Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

I think the big reason no one has bothered to do a deep dive and report on her less savory associations is because she so thoroughly marginalized herself into absolute irrelevance via her career path. she might argue "my appeal has become more selective" but I think the greatest thing about her at one point was the warmth of her music, which has been subsumed by an uncanny valley approximation of what she once was. I guess she just wants to be AI now, it's hard to reconcile the person who was goofing around in the video for Oblivion w/who she is now.

every day I think fondly of the brown king Cyrus the Great

Guys, ask your girlfriends how many times a day the brown king Cyrus the Great crosses their mind

she's been given the benefit of the doubt for years while telling us who she is. because she previously wrapped it up in some half baked conceptual bow that people can make more content out of, they've pretended not to see it. hopefully that's no longer possible

cool how she picks one aryan and one honorary aryan to show us how she's not a nazi

what’s funny about her ex getting irrationally angry at wikipedia this year is that it’s clear half their relationship was getting stoned and reading or sending each other wikipedia articles

remember when we were supposed to take this clown seriously

― Left, Sunday, 31 December 2023 19:11 (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No, I remember when she made some good records about a decade ago.

how many times a day the brown king Cyrus the Great crosses their mind

88 times

The pernicious effect of Canadian content laws

finally hit unfollow today, was way overdue

having 'court jester' in her twitter bio is accurate at least

I think the big reason no one has bothered to do a deep dive and report on her less savory associations is because she so thoroughly marginalized herself into absolute irrelevance via her career path

biggest thing is that she basically stopped releasing music, she only put out a handful of not very good singles in the past 4 years despite briefly signing to columbia and repeatedly announcing new projects that never eventuate. if she does eventually put out a new album i expect at least some of the press will get into her fascist associations etc.

caroline polachek released the a better art angels follow-up last year than grimes is capable of anyway, not like anyone really needs new music from her at this point. though i would still like a studio version of "david" lol

luv 2 prove my non-nazi bonafides by citing my affection for an expansionist Aryan king and a member of the imperial Japanese court

No, I remember when she made some good records about a decade ago.

Well, when’s she going to release them?

Visions is a truly good album but now it seems like an anomaly or accident

And Realiti (Demo) of course. Please don't tell me I'm wrong to like music PK. Happy New Year.

not to be a cynic, but spending years around weirdo underground noise whites, this pivot is pretty unsurprising lol.

Realiti Demo is this board’s most embarrassing poll winner

Grimes already sparked ILMs greatest civil war

Eh, I'll still take "Realiti (Demo)" over "Get Lucky" or "Boys".

Pre-Musk Grimes was cool and her music was good.

She is obviously a Moldbug reading creep now, though.

I saw her perform once when that album people liked came out and it was iirc utterly unmemorable/underwhelming.

i never got the impression she was a particularly strong live performer even when she was making good music

weirdo underground noise whites

having met a handful of people who were either Grimes-adjacent or from similar scenes…. yeah

the thing about artistic scenes that are actually healthy and have a number of young people is you don’t realize how good you have it and what’s enabled those scenes (affordable living, public arts funding, venues that are well-run) until later. and then some people get bitter about how they’re not being catered to, or they’ve broken out and have some level of success and think they did it all on their own (see: Grimes)

a lot of bizarre american-style libertarian thought creeps in when people think they’re being very independent but are actually being independent together

time for me to tap the sign: uncritical tech-fetishization / accelerationism can lead to fascism via a sort of basic social Darwinism / half baked Nietzscheanism. Elon might index the shift but not sure he caused it, especially in light of how many other artists and thinkers have made this slide over the decade. not that artist as ubermensch/amoral capitalist “winner” is new qualitatively per se, but now it’s resonating with other sort of post-internet tendencies

i’m not sure if grimes as ayn rand protagonist who neglects the role public arts funding and affordable living in her early career is the right framing. as ufo said she basically nuked her own career, seemingly more out of disinterest than anything else (“music is my side quest”). i feel like she is more ideologically consistent then people give her credit for; she was onto this loopy new agey transhumanism scifi tech-utopianism—politically an incoherent hodgepodge but always with some libertarianism in the mix—since day one. it’s more racist now, but i bet if you went back and read her 2012 tumblr posts you’d find a lot of commonality

The thing about sci fi tech Utopianists is that they don’t seem to realize they are always the bad guys in sci fi (post 1940s anyway)

walking tumblr post

xpost she was originally a folk punk who sailed down the mighty Mississippi on a raft

Then she touched a monolith

The thing about sci fi tech Utopianists is that they don’t seem to realize they are always the bad guys in sci fi (post 1940s anyway)

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Monday, January 1, 2024 1:09 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

To me it is such an inhuman and unappealing philosophy that it is hard to understand why people are actually attracted to it. The psychology of most right wing stuff is ugly but legible — it is about tribal loyalty and fear of the unfamiliar. Merging with machines though? It’s mysticism, but humans here are not uniting with the divine — “going home” — as in religious traditions.

we're already merged with machines so it just feels like a way to turn the status quo into a religion (in these hands at least)

there are formulations of anti/post humanism which are actually radical (for better or worse) and aren't just the ruling class dressing up their racist capitalist nihilism as something new and rebellious but of course this version is what has taken off. fuck the world

antihumanism is a big tent and lots of different kinds of thinkers take issue with humanism for different reasons. many are very human reasons. they think humanism enables exploitation, both of other people and the environment.

this stuff is different. you are right that it is a post-hoc justification for capitalist destruction.

https://i.ibb.co/6nd2hn6/5uyjpzms0v9c1.webp

kinda amazing her and Elon didn't work out really

"loving humans" was a dealbreaker

just dumb as hell

Why do gay people hate aircraft?

left otm

Can you really be cancelled by the gay community if it’s been a decade since you were midly relevant?

Grimes the musician has always been bad, it just took a little while for Grimes the person to catch up

https://boingboing.net/2024/01/02/now-we-know-what-grimes-saw-in-elon.html

Why do gay people hate aircraft?

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Tuesday, January 2, 2024 2:17 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think what she's trying to say is that she identifies as a middle-aged white man because she likes aircraft, an interest associated with middle-aged white men. But because she is also sexually or romantically attracted to men, that makes her gay. It's strongly reminiscent of "I identify as an attack helicopter" transphobic bullshit if not just a straight-up dog whistle to that point.

I 'm going to see if my local record store will take a trade-in on my copy of Art Angels. I've been holding on to it because I like the music and she's already got my money from it. But every time I look at the spine, I get angry. Not holding my breath for a Claire Boucher redemption story at this point.

She wrote a paragraph to recreate the "lesbian trapped in a man's body" Spencer's Gifts t-shirt.

But that t-shirt is sort of funny and doesn’t seem ill-intended unlike her tweet.

there are formulations of anti/post humanism which are actually radical (for better or worse) and aren't just the ruling class dressing up their racist capitalist nihilism as something new and rebellious but of course this version is what has taken off. fuck the world

― Left, Monday, January 1, 2024 1:48 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

agree but think it's way more sinister than this, tbh.

but it's a conversation for another thread (and connects to j. epstein's creepy "transhumanism"). i hate this person and her lame music and opinions so won't keep posting here

the only way "back" for her is to ditch all that stuff and rebrand as "claire."

which is a nice name, actually.