Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth
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Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth

Ariana Grande Found an Excuse To Imitate Britney Spears in a Saturday Night Live Sketch

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Let’s all guess how much Tidal, a streaming service which I, like many Americans, forget exists until Kanye tweets about it, paid off the writers at Saturday Night Live to create a sketch that namedrops them a bunch while a famous performer sings in the background. Just kidding. (Mostly.)

In the March 12 sketch, Ariana Grande plays a severely frightened-looking intern who roams the halls of Tidal’s HQ, whose decor mostly resembles Vladimir Putin’s favorite interrogation room. After a mishap happens in the control room and some of the streams go down, it’s up to Grande to step in and sing like each performer, because that’s how streaming works?

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Most of Grande’s impressions are completely on fleek, as the youths say: her Britney Spears imitation captures that twangy nasal quality that Brit Brit possesses, and all her Celine Dion needs is an appropriate, violent chest pound. Her Shakira mimicry gives her a chance to correct a misconception when Jay Pharoah’s character profiles her as “Hispanic” (which apparently means she can sing like her?); as Ariana says, “That’s a common mistake, I’m actually just very Italian”). And her Whitney Houston? Damn.

Grande’s Rihanna impression didn’t fair as well—I imagine it resembles what a fish having a seizure must look like—but that’s on purpose: Grande admits in the sketch that she “doesn’t know what [Rihanna’s] saying” in the song “Work,” which is also a thing? I guess?

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Contact the author at jamie.reich@jezebel.com.

Image via NBC/YouTube.