【搬运】【译】英国卫报The Guardian评Ariana Grande专辑《Sweetener》

搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：Ryan-Chopin

校正：Iris六百零七

她和法瑞尔的合作极具突破性，使得这张专辑的其余部分过于墨守成规，甚至黯然失色。

Growing up in public is never straightforward. The route from kids’ TV-approved poppet to Serious Artist is traditionally fraught with issues. But arguably no pop star has ever had a tougher route than Ariana Grande. If it seems crass to suggest that the public and music industry’s perception of her was altered by the events of 22 May 2017 and their aftermath, well, at least one insider already went there. “In all honest[y], I feel like [after the Manchester bombing] was when different people from the record company actually started to understand what we were trying to do,” said Pharrell Williams, the producer Grande drafted in to give her fourth album some artistic edge, earlier this year. “It’s unfortunate that that situation is what gave it context, but they were able to really see it then. And that’s the truth.”

 在公众视野下长大从来不是件容易的事。她一路从儿童电视偶像成长到专业艺人，路途并非一帆风顺。但可以说，没有哪位流行歌手的路途比爱莉安娜·格兰德(Ariana Grande)的更加坎坷。单凭2017年5月22日那天发生的事件就改变公众和音乐界对她的看法，这似乎有些夸张，但有一个人正是那样的。“说实话，我觉得在那时(曼彻斯特爆炸案)起，唱片公司里的各路人才开始清楚认识到我们的所作所为，”法瑞尔·威廉姆斯(Pharrell Williams)这样说道。今年早些时候，格兰德邀请法瑞尔参与了她第四张专辑的制作。“不幸的是，此张专辑背景源于那场事故，那些场景仿佛蕴藏在其中，真实存在。”

 Certainly, the magazine profiles of the singer that have appeared since the terrorist attack have struck a new note of seriousness. One spent time exploring her mother’s love of 19th-century literature and her aunt’s friendship with Gloria Steinem and informed readers that Grande is not a nihilist – a useful clarification for anyone who felt Heidegger’s post-Nietzschean thinking underpinned the contents of her 2015 EP Christmas & Chill. Another opened with a 400-word disquisition on the semantic importance of the height at which Grande wears her ever-present ponytail. Whatever you make of that kind of thing, it suggests that now may be an apposite moment for Grande to try out a more experimental kind of pop than the charming but unchallenging brand of EDM and R&B-infused fizz with which she made her name.

自从恐怖袭击发生后，杂志上便出现了这位歌手的一些简介，这也引起了人们的关注。她曾花大量时间探索了母亲对19世纪文学的热爱，以及她姨妈与格洛丽亚·斯泰纳姆(Gloria Steinem)之间的友谊，这倒提醒了读者，格兰德不是虚无主义者——对于那些认为是海德格尔的后尼采式思维成就了她2015年发行《Christmas & Chill》的人来说，这次澄清十分重要。还有一篇文章以一段400字的论述开篇，讲述了“格兰德始终扎着马尾辫”在语义上的重要性。无论你如何看待这类文章，事实表明，现在的时机或许更适合格兰德尝试这种更具有实验性的流行音乐，而不是EDM和R&B风格的泡沫音乐--悦耳但无挑战性。

And that’s just what Sweetener offers, at least in part. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Pharrell Williams’s back catalogue knows that, as a producer, he is extraordinarily talented and rather mercurial, as capable of making formulaic music as he is of the kind of sonic risk-taking that powered Kelis’s Milkshake or Snoop Dogg’s Drop It Like It’s Hot. But something about this particular collaboration seems to have fired up his imagination. The half of Sweetener with his fingerprints on it represents a genuinely bold and exciting move on Grande’s part. It’s filled with tunes richer and more serpentine than your average millennial pop topline.

  而这正是《甜味剂》所存在的瑕疵，至少有一部分如此。任何一个对法瑞尔·威廉姆斯(Pharrell Williams)制作的音乐略有所知的人都知道，作为一名制作人，他才华出众，既敢于尝试，也能创作出公式化的音乐，正如他为凯利斯(Kelis)制作的 “Milkshake”或为Snoop Dogg制作的“Drop It Like It's Hot”的音乐那样充满冒险。但这次合作似乎激发了他的想象力，他操刀的一大半专辑作品都为格兰德的演唱增添了大胆而激动人心的一笔。这张专辑带来了更丰富、更多变的曲调，已超过新千年流行音乐的平均水准。

On Borderline, Grande’s voice floats airily over a sinister, jarring chord sequence, not unlike the kind of thing that might have provided the hook in a dark old rave track. Even a song as ostensibly frothy as Successful shifts and twists unexpectedly in a way that suggests someone behind it is conversant with the work of 70s soul’s more expansive melodists. The lyrics, meanwhile, stick fast to Grande’s aim of providing light relief – “it feels good to be so young and hot” – rather than dwelling on the horror of what happened in Manchester. The latter topic seems to be addressed only glancingly and tangentially over the course of Sweetener, in the title of No Tears Left to Cry, the refrain of The Light Is Coming (“… to give back everything the darkness stole”) and in Breathin’s depiction of the singer in the grip of a panic attack.

  在“Borderline”中，格兰德的声音轻快地飘过的同时却搭着阴险刺耳的和弦，那可能会让人在一首暗黑的旧狂想曲中被勾起心弦。甚至一首看似成功转型却不乏肤浅的泡沫歌曲，在某种程度上也暗含了有些幕后制作人广识70年代灵魂乐作曲家的作品。另外，歌词体现了格兰德的一种积极信仰——“充满活力又年轻的感觉真好”，她没有无限沉浸在曼彻斯特恐怖袭击的悲伤中。专辑后一半的主题似乎只是被“一笔带过”,似乎有脱离《甜味剂》的感觉，例如主打歌曲“No Tears Left To Cry”,“The Light Is Coming”的副歌部分（“...to give back everything the darkness stole”），还有“Breathin”似乎展现了歌手陷入恐慌症的情景。

The album is packed with songs that blithely dispense with standard verse-chorus structures, that fling disparate musical influences together and seem to go out of their way to avoid cliche: the title track offers a bizarre, gripping splice of earthy Carole King-ish singer-songwriter piano ballad with Migos-inspired hip-hop, complete with onomatopoeic vocal interjections. In a world where a vast tranche of mainstream pop seems to be made using a checklist of sounds and effects, there is something very striking about the blue-sky thinking behind The Light Is Coming: a distorted snatch of dialogue from a news report about an angry rightwing crowd in rural Pennsylvania protesting against Obamacare runs throughout; the rhythm track jitters and glitches, overlaid with whistling, ping-ponging 80s video game electronics; the chorus is a playground chant, albeit with apocalyptic overtones.

  这张专辑的歌曲,都抛开主歌到副歌的一般标准结构,将不同的音乐风格混杂，似乎在故意避免陈词滥调。其主打歌曲夹杂了劣质版卡罗尔·金的钢琴抒情风与Migos的嘻哈风,也不乏格兰德突然融入的炫技型歌喉。在这个世界上,绝大部分主流流行音乐爱用各种音效加持,而在“The Light Is Coming”中我们能看到一个不成熟的想法:歌曲背景出现了一个扭曲的人声，这是从一篇关于一名右翼人士在宾夕法尼亚州乡村集会中抗议奥巴马医改的新闻报道中截取的;其节奏轨不稳且存在毛疵，还拌着80年代电子游戏设备的砰砰杂声;尽管带有世界末日的弦外之音，但其副歌部分也有于操场演绎圣歌般的韵味。

The only problem is that these collaborations throw the rest of Sweetener into an unforgiving light. The gulf in invention between, say, Get Well Soon – a brave lyrical exploration of Grande’s mental health set to spiralling analogue synthesisers and lush multi-tracked vocal harmonies – and the saccharine ballad Better Off is pretty gaping. Clearly no one gave Swedish superproducer Max Martin the memo about avoiding cliches: his tracks deal exclusively in boilerplate stuff of varying degrees of quality. Driven by a skipping UK garage-inspired beat, No Tears Left to Cry is a high-quality example of the songwriter-for-hire’s art; on the other hand, Everytime is entirely formulaic and the most arresting thing about God Is a Woman is its title.

  美中不足的是，这些合作将《甜味剂》其余部分都扔进了无情的聚光灯下。其歌曲存在极大分歧，在“Get Well Soon”中我们可以发现，这些大胆的歌词中蕴含着格兰德的精神情感，是模拟合成器和丰富的多音轨和声的组合运用，而在“Better Off”中，其极其甜美的抒情曲风又存在明显的裂缝与漏洞。显然，没有人给这位瑞典超级制作人马克斯·马丁(Max Martin)一份关于避免陈词滥调的通知:他的曲目制作完全是千篇一律，且质量参差不齐。但在英国车库舞曲风格的跳跃型节奏推动下，“No Tears Left to Cry”是一首流动型制作人制作的高质量歌曲的典范;另一方面，每一次他的制作都是完全公式化的，而“God Is a Woman”最瞩目的便是它的歌名了（上帝是个女人）。

It makes for an uneven album that attempts to balance the desire to – as Grande put it – “make the weirdest thing we can” with something infinitely more straightforward. It sounds like the work of an artist torn between doing exactly what she pleases and, perhaps understandably under the circumstances, giving her audience what they want. But there’s no doubt which of these impulses is more successful artistically. It’s hard not to hope she throws caution completely to the wind next time: the world could use more pop music as imaginative as Sweetener’s highlights.

  其试图在“做我们能做的最新奇的事情”和“更直接的事情”之间找到平衡，但这使得这张专辑的音乐变得参差不齐。这张专辑听起来像是一位分裂艺术家的作品，此情此境下我们或许可以理解，她既想遵从内心，又想呈现出大众所爱。但毋庸置疑的是这些冲动中总有一些取得了艺术成功。我们肯定希望她下次能完全放飞自我，因为世界可以拥有更多元的流行音乐，而《甜味剂》的存在正是富有音乐想象力的代表。