Ariana Grande & Charli XCX Respond To Public Scrutiny On ‘Sympathy Is A Knife’ Remix

brat it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Tonight, Charli xcx released a new version of the album featuring remixes of her original songs, featuring a variety of artists ranging from Julian Casablancas to Tinashe. One of the biggest surprises of the lineup is Ariana Grande, who appears on “Sympathy is a knife.”

In the original song, Charli expresses her complex feelings about being in front of the public, her insecurities and internal comparisons between herself and other women and artists. “I don’t want to share the space / I don’t want to force a smile / This girl takes advantage of my insecurities / I don’t know if it’s real or if I’m spiraling,” he sings at the beginning of the first verse. . Thematically it’s not too different from “Girl, So Confused”.

“This song is about me and my feelings and my anxiety and the way my brain creates narratives and stories in my head when I’m feeling insecure and how I don’t want to be physically in those situations when I’m in no doubt.” said the British artist New York Magazine. He also denied it was Taylor Swift, despite many listeners’ suspicions.

The new version of the song with Grande, however, tackles a different part of being in the spotlight: the immense public scrutiny. Grande made headlines when she divorced her ex-husband, Dalton Gomez, and started dating her. evil co-star Ethan Slater last year. It didn’t take long for her personal life to be picked apart everywhere from tabloids to social media. It’s easy to see where she’s coming from when she sings lyrics like these on the Charli collaboration: “It’s a knife when they dissect your body on the cover / It’s a knife when they won’t believe you / Why you gotta explain ?”

These themes also resonated with Charli. His new chorus includes the lines: “It’s a knife when you’re finally on top / ‘Cause logically the next step is they want to see you fall.” Speaking to Zane Lowe for his self-titled show on Apple Music 1, he talked about how different his life is now than when he first broke out. brat. “So my perspective has changed a lot,” he said.

She explained: “But for me personally, from where I was to now, I’m definitely finding more than ever that my words are being chosen, taken out of context. I’m offending a lot more people by doing exactly the same things. I don’t there’s nothing like breaking here, but I guess because no one cared too much about what I was doing on a day-to-day personal level, I was a little surprised. And it gave me a lot of empathy for the older artists who go through it on a daily basis and they’ve been through it for years. It’s hard to be constantly scrutinized for things you’ve said. It’s hard to have your words taken out of context and then feel like you can’t defend yourself because that would open up another can of worms. .

“And so ‘Sympathy is a knife,’ the remix version, was kind of like me recognizing it and understanding that you only know your own position. And once mine had changed, and I had felt that I had gone through a few interviews throughout this campaign where I had felt that maybe I was being manipulated a little bit or there were other agendas at play, and I had never felt that before. I had felt that Ari wanted to do something and I go say, “This is someone who definitely knows this feeling more than I do.” And so when he wanted to take that sentence like, “It’s a knife,” we’re obviously lucky and lucky to be in the situation where we we find. All the artists who are able to make music at the level that they are doing to give themselves financial support to create art. It’s like we’re lucky because not all artists make it.”

Grande hasn’t fully addressed comments about her over the past year, though she hinted on Instagram that she felt “deeply misunderstood” at the end of 2023. But this summer, she explained why she keeps most of the her answers for herself.

“I always come back to protecting and not taking that bait because I think what I’ve discovered is how to protect my peace and my privacy and the actual details of, you know, sometimes when I would deal with something, it would actually be exposing. more of your real life,” he said on the Evan Ross Katz podcast, Shut up Evan.

“Protecting peace and privacy is really much more important than the understanding and approval of letting people in that way (that) is destructive. And maybe letting people in through art is cathartic and necessary to live,” he added.

While this might be Charli’s first collaboration with Grande, she’s had respect for the fellow singer for years. Last week, some of Charli’s old tweets praising Grande surfaced, to which Grande replied, “me you @charli_xcx.”

Read the full lyrics to “Sympathy is a knife” below, courtesy of Genius.

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