In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. As Scott explains here, the column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
In November 2019, I took my ten-year-old daughter to her first concert. It was Ariana Grande, right in that magical moment that she ascended to the top tier of pop stardom. Grande’s albums Sweetener and thank u, next came out a few months apart in 2018 and 2019, and they showed a casual mastery of the moment. Grande was a big deal before that run, but those two back-to-back records pushed her all the way into the pantheon. Grande got close to the top of the Hot 100 many times before “thank u, next” finally took her there, and then that song finally went over the top. For a few years after that, she practically debuted at #1 every time she coughed into a mic.
That night in 2019, I found out a few hours before the show that I had a spot on the guest list, and my kid canceled some sleepover plans so that she could jump around and scream with a vast mob of other little kids and their slightly older peers in a college basketball arena, just a few months before everything shut down. It fucking ruled. We had a blast. She was in fifth grade then. She’s in high school now, and she’s still meeting people who were at the same show. It was the first concert for all of them, too. For the tween girls of Charlottesville, Virginia, Ariana Grande’s visitation was a major life event.
One year after that show, Grande released an entire album that was pretty much completely and exclusively about boning. This was weird for me. It’s my issue. I know that. Pretty much every former child star who stays famous for long enough hits a horny phase. It’s part of the natural order of things. Ariana Grande should be able to sing about boning if she wants.
As former child stars go, Grande was always pretty adult, and plenty of the songs that she sang at that 2019 show were already about boning. “Love Me Harder”? “Side To Side”? “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored”? Those are sex songs. They’re just slightly less overt sex songs. Even though their meanings were pretty clear, kids could put other ideas on them. “One Last Time,” a pretty-much-perfect single that Grande took to #13 in 2013, is about seducing an ex even though that person is already with somebody else. To my kid, though, it became a song about leaving one elementary school and going to a different elementary school. I wasn’t going to correct her on that.
I couldn’t pretend anything more innocent with “Positions” or with any of the other songs on Grande’s 2020 album, which is also called Positions. Positions is basically an R&B record, and none of its songs have any of the Max Martin teen-pop pixie dust where the words simply stop mattering. The album is fully grounded in a specific form of domestic pandemic horniness, and it never pretends to be about any other feeling. I’ll listen to some horny music with my kids, but this particular horny music felt like a step too far. This wasn’t a case where I could tell my daughter, “Hey, Ariana’s got a new album out today!” She had to discover that one on her own. If Positions was a great album, I would’ve been bummed to miss another bonding opportunity like that 2019 concert. Fortunately, Positions is just OK. So is “Positions.”
The Positions story goes like this: Early in 2020, Ariana Grande started dating Dalton Gomez, a luxury realtor in Southern California. They were a steady couple by the time COVID hit, so they quarantined together. Grande was between album cycles during that stretch, but she kept making hits like nobody’s business. “Stuck With U,” an extremely forgettable Justin Bieber duet, had a week at #1 in May 2020. Grande taped her parts of that song’s video at home, and Gomez made a quick appearance at the end of the clip. It was the moment that he and Grande went public as a couple. A month later, Grande got another week at #1 with the Lady Gaga duet “Rain On Me.” That one doesn’t really have anything to do with Dalton Gomez, though.
At the same time as she made these random-ass hit collaborations, Ariana Grande also worked on a new record of her own. With thank u, next, Grande proved that she could release a huge pop record without a months-long rollout full of singles, so she pretty much had license to release new music whenever she wanted. She wrote and recorded her Positions album mostly with a small crew of close friends and collaborators, including producer Tommy Brown and songwriters Victoria Monét and Tayla Parx. She did not work with Max Martin, the Swedish pop scientist who helped out on many of her biggest, best hits. You can tell.
On Positions, Ariana Grande coasts. There are plenty of big, slinky hooks on the record, but it has none of the immediacy of the stuff that she made when she was still trying to achieve the elusive status that we have come to call Main Pop Girl in recent years. On Sweetener and thank u, next, you can hear a hungry Ariana Grande, one who want to achieve full-on pop dominance. On Positions, that’s gone. Maybe she was happier, more settled. Maybe the pandemic shifted her priorities, especially since her new songs wouldn’t need to fuel a big, heavily choreographed live show for a while. Or maybe her ambitions were changing.
Today, Ariana Grande is a movie star. She’ll probably be a movie star for the foreseeable future. She started out as a kid actor, but she’d never played a significant role in a theatrical film before she was in the first Wicked last year. I did not like that picture one bit, but it was a big fat blockbuster, and anyway it wasn’t made with me in mind. Grande is good in it, too. Her first time out of the gate, she got an Oscar nomination, and there’s a case that she should’ve beat actual Best Supporting Actress winner Zoe Saldaña. Remember that? Emilia Pérez? Feels like a century ago, but those Oscars happened during this calendar year. (I would’ve voted for Monica Barbaro in A Complete Unknown, but nobody asked me.) This past weekend, the second Wicked came out and raked in an eye-popping $150 million at the domestic box office. Grande has more movies lined up after that one. She doesn’t have to worry about her spot in the pop-star pyramid anymore. Maybe she was already planning that transition when she made Positions. Or maybe she just had other things on her mind — things like boning.
Ariana Grande might’ve recorded Positions in relative secrecy with a bunch of her friends, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a small production. Three past and future Number Ones artists — the Weeknd, Doja Cat, and Ty Dolla $ign — make guest appearances. Every track has a ton of credited writers and producers. Still, Positions doesn’t feel like a product of the song machine, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Sometimes, pop stars get so big that they can ignore commercial concerns and just make the cool shit that they want to make. That’s not what I hear on Positions. I hear a big star on autopilot, without much to say. It’s not even the old Mary J. Blige thing where fans lose interest when a star finally finds happiness. It’s more like you can hear the star herself losing interest.
But even cruising on momentum, Ariana Grande didn’t make anything outright bad. She just made a surprisingly forgettable record after a string of really great modern pop starbursts. It happens. Lots of talented people worked on the album’s lead-single title track, but the only thing that they managed to create was a pleasant-enough track that didn’t live up to its immediate pop-smash status.
Perhaps because “Positions” came out with very little advance notice, there aren’t too many detailed accounts of how the song was made. Producer Tommy Brown started working with Ariana Grande when she made her debut album, and he’s already been in this column for his work on her songs “thank u, next” and “7 Rings.” On “Positions,” Brown has three co-producers. There’s Steven Franks, known professionally as Mr. Franks, a Minnesota native who’s also been working with Grande for a long time — in his case, since the 2015 holiday album Christmas & Chill. There’s Brian Vincent Bates, otherwise known as Killah B, who grew up in Chicago and New Mexico and who was previously best-known for collaborating with the culty R&B singer Tinashe. (We’ll see Killah B’s work in this column again.) And then there’s London On Da Track, one of the best rap producers of his generation.
London On Da Track, born London Holmes, is originally from Memphis (not London), but he came up as a prolific producer in the Atlanta rap universe. He started out making beats for the Atlanta duo Rich Kidz, which brought him into the circle of Young Thug, someone who’s been in this column a few times and who will return. London produced a bunch of tracks on Thug and the late Rich Homie Quan’s 2014 landmark Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1, one of the all-time great rap mixtapes. He also did Thug and Quan’s big single “Lifestyle,” which peaked at #16 in 2014. On those tracks, you can hear a producer who understands the atmospheric intensity of Atlanta trap but who’s also got a playful melodic sensibility.
After “Lifestyle,” London On Da Track produced hits for rappers like Drake, Kodak Black, and Saweetie. In 2020, London produced “Playing Games,” a Bryson Tiller duet from his then-girlfriend Summer Walker, and it reached #16. Also, London is officially a featured guest on A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s 2020 Roddy Ricch/Gunna collab “Numbers,” even though he doesn’t rap on it. That song reached #23 the same year. But London On Da Track was never credited on a top-10 crossover hit before he worked on “Positions.”
“Positions” has no fewer than eight credited writers. Ariana Grande herself is one of them. So are all four producers. So is Nija Charles, who’s been in this column for co-writing Lady Gaga’s Grande duet “Rain On Me.” And then there are a couple of instrumentalists: Angelina Barrett, a violinist from Atlanta, and James Jarvis, a British guitarist and YouTuber who goes by the name JustAcoustic. JustAcoustic played the plunky riff that runs all through “Positions,” and I would not be shocked to learn that the entire song was just all the different co-writers riffing on that riff.
You already know what “Positions” is about. Grande sings that she’s so into this guy that she’ll change things around for him: “I’ll be switchin’ them positions for you/ Cookin’ in the kitchen and I’m in the bedroom.” But get this: She could also be singing about sex positions! Even in the kitchen! Sometimes people have sex there!
There’s nothing expecially interesting or saucy about Grande’s “Positions” lyrics. She just wants it to be known that she will make herself lightly uncomfortable to keep this guy happy. The only line that really raised any eyebrows was on the intro, where she sings, “Heaven sent you to me/ Just hopin’ I don’t repeat history.” She leaves a big pause in between syllables on the word “repeat,” which was widely interpreted as a subliminal shot at her ex Pete Davidson. Those interpretations are probably accurate, but also, who cares? When you actually have a song called “Pete Davidson” in your catalog, as Grande does, then that kind of implication just isn’t all that interesting. It also doesn’t say too much about the guy who’s supposed to be the actual subject of the song. We know that he passes the crucial “not Pete Davidson” test, but that’s honestly a pretty low bar.
“Positions” has a structure, but it plays less as a song, more as a vamp. If you listen hard enough to the groove, it’s got a lot going on — some fairly intricate and layered trap drum programming, occasional violin-moans, a multi-tracked choir of Ariana Grandes singing backup, a background sound that reminds me of crickets chirping. Grande’s twisty-divey melisma runs are impressive, but they don’t have the melodic weight that her idol Mariah Carey brought to her best songs. After the song’s release, Grande posted a making-of video where we see her arranging her own multi-tracked vocals on the song’s bridge, and it’s cool to get a glimpse at the level of detailed focus that went into the track’s creation. But with her feathery vocals and the song’s floaty strings, “Positions” is too light and airy to make much of an impression. It needs a real hook, and it doesn’t have one.
Grande posted a couple of online teasers before she released the “Positions” single in late October 2020. The Positions album came out just a week after the song. It wasn’t quite a surprise album, but Grande knew she was big enough to make a hit record without doing a whole promotional campaign behind it. “Positions” debuted at #1, interrupting the long reign of 24kGoldn and Iann Dior’s “Mood.” In the song’s video, Grande plays a horny lady president, something that sadly has not existed in actual American history yet. She posted the clip online the same night as the final presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Well, she posted it online the same night as the final Biden/Trump debate of 2020. I’m sorry to report that that there was another one after that. For all I know, there will be another one in three years. Anyway, I think it’ll be a while before we see another pop star posing as a president in a music video. That job just doesn’t seem quite so glamorous anymore.
After its one week on top, “Positions” didn’t disappear instantly, the way some of the other COVID-era event songs did. It got a ton of radio play and stayed at #2 for a couple of weeks before gradually sliding down the chart. The song is now platinum five times over, but it’s not one of Grande’s real smashes. If the song never existed, I don’t think she’d be any less famous than she is now.
The Positions album went double platinum, about on par with Grande’s previous records, but it only had one other big hit. The next single was “34+35,” an even more straightforwardly horny song that doesn’t even really qualify as an innuendo. (If you add those numbers up, you get “69,” as Grande herself helpfully points out on the outro.) “34+35” debuted at #8. Soon afterward, past and future Number Ones artists Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion appeared on a remix, and the track went all the way to #2. (It’s a 7.)
Shortly after schools opened up again and my daughter finally got to start middle school in person, her gym teacher played “34+35” during class. The kids all burst into giggles, and the teacher was humiliated. He was like, “It’s Ariana, man! That girl was on the Disney Channel!” She was really on Nickelodeon, but his point stands. Just saying: I wasn’t the only person who had to deal with some discomfort around the whole Positions era.
Ariana Grande married Dalton Gomez in 2021, and she divorced him less than two years later. By that point, she was just about ready to launch herself into movie stardom. During her endless Wicked press tours, she’s made it clear that pop stardom is not her primary focus these days. But Grande’s pop-star imperial era didn’t end with “Positions.” She’ll be back in this column before long.
GRADE: 6/10
BONUS BEATS: The actual song “Positions” didn’t leave any cultural residue that I can use in this part of the column, so I’ll go with something else that Ariana Grande did around the same time instead. In 2018, Grande covered Thundercat’s spectral space-funk song “Them Changes” during a visit to the BBC Live Lounge. That was just a little while after Grande broke up with the late Mac Miller, a frequent Thundercat collaborator. In December 2020, Thundercat performed “Them Changes” during the livestreamed Adult Swim Festival, and Grande made a surprise appearance to sing it with him. I thought that was a cool thing to do. Here’s that performance:
(Thundercat doesn’t have any Hot 100 hits as lead artist. In 2022, though, he and fellow bass wizard Bootsy Collins appeared on future Number Ones artists Silk Sonic’s “After Last Night,” which peaked at #68.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I’m tryna sell it to your mama on a Sunday, then publish a new column on a Monday. Buy it here.
