By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Right now, Ariana Grande is having a moment: she had already found major success as both a singer and an actor before landing a starring role in Wicked, a blockbuster movie that put all of her skills as a performer to the test. Wicked proved to be a blockbuster smash that sent Grande’s career flying just as high as the Wicked Witch, but a new scandal is threatening to bring her right back down to Earth. Her team is allegedly copyright-striking old videos where Grande is seemingly using a fake Black accent, and the negative attention she’s now getting proves one thing: the internet never forgets.
The Ariana Grande Accent Scandal
The heart of this Wicked scandal is the accusation that Ariana Grande used a fake Black accent (or blaccent) in previous media appearances as a way of giving herself and her career something of a makeover. One fan (@goodgirlffaith) posted a video on X with numerous examples of the singer’s alleged blaccent on December 28, where it racked up an impressive 26 million views. It might have gotten even more, but the video was removed by a copyright strike from (according to the user who posted the vid) Grande’s own legal team.
Part of what makes this Wicked scandal so spicy is the alleged reason behind the copyright strike. According to the X user who posted it, the reason for the video’s removal is that “it was pirated/leaked content,” but she pointed out that the footage was taken from “officially released” interviews and therefore “fell under fair use.” That same video was posted to TikTok and subsequently removed, leading to a theory that Grande’s legal team is doing everything in its power to avoid the negative repercussions that the singer’s alleged blaccent could cause to her career and her latest film.
Obviously, it’s impossible to know the exact motivations of Ariana Grande’s legal team. They may very well have thought that the original video somehow contained pirated content. And if there really was some major conspiracy to hide all evidence of the singer’s alleged blaccent, that same legal team would have kept the video from being reposted or tried to strike other videos dealing with similar subject matter. Nonetheless, that vid has been successfully reposted as a YouTube short, meaning anyone can watch the footage of the modern Grande interviewing a past self who has noticeably darker skin and a noticeably different accent.
For the creators of the Wicked movie, this scandal hit at the worst possible time, and the efforts to remove the original video have only made more people curious about how Grande has changed over time. Notably, controversy about her accent and appearance goes back many years to when she was working with Black artists like Victoria Monét on more R&B-influenced music. During this time period, Grande rocked a deep tan and a different accent, prompting speculation that she wanted fans to think of her as Black (she is actually Caucasian), and this old scandal is now poised to threaten her future career ambitions.
There’s a lesson here for all of us: the fact that Wicked fans and haters came together to create this scandal at the height of Ariana Grande’s fame is proof that the internet never forgets anything. The controversies of yesterday are neither forgotten nor forgiven…they are instead being edited into clever videos that will be released whenever a celebrity needs to be taken down a peg. And should this video gain more traction thanks to her legal team’s alleged interference, Grande might have to take notes from her Wicked character and ultimately re-learn how to be popular once more.
Source: PopCrush