Unpacking Ariana Grande’s Impact: A Deep Dive into We Can’t Be Friends and Eternal Sunshine Influence

We can’t be friends is easily the video of the year. Not only did it make the most noise, but the way it fully encapsulates the entirety of Eternal Sunshine is visual proof of the concept of the album. I agree with this wholeheartedly. I think that she probably should have just LED with that instead of yes, and although yes and has kind of grown on me since the reaction that I did. But we can’t be friends is the true, the true diva. And I think Ariana is in a real sweet spot when she’s working with Max Martin because I think the combination of him being kind of like melodic math obsessed and Ariana being so unbelievably picky about her vocal production, where her voice is placed, how the harmonies stack, etcetera, etcetera. I think those two things, Ariana’s tendency towards maximalism in her voice and Max’s tendency towards minimalism with production style. And that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t make bombastic stuff, but if you listen to a Max Martin song, they’re not very busy. They don’t have a lot of things going on there. They tend to be quite focused. So I think that that combination, the intersection of their two strongest skill sets is what made Eternal Sunshine such a compelling effort. And we can’t be friends as a really good example of the two of their kind of a stylings colliding and something I respect a lot about Ariana on Eternal Sunshine and On this song, we can’t be friends specifically is her restraint because she has the voice that can go there. Listen to my everything. She’s screaming and shouting all over that. She is up and down in your face. Her voice is like pink being an acrobat bouncing all around the stadium. It’s exactly the same thing. But on Eternal Sunshine, I think she showed incredible restraint to match the mood and the pacing of the album itself and to really execute a concept. And I think a concept album is, is actually very difficult to execute successfully. And I think that her concept of The Eternal Sunshine, of the Spotless Mind, if you haven’t seen it, it’s a movie. It’s about like bleaching memories that are so painful for you from your memory tape and starting over as if they never happened. It’s kind of an interesting comment on trauma, which is something that Ariana has experienced a lot of. And we just see that depicted so beautifully in the music video. And Ariana is a dork. She’s like a media nerd. She loves her movies. She loves her plays. She loves Broadway. And Eternal Sunshine is a Jim Carrey movie, one of her favorite actors. And I think it was recreated in such an artful and contemporary way. A lot of the like recreations of music videos that you’ll see, her recreation of Mean Girls and thank you next, for example, are just created to serve as callbacks. And to be nostalgia bait, I felt that the we can’t be friends music video was really like taking the concept of Eternal Sunshine and applying it to Ariana as an artist. And there were enough creative decisions that I felt differed from the original direction of that movie for it to be its own thing. And Ariana’s acting in that video is incredible. That scene where she, like, the headset malfunctions and a single tear rolls down her face, I was moved by that. I was moved to tears when I saw that. And I’m not often moved to tears by literally anything.