The star who attracted so many young fans to the Manchester Arena may have started her career in a cheesy kids’ sitcom, but from her spectacular voice to her feminist convictions, she is no industry puppet

Ariana Grande is an unusual star to be at the centre of a British tragedy in a northern city. If Monday’s attack had taken place two days later, when Take That were due to play the venue, their music would have undoubtedly formed a central part of the coverage. As it was, many radio stations chose to play Oasis following news of the attack, because of the Manchester connection, rather than the music of Grande herself. She is obviously a very famous singer, but not in a way that the British, or at least Britons over a certain age, can really get a grasp of. She is from Boca Raton, a small city north of Miami, in Florida, a former Nickelodeon star who performs mostly with rappers, and is a product of the internet age.

It is true that she has very young fans. And it is true that, in some ways, she is the dream pop star for children: even though she is now 23 years old, she looks like a Disney princess at a junior prom, all slicked-back hair and lipgloss. But that forms just a small part of the picture. In other ways she is a subversive star, who has an uneasy relationship with the rules of pop, at times finding herself at odds with her fans and her country, at others unapologetically enjoying the trappings of celebrity.

Ariana Grande 'broken' as musicians react to Manchester terror attack Read more

Her career began as a teenager, in kids’ television. In 2009, a 16-year-old Grande auditioned for a new Nickelodeon show. At the time, the channel was struggling. It had cornered the market among younger kids with Spongebob Squarepants, but it was being trounced by the Disney Channel – which had Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers on their books – when it came to tweens. Still, Grande got the job and her show, Victorious, helped transform the channel’s fortunes.

Once they had her, however, Nickelodeon didn’t want to let her go. She became trapped in their universe, making various spin-off shows and cheesy tie-in albums. She told Rolling Stone that she hated the period, calling it “inauthentic and fake”. She described one video shoot as “the worst moment of my life … They gave me a bad spray tan and put me in a princess dress and had me frolic around the street.”

Eventually, Grande worked through her contracts and, in 2013, released her first proper single, The Way, a duet with the rapper Mac Miller. In some ways, it is a track typical of emancipated child stars, complete with sexual lyrics. But there is a romance and honesty that feels bigger than that. “You give me that kind of something./ Want it all the time, need it everyday,” she coos at Miller. “You’re a princess to the public, but a freak when it’s time,” he winks back. In the video, there is a flirty, honest chemistry that seems to go further than anything the director might have asked for. But what makes the track is her vocal: effusive, delicate, as fizzy as Coca-Cola, it sounds like the giddy feeling of falling in love. Clearly the song rubbed off on the performers, too. A year ago, Miller and Grande began dating, and are now nearly always photographed at each other’s side.

Grande continued to perform with hip-hop artists. Her next few singles – Right There with Big Sean, Problem with Iggy Azalea and Bang Bang with Nicki Minaj and Jessie J – propelled her career further, but on her albums she was starting to make cool, aerated pop that sat away from the penchant for big chunky bangers popular at the time. Be My Baby, produced by the Norwegian dance artist Cashmere Cat, and Hands on Me, featuring then little-known Harlem rapper A$AP Ferg, were both sexy and unusual pop songs, enjoyed mostly by nine-year-olds.

She was taken on by Scooter Braun, the manager superstar of Justin Bieber and Kanye West. In 2016, she tried to fire Braun and have her mum take over, but she quickly realised that was a mistake. Since he has returned to her team, her career has rocketed: Grande’s videos rack up hundreds of millions of hits – her song Side to Side (another one that features Minaj) has hit almost 1bn views on YouTube. She has 106 million followers on Instagram and is the platform’s third most popular user. She is a pop star of the Spotify age; the first artist to score a UK No 1 once streaming was accounted for.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grande (left) performing at the MTV Video Music awards in 2014 alongside Jessie J and Nicki Minaj. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/MTV1415/WireImage

Yet it isn’t just the music that has become interesting about Grande. She spent so long on a cheesy kids sitcom, full of terrible gags and canned laughter, that it was assumed she was a bore. Free from that, it soon became apparent Grande is actually very funny.

She was one of the first guests on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, where she was asked to do musical impressions: her Christina Aguilera doing The Wheels on the Bus was both hilarious and vocally spectacular. Around the same time she performed in Miley Cyrus’s back garden, dressed as a mouse, performing a cover of Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over. It feels like the sort of thing that would happen at 5am at Glastonbury in some dark bizarre corner of a tipi field, except that her vocal is Mariah-level perfect.

Perhaps the funniest thing Grande has done, and the defining scandal of her career last year, is lick a doughnut. In CCTV footage leaked from a US bakery, she was seen putting her tongue on a tray of baked goods while a member of staff wasn’t looking. You might question the hygiene of such an act, but there was something wonderfully laddy about it, the sort of gag you would expect from some tattooed pop-punk band, not a made-up pop star. In the same video, she takes a look at a cream-filled, deep-fried, super-sprinkled doughnut extravaganza and is heard saying: “I hate America.” It seems obvious that the comment was aimed at the baked goods rather than the nation state, but in a country where anything other than total patriotism is seized upon ferociously, Grande was hounded for weeks afterwards. Emails from the Democratic National Committee leak in the run-up to the 2016 election revealed that the incident meant she was seen as too risky for a concert at the White House; she was removed from the bill of a concert planned for President Obama.

Arianators assemble: Ariana Grande’s fans weave a web of support Read more

These have not been her only transgressions. Following a meet-and-greet with fans after a show, the New York Daily News reported that multiple witnesses overheard Grande hating on her fans – something the star fiercely denied. But the message – that she isn’t always on-message – was clear. A vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton, Grande attended the Women’s March on Washington with friends this year. Like a lot of stars, she preaches feminism and empowerment. But she also puts platitudes into practice; she recently admonished a fan who bumped into her and Miller on the street in Los Angeles. The fan was excited to see them, and said to Miller: “Ariana is sexy as hell, man I see you, I see you hitting that!” That night, Grande explained on Twitter to explain how hurt she felt by the incident. “This may not seem like a big deal to some of you but I feel sick and objectified,” she said. “I am not a piece of meat that a man gets to utilise for his pleasure … I’m an adult human being in a relationship with a man who treats me with love and respect.” She encouraged fans to speak up against this sort of behaviour: “We are not objects or prizes. We are QUEENS.” In an industry in which women are still paraded around as sex objects or told to get on their knees in hundreds of rap lyrics, the value of that kind of sentiment cannot be overstated.

Undoubtedly it will be difficult for her to move past such an unspeakable horror. Eagles of Death Metal, the band that was playing at the Bataclan in Paris when it was attacked last year, started touring again soon after. But they are old chizzled rockers; she is only 23.

Since the attack, I cannot stop thinking of the last time I saw Grande perform. I was with a friend, and as the two of us turned around from the bar, it hit home that – parents aside – we were the oldest fans there by about 20 years. There is always a mix of ages at gigs such as that, but everyone was so young. So we acted like kids, and the kids got hyper and acted like drunk adults. At one point, seeing a stressed-out parent unable to lift all her children to see the stage, my friend and I were holding children, one five years old, the other seven, in our arms, bouncing them up and down while their eyes boggled in wonder at the stage.

When I was their age I loved Steps and S Club 7: fine music for children, but complete industry puppets without an opinion between them. All I could think was how lucky these children were to have a pop star of such calibre to call their own.

• This article was amended on 29 May 2017. An earlier version referred to Ariana Grande encouraging fans to speak up against the objectification of women and said that the value of this “cannot be undervalued”. This has been corrected to say this “cannot be overstated”.