Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

I'm just gonna keep enjoying her music as long as she makes music I like. These weird interviews are fun I guess, but I don't really care.

otm to all. this is mostly just boring. idea about last supper photo was fine arts major embarrassing graduation show boring and bad. i'm happy she's found a theme that allows her to feel ok about making new music for the twitter wolves.

None of this affects my enjoyment of her music (or lack thereof) in the least. Whether she’s deliberately trolling or not I’m just amused by how obviousness is invariably the most successful approach when it comes to attracting attention.

absolutely, "clowned on" is the correct response. earnest anger, even annoyance, baffles me here, just as it did last week with Bret Easton Ellis. I like artists that are willing to use themselves as battering rams to explore controversial and provocative ideas - how that process plays out in public is what's interesting to me, not the ideas themselves necessarily. conflating "trolls" with provocateurs is such an art-negative point of view

a bit condescending to "the public" there, flappy

The only thing I know is that new Grimes music exists and maybe will be released, but probably not soon. It's just as likely it will all be scrapped based on reactions she may be absorbing from the internet by osmosis whether she is connected to it or not.

what do you mean xp

as a grimes fan i guess i support AI totalitarianism now too

we all knew you had it in you treesh

xxp you made it sound like you are an enlightened observer of these grand experiments performed by artists on an unwitting public. but it seems more likely that you, like me and everybody else ever, probably just enjoy some tabloid drama trash with your coffee.

"time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future" - Steve Miller, AI nihilist

the interview comes off like her expressing a certain amount of frustration obviously and as far as her AI take i mean suddenly everyone is acting like she's gone NXIVM culty with it and suggesting "actually just take the blue pill" vs just being an artist spouting off random ideas and being maybe a little tongue in cheek. i guess also i've comes to somewhat distrust the tone of interviews w/artists that are having a moment where people want to take them down a notch, sometimes the writing voice can make a conversation seem worse than it is especially w/someone like grimes who from interviews i've seen with her tends to just ramble on with whatever comes to mind and it can seem a little incoherent on occasion. some of the pieces on her seem to misread her in bad faith as sufjan said, plus i guess would find it hard to believe she is actually turning into an evil supervillain vs just discussing the idea in abstract, from an artistic POV.

haha do my comments come off as that pompous? it's not the case - I enjoy the spectacle and drama. the way it plays out in public & in the media, it's interesting to me. the only real feeling I have here is that reflexively dismissing any controversial or provocative artist as a "troll" or a "hater" is an inherently art-negative point of view.

also the notion that artists have to be virtuous, morally correct, smart - I don't agree. and I think about this

I guess I read "I like artists that are willing to use themselves as battering rams to explore controversial and provocative ideas - how that process plays out in public is what's interesting to me, not the ideas themselves necessarily." as something Chuck Klosterman said about The Real Housewives. I'm also just giving you a hard time.

couldn't she have embraced xenofeminism instead? I feel like we could use a xenofeminist pop star

also the notion that artists have to be virtuous, morally correct, smart - I don't agree. and I think about this

Do you guys actually think she—the person not the character—believes climate change is “good”? She said this:

“The way I figure it is that climate change sucks and no one wants to read about it because the only time you hear about it is when you’re getting guilted,” she explained. “I wanted to make climate change fun. Miss Anthropocene has got a Voldemort kind of vibe. She’s naked all the time and she’s made out of ivory and oil. It’s going to be super tight.”

She’s approaching these apocalyptic scenarios that loom on people’s minds from a different angle to see what the results are. Seems like a good idea to do that—the way we talk about everything has become really predictable and obviously it’s not working to get us to make the changes we need to

"I like artists that are willing to use themselves as battering rams to explore controversial and provocative ideas"

"I know there was this big controversy last week with this New Yorker piece about me, a New Yorker interview, which was kind of a prank. I got punked, I have to admit it. But one of the questions was, I said, 'I’m not political, why are we going here?” He said, “Well then you shouldn’t have written a political book.'"

...........

like... saying "kids today" is the least provocative thing you can say, even if you're saying it in the middle of a coke binge

tfw ur alienation has reached such a degree ur experiencing ur own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order

Lol people expressing sympathy for Bret Easton Ellis is making me feel extremely vindicated

he's always going to have apologists. always

What has he to do with grimes?

scroll back

the way we talk about everything has become really predictable and obviously it’s not working to get us to make the changes we need to

This

hope this album comes out soon then

omar little OTM (51 mins. ago)

treeship otm the only way to move this political conversation forward is to develop more hard-edged anime personas for ourselves

I’m just saying she’s taking things from the culture as materials and trying to approach them from new angles as this artistic process can have some value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization

she is like taco bell in that way

The result of her shenanigans seems to be a conversation abohf fhe responsible way to approach climate change—a threat that is kidn of everywhere and nowhere as the down the line effects are too terrifying to contemplate. Grimes js not going to change anything serious about this issue but she’s trying to provoke a different way of looking at it—seems like artists do this all the time

she is wrapping the same terrifying climate change up in an outer layer of AI nihilism and saying "you are good to go"

That musicians have to constantly interact with social media in order to stay in a certain credibility zone is such poison.

donald glover isn't on social media

and look at his success!

Didn't the video for "Oblivion" (which I adore) do something similar w/r/t to its subject matter of male aggression? She positions her right there, in the midst of it, even a participant -- in the crowd at the dirt bike rally, in the locker room with the rowdy, shirtless dudes (laughing at one point when she's jostled hard from behind) -- not standing off to the side and saying "tsk, tsk"

Like, again, I'm far from a Grimes fan (beyond that song) -- but just going on that one video I know & love, it's ??? to me that actual fans are all "OMG!!??!" when she floats these ideas about engaging w/climate change in a "different" way

i would posit that the world has changed a lot since 2012, especially when it comes to extremely pressing issues.

it's almost like climate change and toxic masculinity aren't the same thing

So now the charge isn't that she's on some wack new trip, it's that her established M.O. isn't suited for the times? I'm trying to keep up

idk man you are moving the goalposts here i'm just trying to keep up

Like I have *no f'in idea* how I would address climate change if I were an artist (I probably wouldn't even try); but I don't get the "This ain't it, chief" response to an admittedly sketchy-sounding approach from an artist whom I would think deserves the benefit of the doubt (and who hasn't even released the album yet)... and even if it's a failure, at least she, like, did what an artist does(?)

What's the worst that happens -- it "backfires," and she sucks impressionable youth into sincerely identifying w/the villain schitck? What's the chance of that? Doesn't everyone hate her now; and isn't that her point about it being freeing, and trying to spin something productive out of all the negativity being directed at her?

(And the only goalposts I lay down were to point out that she seems to have embraced a somewhat complex p.o.v. when exploring "issues" in the past; which is why it seems odd to me for supposed fans of her to say, "UH-UH, CAN'T HAVE THAT" when she does it again now.)

lol this thread is the most overblown bs ever. As far as I can tell, she's creating and expressing, attempting to live her life on her terms, and actually attempting somewhat unique musical/lyrical themes within the context of mainstream music. If this is what gets ILM worked up these days (as opposed to shit in the past like "$90k + bennies") things have gone soft.

Maybe Whiney can make another ridiculous comments poll sourcing this thread.

I think the criticism leveled at her is that she just uses the news cycle for the promotion of her brand by doing and saying whack stuff, it worked ever since the hilarious story of the raft down the Mississippi and since there's been countless ways in which she finds herself making the headlines, sometimes good, sometimes bad. The environmental angle is just the latest and since it touches a difficult subject, some of the audience is questioning her sincerity.

It is not a big deal imo but it does exemplify a certain precarity lots of artist finds themselves with having to promote themselves and exist on a saturated market...

Brings to mind Dave Chappelle's skit about needing Ja Rule to make sense of a tragedy.

Elon Musk : Grimes :: Billy McFarland : Ja Rule

It checks out.