25 January 2019
When Tattoos Go Wrong is always great entertainment for the schadenfreude in our hearts. To tie in with the release of her hip-hop track ‘7 Rings’ and its Japanese-themed video, Ariana Grande got herself a tattoo of the song’s title in Japanese characters. However, it turned out that the phrase in Japanese denotes a type of barbecue grill. An attempt to fix it by adding another character only served to turn it into the phrase “barbecue finger”. This is hilariously similar to Ed Sheeran getting a tattoo saying “Galway Grill” in the stage-Irish video for ‘Galway Girl’, apparently a prank by co-star Saoirse Ronan which goes a small way to redeeming her participation in that project and in that SNL Aer Lingus sketch. When the hanging judge of cultural appropriation comes for you, sometimes it’s with needle and ink.
I don’t suppose this song’s use of ‘My Favorite Things’ to list out one’s bling counts as an appropriation of Austrian culture. In any case, except for the most committed Arianators of yore I doubt that when the dog bites and the bee stings you’d reach for solace from ‘7 Rings’. Grande’s breathy, breezy pop style is always liable to slip into self-indulgent fluff like this. There are better hits and other chart-toppers from her out there that we can chuck on the Japanese barbecue grill instead. In fact, there’s another one right up next at the top of the 2019 charts.
