The 2020s File Feature
What Is This Feeling?
What Is This Feeling? — Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo Bring Broadway's Great Rivalry to the ChartsDecember 2024. The most anticipated film adaptation in ye…
01 The Story
What Is This Feeling? — Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo Bring Broadway's Great Rivalry to the Charts
December 2024. The most anticipated film adaptation in years had finally arrived, and with it one of the most talked-about castings in recent memory. Wicked, the stage musical that had been running on Broadway and the West End for more than two decades, came to the screen with Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, two performers whose profiles could hardly have been better calibrated for the roles. Among the songs from that film's soundtrack to reach the charts, What Is This Feeling? was one of the most dramatically apt: a number built entirely on mutual antagonism between two characters destined for an unlikely friendship.
The Source Material and Its Legacy
The original stage musical Wicked, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, opened on Broadway in 2003 and became one of the longest-running and highest-grossing shows in theatrical history. What Is This Feeling? is one of its sharper comedic numbers, establishing the hostile dynamic between the two female leads through competitive sniping disguised as polite introduction. The casting of Grande and Erivo in these roles was notable because both women brought not just acting credentials but vocal power of a genuinely unusual order.
The Chart Performance
The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 7, 2024, at position 68, before climbing to its peak of number 62 on December 14, 2024. It spent five weeks on the chart, carried by the considerable promotional momentum of the film's release and the combined fan bases of its two stars. The 40.8 million YouTube views accumulated since release reflect both casual curiosity about the film and the devoted following both performers bring to any project.
Two Voices, One Perfect Collision
What makes the recording distinctive, beyond the theatrical material it draws from, is the specificity of what Grande and Erivo each bring to it. Grande's instrument tends toward lightness, agility, and a kind of confectionery sweetness that suits Glinda's performative pleasantness perfectly. Erivo's voice carries a gravity and depth that makes Elphaba's barely concealed contempt feel earned and three-dimensional. The contrast between them is not merely characterful but musically textured, and the interplay benefits from the fact that both performers genuinely understand how to inhabit a song rather than just sing it.
Soundtrack Success in the Streaming Era
Theatrical soundtrack releases have had a complicated relationship with contemporary chart mechanics since streaming became dominant. The Wicked film soundtrack was a genuine commercial event, and several of its tracks made chart inroads in the final weeks of 2024. What Is This Feeling? benefited from its position as a duet between two of the most followed artists in either performer's respective lane, and from the fact that the film's enormous box-office performance kept it in public conversation for months.
Where It Lives in the Story
The song will be remembered as part of a genuinely major cultural moment: the moment when one of theatre's defining musicals finally reached the screen with a cast worthy of its ambitions. Press play and hear two world-class voices at play in material that was made for exactly this kind of talent.
“What Is This Feeling?” — Ariana Grande & Cynthia Erivo's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
What Is This Feeling? — The Beautiful Chemistry of Instant Dislike
Some of the most compelling relationships in dramatic literature begin not with attraction but with repulsion: two people who recognize each other's intensity and respond to it with hostility precisely because they see something threatening in it. What Is This Feeling? from Wicked is a comic dramatization of exactly that dynamic, and its theatrical wit holds up beautifully in the 2024 film recording.
Competitive Chemistry as Theatrical Device
The number functions as an exposition tool: within its runtime, it establishes the entire arc of the Elphaba-Glinda relationship, from immediate mutual antipathy through the layers of social performance that both characters use to manage their actual feelings. The lyrics use the formal language of politeness as a vehicle for barely concealed aggression, which is one of the oldest comedic techniques in theatrical writing and one that lands particularly well when performed by actors with enough skill to keep both registers simultaneously visible.
What the Song Says About First Impressions
At a deeper level, the song explores how two people can look at each other and immediately construct a narrative about who the other person is, a narrative that says as much about the observer as the observed. Glinda reads Elphaba as a social threat; Elphaba reads Glinda as vacuous and conformist. Both readings contain enough truth to be defensible and enough distortion to be wrong. The dramatic irony is that the audience already knows these two will end up deeply entangled, which makes the performance of their hostility feel both funny and a little poignant.
The 2024 Stars and the Roles They Were Born to Play
Part of what made the film's casting so widely celebrated was the sense that Grande and Erivo were not simply adequate choices for these roles but genuinely ideal ones. Grande's persona, which has long involved navigating public expectations about sweetness and depth, maps onto Glinda's arc in ways that feel almost too apt. Erivo's history as a theatrical powerhouse whose versatility extends well beyond the stage gives her Elphaba a specificity that goes beyond the singing.
Rivalry as the Seed of Genuine Connection
The larger Wicked narrative transforms the rivalry established in this song into one of the most affecting friendships in contemporary musical theatre. What Is This Feeling? works because it plants the seeds of that connection even while depicting its opposite; the sheer attention the two characters pay to each other, even in dislike, hints at the intensity of what will follow. The song asks what this feeling is partly because neither character can fully admit that what they feel might be, among other things, recognition.
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