There have been many pop acts in the charts over the years who have been a bit crap. In the last 15 years or so, I would say at least 90% of the records in the Top 40 have been crap. On that basis, any successful chart act of the modern era is likely to be crap.
As a general rule, I'm ok with that. When Ed Sheeran had 16 records in the Top 20 in the same week, I didn't mind. I have nothing against the man personally, but music wise I'm yet to hear a record of his that I actually like. I could say the same thing about Drake as well, I could list some more successful but crap chart acts that I have no problem seeing at number one.
However, there are a select few that I can't help but get irritated by the level of their success, and as you may have guessed Ariana Grande is one of those. Yesterday she scored her 6th number one with her 25th Top 40 hit in a chart career that only began 6 years ago.
In some ways though, this is like Rihanna all over again. I remember back in 2005 when we were first introduced to Rihanna. She was a new signing to Def Jam with her debut hit being "Pon De Replay" which was a bit of a nothing song. I saw her as being the new Christina Milian, i.e. a young female pop singer who's branded as being R&B who will have a handful of hits before disappearing. Although Christina Milian would have one more hit in her, she was pretty much finished by this point.
A few more hits followed for Rihanna, but by the end of 2006 her popularity seemed to be fading. Her final hit of 2006, "We Ride", only made number 17. This was surely the end of Rihanna, that's what I'd hoped at least.
Of course it was just the beginning really. In the summer of 2007 she was back with the extremely irritating "Umbrella". From this point she never seemed to be away from the charts, and the excessive number of hits backs this up. At the time of writing she's had 49 Top 40 hits and 9 number ones.
Fortunately she doesn't do much in the way of music these days. She's had one Top 40 hit this year as a featured artist and her last hit before that came in 2017. Despite this she's still in the limelight for whatever else she's supposed to be doing.
The big question though is why has she had that level of success? Quite a few of her songs are written by Stargate, who a quite prolific in writing hits for other people so this would be a factor, but she's a terrible singer, surely someone else could have done a better job with those songs.
Onto Ariana Grande then. I like many others didn't really know anything about her until the incident at her Manchester concert. When I did hear her music though I thought it was bad, even by todays standards.
The formula is the same though, terrible singer and terrible music with an excessive number of hits. Whilst Rihanna had help from Stargate, she's had help from the most successful songwriter of the modern era, Max Martin.
On that basis, she probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It took Rihanna till hit number 28 to score her 6th number one, but she was 6 years into her chart career when she scored hit number 25.
If Ariana Grande is the new Rihanna though she'll probably give up music to become a celebrity. The day Ariana Grande stops making music can't come soon enough, but as history shows, when that day comes we'll likely have someone just as dreadful clocking up the hits.
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