It’s no secret that Ariana Grande has always shown support for the LGBTQIA+ community. And it isn’t just because her brother, Frankie, is gay, but because she has long received support, in turn, from a queer audience who appreciates those high-pitched pipes and that “living doll” aesthetic. Taking into account the tendencies the gay male has of wanting to be, shall we say, effete (female “characters” are just so much more interesting, you know?—and the outfits! The hair! The makeup! No wonder all the gay boys love fetishizing Ari so much), Grande makes for the perfect “Barbie” to want to emulate.
But in her combination lyric video/performance art piece for “pov,” the third single from Positions, neither of the dancers involved, Cory Graves and Brian Nicholson, are anything but themselves as they perform the dance of, er, love. Or rather, the stages of trust involved in falling in love. So yeah, somebody get this on the lineup of choreography to learn at every dance school.
Set against a white background (within an open-air structure) that looks like it could be some “modern ruin” in Greece, it’s very clearly just another tableau in Los Angeles (Griffith Observatory, perhaps?). Helmed by Director X, the lens is deliberately given a fisheye effect to really drive home the whole “point of view” theme. Around the one-minute, thirty-second mark, a distrusting “tussle” between the two men begins as they each face their own insecurities that serve as the real reason for skittishness and hesitancy—not based, in actuality, on anything the other lover is really thinking about him. It’s merely a projection of their own inner self-doubt.
For a brief moment after the “fight,” they lie on their sides with their backs to one another—body language (or “love language,” as Grande might call it) indicating they may not get through this difficult moment of surmounting their trust issues. Until, all at once, they both reach their hands out for one another at the same time in a touching moment of bearing witness to when two people finally let go of all their fears about taking the relationship plunge.
Things get a bit too cheeseball for those with a sentimentality threshold when Graves starts pantomiming that he’s capturing the perfect shot of Nicholson within the “frame” created by his index fingers and thumbs pushed together…right as Grande croons, “I’d love to see me from your point of view.” It’s almost something right out of an 80s movie—which is Grande’s bread and butter as much as anything from the 90s and 00s. At the same time, this song could easily be retroactively placed in Being John Malkovich for some sardonic flair.
What’s more, since this is a song about perspective a.k.a. “vision,” Ari is sure to make optometrists everywhere delight in the lyric, “You’ve got more than twenty-twenty babe/Made of glass the way you see through me.” Former Grande collaborator Nicki Minaj also once expressed a similar sentiment of wonderment on “Right Thru Me.” So yeah, women get really eroticized when they feel seen and heard, which should just go to show how deprived the gender has been of these basic “male-given rights” for centuries (which is perhaps why so many mistake the slightest hint of basic decency for a guy being “great”). And these are rights most definitely given to the males in this video, who by the end, are so spent from all the metaphorical and literal dancing around their feelings that they finally decide to just give in full-stop and relax.
Released as a nod to the six-month anniversary of Positions (already recently celebrated apropos of nothing with a bonus track version of the album), there’s a sort of conspiratorial “fuck you” on Grande’s part to any of the scant few fans of hers who might actually be anti-LGBTQIA+—being that “pov” is a prime case in point of Grande’s own heteronormativity. Something that listeners would expect to bleed into the premise of the video but instead are met with this love letter to gay boys. And it ain’t even Pride month yet. That’s how you note a true ally: always on, no matter the time of year.
