Ariana Grande’s rough ride to the top: from coffee and doughnuts to terrorism to pop queen
- After the terrorist attack at her concert in Manchester, Grande returned to the city to sing and has kept performing
- She is the first person since the Beatles to have three singles from an album at the top of the Billboard charts at the same time
The doughnut licking incident seems like a lifetime ago.
Remember that? In 2015, before she became an unassailable heroine. Before she became the first artist since the Beatles to simultaneously have three songs on top of the Billboard singles chart, Ariana Grande was an inexperienced and untested pop star.
The then-22-year-old singer made pretty gross TMZ and tabloid news by being caught touching her tongue to a variety of glazed goodies in a California bakery and – gasp! – saying, “I hate America.”
The vocalist with the Brigitte Bardot high ponytail who began as a teen actress on the Nickelodeon show Victorious apologised. She said she didn’t really hate America; she was just concerned with sugar intake and childhood obesity. And she said seeing herself “behaving poorly” on a hidden camera video made her feel “so disgusted with myself”.
America forgave her, thank goodness, and Grande’s career survived the mini scandal. She went on to do spot-on musical impressions on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and display comedic flair hosting Saturday Night Live, where she introduced herself as “a singer, not a coffee drink”. (These days, however, she is the spokeswoman for a coffee drink.)