ariana has built her career on being the perfect vessel for pop fantasy, but here, she sounds tired of the pedestal her fans built for her. Dropping into a lower, almost resentful register, she delivers a mid-tempo sigh that plays like a mirror image of “We Can’t Be Friends.” Max Martin and Ilya anchor the track with a minimalist looping instrumental, but the real weight is in the ambivalence. When she murmurs, “Sorry if I made me your type / ‘Cause I barely tried,” it’s less a boast and more a defense mechanism against a public that treats her identity like property. It’s polished and mathematically sound, yet entirely detached. It positions her as a ghost haunting a relationship we forced her into, but the clinical execution lacks the raw, unbridled blood-letting that makes a pop tragedy truly hit the gut. Her commitment to this boundary is conceptually admirable, but it results in a track that’s too bloodless to break your heart, and ultimately too inert to feel like anything more than an administrative correction.
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Claire Davidson: It seems the Wicked duology did Ariana Grande some good in the vocal department: on a song that calls on her to utilize her lower register for the verses, she sounds more confident than ever, forming these notes with such fullness that I didn’t even recognize her when I first heard “Hate That I Made You Love Me” on the radio. The rest of the song hardly rises to that occasion, though, building its foundation around a loop of blubbering keys that aims for ethereality but curdles in the flatness of the mix, unsupported by the hazy synth-bass wavering beneath it. The song has so little in the way of a pulse that I’m tempted to call it a glorified Eternal Sunshine B-side, but the instrumentation is dated enough that the better analogue is probably Positions, an album plagued by the same shrink-wrapped intimacy that infects “Hate That I Made You Love Me.” The track’s content is even more anonymous, a break-up song emanating the same smug sanctimony as anything on Grande’s two previous albums, one that excoriates a man for his toxicity—one who likely exists as a proxy for her own fanbase—while subtly uplifting her own magnetism, implying that she maintains an irresistible allure without even trying. Aside from the ego such a framework suggests, it also betrays a laziness at the core of the song’s conceit, conveniently omitting why Grande chooses to entertain such characters while exalting her decision to leave. It’s a fitting approach for a song whose identity is this hands-off, the product of a touch so light that the end result is barely there.
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Ian Mathers: I feel like I’m missing some lore drops for this one, and in isolation it’s perfectly ok radio fodder.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Is Ariana Grande capable, at this point, of making a lead single that is not some kind of meditation on her own relationship to her fandom, the media, things of that nature? If not, can she at least make said meditations less dirge-like?
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Nortey Dowuona: ME: Bullshit! You don’t hate the money we put in your pockets, or the attention we paid to all your late night appearances, or even your movie star and Oscar aspirations! You hate that now you have to rein in your ambitions, realize the undergirding of your popularity is washing away in the sand and being swept out to sea, that your last few albums have disappeared into popular culture’s wormhole that consumes the entirety of young and old singers, their dreams and delusions, many of whom went through this very abusive, predatory industry and were unable to succeed the way you have! You hate that we don’t love you anymore, that we have turned our eyes and ear towards dozens of other artists in our lives, you hate that we no longer pay your otherwise constricted life any mind and let you live it, that your commonplace adoption of appearances that are at best despised and at worst criminalized are both pathetic and transparently desperate, that you can’t earn back our love anymore.
ARIANA: (pause) Isn’t that your exact type?
ME: Yes, but I have self awareness now.
ARIANA: Like the Israeli Twenty One Pilots?
ME: THAT IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT and I didn’t like them.
ARIANA: Why?
ME: (pause) They can’t sing like you.
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Julian Axelrod: Obviously the circumstances around “Thank U, Next” couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be replicated, but it’s helpful to remember that Ariana can turn difficult personal circumstances into a song that’s catchy and clever instead of a synthy Spongebob soup. (And I like Ethan Slater!) Someone in the Grande camp should be backing a truck filled with money into Victoria Monét’s driveway as we speak.
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Will Adams: Grande continues to demonstrate her skill as a vocal arranger: gorgeously layered, breathiness turned into real texture. The lyrics cut deep: “turned tears into diamonds” from someone who’s publicly experienced trauma to the extent she has is brutal. It’s a shame the song itself is so plodding. Can’t remember the last time Max Martin sounded this phoned in.
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Hannah Jocelyn: Ariana Grande is a frustrating pop star to me – she’s obviously capable of pop music so beloved I don’t even need to hyperlink “Into You”, but spends a lot of time on mid-tempo R&B that doesn’t even play to her strengths as one of the best vocal producers to ever do it. This is both an example and an elevation: not just for the major-III-in-a-major-key bit, but because of how weird the vocal arrangement gets, particularly when the melody and counter-melody intertwine in unexpected ways. The instrumental is weirdly straightforward and sloppy for a Max Martin production, though I guess combining “Kill Bill” and “Lucky”  fits a song about resenting her audience. More musicians should hate their fanbases – “Fortnight” finally clicked for me because of that interpretation — and I guess if the fanbase wants more “Into You”, this is a pretty good “fuck you.” Emphasis on “pretty good!”
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