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Why do pop stars align themselves with astrology? Heaven knows | Elle Hunt

Ariana Grande, SZA and Kacey Musgraves are just a few of the musicians to invoke astral powers in their songs. It’s a reach for relatability – but what does it mean for songwriting?

My eye was caught by a line informing me and my fellow Pisceans that we were in the final stretch of a punishing three-year visit from Saturn, the “taskmaster planet”, but pretty soon everything was going to be fine. To Satya Doyle Byock, a psychotherapist and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, the transition is often accompanied by turmoil as people correct course ahead of the next development stage. To quote the philosopher Theodor Adorno in his prescient 1974 analysis of the LA Times’ horoscopes, it “represents a layer which is neither quite admitted nor quite repressed – the sphere of innuendo, the winking of an eye and ‘you know what I mean’.” Musgraves’ Deeper Well leans heavily on this kind of generic language, blunting her old acuity as a songwriter, while the blithe, fluid invocation of both therapy and astrology on Eternal Sunshine is the only dull spot on an otherwise effervescent album.

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