Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

I want to tell them to get off the internet and engage with something that isn't endless critculure.

ironically this is the same thing JES is telling grimes to do

that jes thing is really well written but i had to stop after she tried to apply grimes' opinion about mariah carey to grimes' own artistic pursuits

feels like a disingenuous, forced connection

i say that as someone who initially held lex's view of the record and then realized last week that it is the gothy freestyle record i have always deserved

haha

There are so many reasons one could dislike Grimes. I was excited to see them articulated, but this piece was just bizarrely off base. This part in particular:

Grimes seems bent on negating her humanness and operating from robot zone, herself.

Really? She sounds like a robot? She negates her humanness? You might not like her personality, but how can you accuse her of not having one? If anything, I thought people found her personality overbearing.

Yet others who’ve embarked on such pursuits — Bjork, for example — have recognized the paradoxical intertwining between nature’s ether and that of the web. Grimes’ music feels like it’s operating in a vacuum, and while internet-referencing internet music is zeitgeistical, eventually the vacuum’s gonna run out of air.

Come again?

Of course, Grimes’ cyborg unicorn stance is an updated ideal on the continuum of the asexuality that a certain strain of indie rock values, up to and including twee.

In what world does this album lack sexuality? Grimes dwells constantly on physical contact ("Skin," "Be A Body"). And she sings in orgasmic squeals.

oh yeah i also stopped reading because of the word "zeitgeistical"

Grimes has a host of recent-vintage contemporaries who approach their music with a similar concept, like Lykke Li and Fever Ray and Bat For Lashes and even fellow blog star Charli XCX, all of whom do similarly conceptualized music but tap into their womanhood and sexuality as a source of power, some might say THE DARK ARTS OF WOMANNESS.

This is just terrible writing and impossible to take seriously.

My problem with it is that the writer fails to recognize the paradoxical intertwining between nature’s ether and that of the web, unlike others who've embarked on such pursuits.

And she sings in orgasmic squeals.

lot of squealing on this album, not a moment of it sounds "orgasmic", thankfully

and her dwelling on the physical never actually reads as physical. upthread enya comparisons otm. the language might suggest physicality, but the music and performance deny this. closest thing to a body here is the hiccup in the "oblivion" loop.

I think there may be some yearning for the physical, but as far as its presence it's kind of floating as a figment within, or sharing the same space with a more spectral reality. like how people live lives with one foot in the physical and one foot in this non-place/space/everywhere which all kind of shares the same space (and in the case of the online, your personality/humanness kind of floats there as an ethereal presence - I think her voice works in the music like this - liquified humanity floating in a digital everyspace)

sorry, that could have been written more clearly (a comma between 'everywhere' and 'which' would help)... just waking up here.

basically just meaning to say there that her human presence registers the way personality registers online, there's still a human presence hovering there but some of the things that come with physical interaction/presence are gone or diminished. although I personally still feel her music reflects the balance, or coexistence, of online and offline life, culture and humanity seeping into online space

strongly resistant of the temptation to read this album as being "about" online identity, even if that's the artist's explicit intent. just don't see this theme convincingly or compellingly developed in the music/lyrics themselves, and though it's an interesting lens to try on, it could apply equally well to almost any electronic/low affect/alienated/disembodied music.

it's not that I see it as being directly about online identity, as much as it's just coming from that reality. I get this picture of a faint, slightly bewildered humanity still trying to connect and find ways to live out its humanness in a rotating topology of some Information Sublime

Chris S's posts are great; and I think they speak to how substantial Boucher's songwriting is, even if she downplays its importance

Totally agree with contenderizer, too. These songs aren't about online identity. That's just lazy writers' way of framing them based on something cool she said in an interview once

I mean, "post-internet" is a cool way of contextualizing these songs, but if that's your only takeaway from them, you need to do less reading and more listening

i don't really feel like grimes succeeds in conveying what her songs are "about" at all - not that she should have to but it's why they feel somewhat thin and empty to me. don't get a sense of physicality or otherwise, it doesn't evoke much of anything, certainly nothing about identity let alone post-internet identity.

i certainly don't need it be about anything, beyond an interesting voice & some good ideas

i agree that the whole "post-tumblr" thing is ridiculous, but it's just press copy, doesn't affect how i hear the music

well demanding a song be "about" "something" "specific" is ridiculous yeah, but music should certainly evoke something, put something in mind, even if it's just an image or colour or whatever, and that's what i don't get from grimes music - it's flat, it's literally just sound.

tbh I totally experience all those things in the music - post-internet identity (in her presence and in the flow of influences, and stuff about 'being a body' etc in the face of all this). the slight thinness, 'emptiness' to her voice (although it has a lot of substance/emotional resonance for me, but there is certainly a faintness/ethereal quality) is a part of this too - to my experience of it at least

My sense of this album is that its intimacy feels internalised, as if Boucher is singing to herself (I'm using "to" in a strong sense here - like she's addressing herself) and the listener is posited as the part of her being sung to.

My reaction may be slightly overdetermined by how much she reminds me of Happy Rhodes in electronic mode - both vocally (with the high portion of Happy's register anyway) and musically, but also thematically - there's a kind of dasein vibe at work, which is maybe why so many of the songs also seem to be about the creative process itself, music about its own making (and perhaps as a general rule if you're not really enamoured of a musician's creative process then any oblique odes to it will seem to be about "nothing).

My sense of this album is that its intimacy feels internalised, as if Boucher is singing to herself (I'm using "to" in a strong sense here - like she's addressing herself) and the listener is posited as the part of her being sung to.

...there's a kind of dasein vibe at work, which is maybe why so many of the songs also seem to be about the creative process itself, music about its own making

again, those are intriguing concepts, but i don't think they're strongly present in grimes' music/lyrics - at least no more so than in lots of other music. i mean, "dasein vibe" suggests so much, but specifically attaches to so little. grimes' songs tend to be less about doing than being, but that's as far as i can follow that train of thought wr2 what i actually hear here.

intimacy is a strange and loaded word in any context. i've realized recently that the quality i like best in several of the 2011 albums i was initially exposed to in the year-end poll thread is a quality of intense intimacy (referring primarily to colin stetson's new history warfare 2, julia holter's tragedy, king creosote & john hopkins' diamond mine and nicholas jaar's space is only noise). there's something a bit sickly and even oppressive about that kind of intimacy, an unfiltered, unmediated engagement that verges on oversharing. when you're close enough to hear the tongue moving in someone's mouth, see the contractions and dilations of their pupils, you might be too close for comfort. i don't get that sense at all from grimes, and therefore it's hard for me to think of her music as particularly "intimate". which perhaps does raise questions about what intimacy might be in a dephysicalized, delocated context, but i don't think this album really addresses them.

that's interesting, Tim - it brings to mind the stuff she's said about wanting the be both the producer and the Star... the producer being a traditionally male role and the Star kind of being the inheritance of the classical Western role of the woman as object-to-be-seen-under-the-Male-Gaze. like, in John Berger's Ways of Seeing, in his chapter on the Male Gaze and the history of the representation of women in art, he describes how within women in this context, there can be an internal male judge viewing themselves as they are seen from without, and from this every action is performed with understanding that men are always seeing and rating.

and Boucher demonstrates that here, creating and performing herself, to herself (a viewership/listenership that also symbolizes the outside listener/viewer), but in taking more charge of the producer role and exposing the creative process she's kind of collapsing that binary

and back to the Internet again, it also reminds me of the way the Net makes people realize they're always performing in a sense, so they learn to take control of both the process of self-creation and self-display (through Facebook profiles, twitter, everwhere). her self-conscious performing herself into being (but earnestly so, it doesn't feel like the gestures made are artificial) is like this gender-neutral fusion of the Gainsbourg and Birkin/Phil and Ronnie Spector/Hazlewood and Sinatra... so in other words it's a Lana Del Rey visibly and honestly in charge of her own production/realization

so in other words it's a Lana Del Rey visibly and honestly in charge of her own production/realization

or lady gaga or any other woman who produces the music that she is seen to perform

sure

it's a thing I'm seeing a lot lately

the female producer-and-performer is not that rare

intimacy is a strange and loaded word in any context. i've realized recently that the quality i like best in several of the 2011 albums i was initially exposed to in the year-end poll thread is a quality of intense intimacy (referring primarily to colin stetson's new history warfare 2, julia holter's tragedy, king creosote & john hopkins' diamond mine and nicholas jaar's space is only noise). there's something a bit sickly and even oppressive about that kind of intimacy, an unfiltered, unmediated engagement that verges on oversharing. when you're close enough to hear the tongue moving in someone's mouth, see the contractions and dilations of their pupils, you might be too close for comfort. i don't get that sense at all from grimes, and therefore it's hard for me to think of her music as particularly "intimate". which perhaps does raise questions about what intimacy might be in a dephysicalized, delocated context, but i don't think this album really addresses them.

I find the Holter and Jaar albums much less intimate than this, though I can sort of see what it is and them that you find intimate. With Jaar in particular the intimacy strikes me as a byproduct of the music being so insubstantial that it cannot form an existence separate to the listener (and I love most of Jaar's non-album work).

I think all this goes towards how a lot of the qualities we're arguing over whether Grimes does or does not have are qualities which do not exist in themselves but only by virtue of the relationship struck between the music and the listener - humanness, intimacy, corporeality/physicality etc.

It's a trite truism obv but I think that we'll basically keep on digging in our trench positions on this point all governed by whether we "click" with the album in the first place.

lex - yeah, definetely not, even the whole process of beautication is self-production for performance, it's as old as gender constructions, but I'd say there's maybe more of an emphasis on an exploration of the production side, and its technique, with Grimes and artists like her. but maybe not (will need to make a list I think)

a lot of the qualities we're arguing over whether Grimes does or does not have are qualities which do not exist in themselves but only by virtue of the relationship struck between the music and the listener - humanness, intimacy, corporeality/physicality etc.

that's a good point, and it perhaps raises questions about how music can imply things about the nature of that relationship. maybe one of the things that's interesting about grimes' "singing to myself" approach is that the result doesn't really define the space in question, leaving listeners to decide for themselves where they stand in relation to the music and the place the artist establishes for herself within it. thus you can construct it as intimate or distanced, depending on your proclivities. maybe this fluidity also enhances the sense that the music reflects identity on the internet.

completely disagree about nicolas jaar's music being insubstantial, even on the slighter-in-comparison album - each track has a deceptively solid foundation, a bassline or a groove or a hook that works as the starting point for him to weave his magic.

The female producer-and-performer is not rare, but at the same time to simplify massively it exists along a continuum where one side of the equation can be emphasised more than the other.

Lady Gaga, for example, seems more invested in performance than production, which is not to say that she does not attend to the latter, but that she produces for the purpose of performance.

If this seems meaningless, compare with, say, a house producer who adds soft diva-esque vocals to her own tracks - while it might be important to her that she does her own vocals, the music itself does not frame the vocals in that matter (and but for our own intermittent

That cut off the second half of my post. Let's try again:

The female producer-and-performer is not rare, but at the same time to simplify massively it exists along a continuum where one side of the equation can be emphasised more than the other.

Lady Gaga, for example, seems more invested in performance than production, which is not to say that she does not attend to the latter, but that she produces for the purpose of performance.

If this seems meaningless, compare with, say, a house producer who adds soft diva-esque vocals to her own tracks - while it might be important to her that she does her own vocals, the music itself does not frame the vocals in that manner (and but for our own intermittent creator-fetishism, as listeners it probably wouldn't matter to us who did the vocals). You could say that an artist doing this kind of thing is performing for the purpose of production.

Grimes exists pretty squarely in the center of the continuum, and I think an effect of that position is that the resulting performance of the equation sounds both more self-aware and dialogic (again, this is not unique, but it's only a small subset of female producer-performer work). The fact that she uses multiple voices rather than a single narrative-centric voice only underscores this.

good post, spot on I think

Grimes exists pretty squarely in the center of the continuum, and I think an effect of that position is that the resulting performance of the equation sounds both more self-aware and dialogic (again, this is not unique, but it's only a small subset of female producer-performer work). The fact that she uses multiple voices rather than a single narrative-centric voice only underscores this.

yeah, that's a good way of describing a certain approach. suppose kd andersson's work in the knife and especially fever ray walks the same line, see also planningtorock et al.

as far as gaga goes, i've always seen her primarily as a producer, and one of the things she produces (lol pun) is a knowingly prefab pop personality called "lady gaga", so in my view, she's closer to the center than it might seem

so, i'll take it there's no point in trying to wade into this thread now huh

i dunno, what do you think about internet robots who are also producers?

daft punk is ok i guess

i dunno, what do you think about internet robots who are also producers?

you mean like horse_ebooks?

as far as gaga goes, i've always seen her primarily as a producer, and one of the things she produces (lol pun) is a knowingly prefab pop personality called "lady gaga", so in my view, she's closer to the center than it might seem

Yes I agree with this which is one reason I felt it necessary to caveat my explanation as a pretty massive simplification - insofar as performance is always a production (of one sort or another) it's actually theoretically dodgy to try to insist on a division between performance and production.

What I'm really getting at is the idea of character in music - and again not in the judgmental sense of "this music has no character" but more the question of whether the music presents a character or characters.

Lana Del Ray and Lady Gaga are both very clear, striking examples of that.

New video! I really like this, although I'm not sure why, since it's essentially just four minutes of Grimes looking cute and goofy singing with headphones in various locations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtH68PJIQLE

The "Vanessa" video cost $60, mostly for booze. I believe this one cost at least twice that.

I'm pretty sure that the stadium in that video is the one I run a couple times a week at the gym.

I like the video, looks like she's having fun.

this is quite good, not sure what i expected but didn't expect this

Wish there was more love for "Nightmusik", sounds like an update of Cranes
So happy to see so much love for this girl

Has anyone seen her live? I might try to catch her set at SXSW. Worth going?