John Paul Meenan in LifeSiteNews:
I must confess that I had never heard of Ariana Grande until this morning. In the photo on her Wikipedia page, the 23-year-old singer is dressed in what looks like a naughty nightie, something you would buy in the back of Victoria’s Secret. Not exactly a role model one might choose for young women and girls in our already sex-saturated culture. There is a method to the madness of ISIS, and they choose their targets with aforethought. To such ‘men’ who have their women dress, if dress is the right word, in what amount to full-body shrouds, one can see how someone like Grande and her troops of teenage imitators would make them froth and foam at the mouth.
Alexis Petridis in the Guardian:
My daughters are 10 and seven, and I take them to pop gigs in arenas, exactly like the one that was attacked on Monday night. I don’t do it on sufferance, although there are frequently things I would rather be listening to than whatever is on offer. I do it partly because it was something I was never allowed to do myself as a kid and sorely regret being denied – I was 15 before I saw a live show. But mostly I take them because I think those big pop gigs do something incredibly important. (…)
Nor was it the way her lack of cynicism made me reconsider my own feelings, although that happened too. I have always been deeply suspicious of the kind of rhetoric that modern pop surrounds itself with: all that platitudinous “just be yourself”, “if you dream it you can do it” stuff. But my daughter took it all at face value and I ended up thinking: Well, there’s certainly worse messages you can send out to kids.
But mostly it was the way it gave her a first glimpse of a world that was previously outside her experience, a more adult, or at least more mature world than the one she knew, a world that would one day be her own, and how excited she was to see it, how – as she put it – grown-up it made her feel.
