Ariana Grande’s new music video for her song “Petal” opens with a “parental advisory and viewer warning.”
Before a single verse is sung, a voiceover cautions: “The following video contains explicit content and depicts graphic violence, which may be offensive to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.”
It’s an honest warning. The nearly seven-minute video that follows includes one of the most graphically violent sequences in a mainstream Hollywood pop music video in recent history.
In the video, a skeletal-looking Grande plays the role of Pepper, an aspiring actress who repeatedly auditions at the fictional Fame Inc. and faces harsh rejection from male executives over her looks and talent. Eventually, Pepper snaps and murders the panel with a chainsaw.
The sequence cuts between stark red silhouette shots of Pepper wildly swinging the chainsaw and closer live-action frames that show the blood spraying as limbs and fingers are severed. She keeps going until the executives are a mangled, bloody heap, then walks out of the room still covered in gore, as the room full of her fellow female auditionees erupts into applause and cheers.
The scene is so horrifically violent, Allie Beth Stuckey refuses to play it on her show. But she does expose what’s going on beneath Grande’s sudden dark turn.
Allie highlights a disturbing pattern among female pop stars.
“They become darker and edgier and more violent and more disturbed in their artistry as time goes on,” she says, pointing to Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and Chappell Roan as examples. “That seems to also be true of someone like Ariana Grande.”
Between the gory violence in the “Petal” music video and Grande’s “skin-and-bones” frame, Allie is nearly certain the “Wicked” star is under the influence of demonic powers.
“When you have this skeletal figure covered in blood, you see the wedding of these two things [and] she’s glorifying them … I do think that there is something very dark going on mentally and spiritually here,” she says, noting that Grande has not admitted to any weight-related illness or struggle and has insisted she’s “so much healthier now than she used to be.”
“I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes in Hollywood. I think some very scary exchanges probably happen,” Allie continues, “but again, we don’t even need to know all of that to know that this is just the nature of sin: It takes you from one thing to the other.”
She argues that between Grande’s sickly weight, her new dark image, and her dating Ethan Slater, her “Wicked” co-star who was married and had a child, Grande should be “a very controversial figure.”
“But instead her posts still get millions of likes. People still praise her as being beautiful and wonderful,” says Allie. “I’m like, ‘No, this girl is on the brink of death, fantasizing and glorifying murder — the last thing our culture needs right now. And she’s a home-wrecker.”’
To hear more, watch the video above.
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Allie beth stuckey, Ariana grande, Hollywood, Spiritual warfare, Blazetv show
