Ariana Grande is white, and Madame Tussauds in London reminds us of this with her wax figure.
Last week, London's Madame Tussauds wax museum revealed to us the latest victim of its ill-fated habit of modeling life-size wax figures of celebrities.
The wax figure has all the clues that reveal where Ariana grande really came from.
An oversized sweatshirt? Of course. Her ponytail, which is her hallmark, along with some ornamental earrings in her hair: she's been nailed. Her face? Well… Let's just say that she has a rather mayonnaise tone, and is not quite cinnamon. The fact that Grande went to great lengths to remove hints of Caucasian heritage from her might be easy to forget, but that's only until you see a version that doesn't include those modifications.
In a sort of Sliding Doors juxtaposition, Ari's wax figure looks like a younger, paler version of himself, before he discovered and appropriated black culture. The astonishing copy gives us a glimpse of what Ariana could have been, the version who got stuck belting out like Céline Dion and Barbara Streisand from the back of the car, and who had never been shown The Wobble at a barbecue. Let's remember that Ariana Grande is 100% white, despite her rampant racial confusion. (Grande identifies as "half Sicilian and half Abruzzo," which can be translated into Italian-American as "half white and half tan.")
We could say that Grande's look has evolved over the years, we knew her as the child star of the Nickelodeon series Victorious and Sam & Cat, sporting her curls and a red punk ponytail. At the time, her skin tone was pin-up girl-level, but someone had to serve Ariana Grande some seasoned chicken, and she took the raisins out of the potato salad. The neighborhood girl underwent a gradual transformation into a sort of Jenner/Kardashian, increasingly tanned; she did the Kylie treatment on her lips (ahem, too exaggerated); her voice pulled less towards Streisand and more towards the breakdowns of Mariah Carey; and she started hanging out with rappers and badass on a rampant basis.
The industrious artisans at Madame Tussauds in London were overwhelmed by Grande's various stages and appear to have only searched for 2008 images of her face and 2018 photos of her body and clothing. People magazine revealed that Madame Tussauds had taken to Twitter to ask fans of the singer which version of Grande they should represent. The options to vote for were "Classic Ari", "Sassy Ari" or "Princess Ari". The most-voted answer was “Classic Ari”, but clearly, something is off. Her body is “Boyfriend” but her face is “Bye Bye Bye”.
Even Ari ended up commenting "we need to talk" on Popcrave's Instagram post where they posted the image of the wax figure. I bet she does, considering the effort the singer has made to reflect the black culture and African-American appeal in her look and sound, hiring black female songwriters to establish herself as an adult urban artist (which has led to her being accused of plagiarism and cultural appropriation by their peers).
She has experienced the same thing with many white artists who have wanted to shed the pop artist image for the average American that made them famous. Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and many others have turned to emulate black artists to create a more provocative and adult persona. It's no wonder that being "bad boy" or "bad girl" in many cases means appropriating black culture when you consider that studies show that black boys and girls are categorized as aggressive, and loud from very young ages. early.
But as much as she wants to embody what writer Rebecca Walker calls "Black Cool," neither tanning, imitating African-American speech, nor twerking in her videos surrounded by black dancers will change her DNA.
Grande's wax figure at Madame Tussauds in London can be a painful way of reminding Ariana that she is, indeed, white.
