The Singles Jukebox

Not a Robyn cover?…

[Video]
[6.47]

Hannah Jocelyn: This is “Dancing On My Own (Ariana’s Version),” so the floor is pretty high. It’s honestly so close to being a masterpiece on the level of “Into You” but it’s undone by the Robyn-shaped elephant in the room and some truly bizarre chorus phrasing. “Pre-e-e-tend” is not that many syllables! The original isn’t perfect; the chorus has little to no impact because it’s nearly the same arrangement as the verse. And yet, this remake has its own issues: the backing vocals are so absurdly loud they overwhelm the synths and the actual lead (maybe an attempt at Dolby Atmos-style depth), and when the Aris disappear we’re just left with empty space — not negative space, empty space. You have a whole orchestra at the end, use it! The lyrics are definitely not as memorable as “DOMO”, either; that song endures for its universal sentiment as much as its melody, and this is most interesting if you’re invested in Ariana Grande’s life. She is giving it her all, particularly with a soaring bridge straight out of Ellie Goulding’s Halcyon, but between this track and its inspiration, I’m not sure this is the song I’m taking home.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I abjured this sort of thing when Georgia brought it to me; I cannot quite resist Ari’s own offering to the same extent (it has an actual hook, at least), but it still feels slightly hackish to make this sort of song in 2024. We simply must have some better way to convey the complex cocktail of melancholy and defeated joy that accompanies remembrances of loves just slightly out of reach than doing Body Talk cosplay, right? It’s been more than a decade! There are kids starting high school this fall who were born after “Dancing on My Own” came out! Let the past die; abandon the sophistipop trappings of this stagnant cultural moment; keep the bit where you say “silence” and then the beat stops, it’s cute!
[5]

Tim de Reuse: A catchy, flattened synthpop preset that never reaches for greatness or shows any restraint trudges along with all the emotion of an industrial process. For every moment of insight there is an Ariana-ism (“At least I look this good?” Come on, how is that relevant?) that flicks us away again. Paint-by-numbers unremarkable — and yet, somewhere in the glossy chorus there is the imprint of something truly pathetic; nothing in her delivery of “wait until you like me again” implies that things are ever going to get better, and for a moment the dullness congeals into something. We get a true, insistent flash of the horror of anhedonia, the dead-behind-the-eyes dread of a lonely weekend, the sisyphean task of rewiring yourself to no longer want. I don’t know if it’s deliberate. But it’s compelling, strange, sad.
[7]

Mark Sinker: Ariana has a kind of implacable wax-figure dizziness which is probably what I do think makes for good music, even when it distresses me a bit in people. 
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: A Robyn track with none of the pathos, “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” is all shallow signification. Grande’s voice is too airy to be emotive, and she delivers every line with too much consideration for phrasing. Strangely, it doesn’t seem like she even cares what she’s saying, though though. And even the beat seems vacant.
[4]

Alfred Soto: In another demonstration of her newfound fealty to mild sentiments set to milder beats, Ariana Grande scratch-coos through a closing door that she leaves open at the last second. “You cling to your paper and pens” still stands out on the twentieth play — is it this kind of weirdness that redeems her boy?
[6]

Michael Hong: The line about papers and pens is funny — strange enough to make you believe it’s specific without actually being much of anything. Not contracts and whatever the hell a real estate agent does because maybe Grande couldn’t figure out how to fit that into song or maybe, like me, she just doesn’t know. All throughout “we can’t be friends,” she hangs on this idea of herself being misunderstood: “I didn’t think you’d understand me” or “you got me misunderstood.” She craves the feeling of being understood, liked, and loved, without reciprocity in her mind. Perhaps that’s why sitting in her car right outside the club doesn’t feel like a revelation but a reminder of the vacancy that needs to be filled in. To that end, the strobe synth is a comfort, a sharp first breath away from the noise, a couple minutes of pleasure before the loneliness settles in.
[7]

Anna Suiter: Even if I had a huge crush on Elijah Wood as a teenager, I never actually watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Now I think I don’t have to.
[7]

Jackie Powell: When assessing the chart performance for both of Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine singles, Chris Molanphy astutely compared the general public’s response to Grande’s “Yes, And?” to Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” He explained that both singles didn’t last on the charts or in the cultural zeitgeist because they weren’t relatable to listeners. To complete the comparison, “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” has the potential of Swift’s “Delicate,” which was also produced by Max Martin and achieved incremental “narrative changing” success. The recipe is there: “we can’t be friends” is more introspective, vulnerable and polysemous than its predecessor. The track, heavily influenced by Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” is less catty than Grande’s last single; it reveals that she has the capacity to express and perform complex emotions. An issue I take with Grande as an artist is her struggle to lean into her performance, connect with her audience, and emote; she’s often just focused on how she sounds technically. (This is yet another reason why I believe she was miscast in Wicked.) She often struggles telling her story compellingly when she performs live. On “we can’t be friends,” however, there’s more of an effort to make the listener internalize the sadness and the longing. Her enunciation helps. When Grande performed “we can’t be friends” live for the first time on SNL, she was stiff and awkward and refused to look at the camera with open eyes — a trend during most of her live performances — until the final chorus, which seemed like a turning point for the track as SNL seemed like one for her career. Is this a preview of what’s to come this November in Oz? We’ll have to wait and see. 
[8]

Leah Isobel: Yes, Ariana, I also think “Dancing On My Own” is a great song!
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: I hope Davide Rossi has made back his money, because if I get credit for playing the violin, viola, and cello and have most of my work drowned out by Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh’s limp, ED drums and only get 26 seconds of my hard arrangement to play, I’m going to be pissed. Oh, and if I hear it and it’s bad, I’m disavowing it completely.
[3]

Katherine St. Asaph: Everyone thinks this sounds like “Dancing on My Own.” They are wrong. What this sounds like is a “Hang With Me” chimera: the synths of Robyn’s track with the uncathartic energy of Paola Bruna‘s original. For this reason, and others that don’t need elaborating here, I can’t remember the last time I was so disappointed by a song.
[5]

Ian Mathers: I mean, genuine kudos to Grande for making a kind of passive aggressive breakup song with the press (and/or stans?) so genuinely affecting. I hope those crazy kids can make it work.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: On paper, an anthem about a “break-up with the media” seems too-cute-by-half, a way of trying to hijack our neural pathways in order to smuggle in sympathy for one of the most inherently unapproachable pop star problems. But if “we can’t be friends” is nothing other than an attempt at manipulation, of getting the listener on Ariana’s side, it isn’t any more underhanded than all the little manipulations we use on each other on a daily basis. In fact, it’s surprisingly candid. There’s some diagetic honesty in her trying to critic-proof her message by attaching it to a more blatantly Robyn-derived template than anything Carly Rae’s ever put out, a move that expresses deference more than defiance. And the telegraphed moment of silence, though I laughed the first time I heard it, is a nice way of actualizing the meditative, acceptance-focused vibe while also, through the piped-in urban ambience, hinting at the unsettled feelings that still lie beneath. The grandiose strings of the finale, which in other contexts might ring false, are here used to show just how seriously Ariana takes all of this — a head-held-high defense of her own confessions of dependence and neediness. There will always be room for songs that admit we actually do care what the haters think of us.
[8]

Isabel Cole: Ariana at her most ethereal and Max at his most shimmering and sparkly make this aggressively me-bait, and that’s before the Robyn-reminiscent closer in which the synths fade to let the strings swell send us out. The track is just stupidly gorgeous, a lush soundscape made up of parts meticulously arranged exactly as they should be, each piece necessary, none of it overplayed. Ariana delivers her lines with almost no affect at all, steadfastly refusing to differentiate the lines in tone or intensity, which would normally be a deficit but in this case allows her voice to simply take its rightful place as one of many lovely noises making something wonderful; I like that her high note in the bridge is a little weak, a pleasant jolt of humanness in the midst of this impeccable construction. The lyrics are irrelevant, both because she could not sound less invested in them (compliment) and because every time that warm bass kicks in the language centers of my brain shut down to better appreciate details like that first descending synth line that kicks in partway through the first verse or the twinkling effect in the bridge; having looked them up, I have to say there are worse strategies for dealing with the haters than offering them the aural equivalent of a warm bath dotted with rose petals.
[9]