Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

'phone sex' seems like it's striving v hard to be a big summer jam, but for me it's succeeding very well, so whatyagonnado.

the tent for her set at field day had overspilled in a serious way, she is v much 'in'.

I'm more about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIqz3Q4qsMw

Joanna Newsom meets electronic music.
maxjimmyjazz 11 hours ago

wow, I wish

I actually quite like that remix.

i haven't been listening to much new music this year but i do like some grimes jams

She played our stage at Field Day and I was amazed at how popular she was - people were going apeshit but I still don't really get it. It seems to be more about her as a personality than the music. It was really interesting watching the crowd change for Tortoise who were on after her.

It seems to be more about her as a personality than the music.

yes, this must be it.

That's the kind of comment that really irritates me. Like, you don't *get* the music (which is fine, that's why there's chocolate and vanilla) but because you don't *get* it, that means other people's appreciation must be based on her... personna or something?

It doubly irks because it's the kind of criticism that often gets thrown at female musicians - it can't possibly be their music, it has to be about something else - saying people are responding to that performer's "personality" is a step up from "you just like her looks" but it's coming from the same highly loaded place IMHO.

she's pretty cute tho

So's Thom Yorke. Your point is?

Gukbe had all the bait this entire time, you guys

WCC did not take my post in the spirit within which it was given

your use of "within" makes that sound quite liturgical.

just striving to hit that point where the post plunges through its own transparency to meet the power that created it

It was really interesting watching the crowd change for Tortoise who were on after her.

well ya, it went from (to generalize) a slightly younger mixed group to (to generalize) a slightly older largely male group. this is perhaps not v startling when it comes to tortoise vs just about anybody. and rly i'm not even sure what her persona is, especially not as something notably distinct from the music.

(mild passive aggressive dickishness aside, your stage had a lot of great stuff, doran, i found myself there more than anywhere else. and also, if you were who i thought you were, that was a v sharp fitzcarraldo-esque suit you were sporting.)

Nah, personality may be part of it, but i think the biggest part is blog fame/peer pressure.

she was v.much 'bad' at primavera - needed a smaller stage I think, struggled to fill the space

also, an artist's personality always comes through their music; it's a bad argument that separates the two.

^^^^It's got nothing to do with the fact that she's a woman and everything to do with the fact her music is - IN MY OPINION - paper thin and on the whole unmemorable, the fact her voice is (to me) pretty irritating and there's only really one strong song on the album and even then, I'd sooner listen to Julie Cruise.

Apologies if I've expressed myself badly here but the post was supposed to suggest that I'm middle aged and perhaps too old to 'get it', hence the reference to Tortoise. As I twittered at the time I was pretty much convinced it was the coolest/youngest thing we've ever had our name attached to and it was pretty funny seeing all these people slowly morphing into fucked old dudes who look like me for Tortoise.

But yeah, if I was passive/aggressive or a dick, I'm sorry BUT I reject any claims of misogyny vigorously. There's absolutely no reason why anyone on here should have read anything I've written but all the same there is enough evidence out there to suggest that I@m not some sexist creep - quite the opposite hopefully. Sorry if I've upset anyone I'll try and phrase things more precisely next time.

oh, i meant i was the one possibly being a passive aggressive dick, sorry! (communicating over the internet bad, grimes better.)

additionally i can't fucking stop listening to the track with blood diamonds, i should really be saving my summer jams for summer.

Ah, sorry. And thanks for the kind words on my suit - usually I expect people to say I look like a sex tourist in it. I'm glad you enjoyed our stage. It wasn't as good as last year but yeah, I think there were some ace sets.

^^^^It's got nothing to do with the fact that she's a woman and everything to do with the fact her music is - IN MY OPINION - paper thin and on the whole unmemorable, the fact her voice is (to me) pretty irritating and there's only really one strong song on the album and even then, I'd sooner listen to Julie Cruise.

Doran you can just not like the music rather than posit that her music has no appeal to anyone and people are just vibing off her personality.

Which doesn't really make sense given this album's take-up seems to be much broader than the reach of interviews/profiles on her would suggest.

If anything most people I know who are really into the album got into it in a way entirely disconnected from any notion of who Claire Boucher "is" - in particular at least 3 people I know first became obsessed with "Oblivion" as a kind of ~this year's "Heartbeats"~ thing where they didn't really care who was responsible for the music so long as it filled a specific need for them.

Look, it was an off the cuff observation based on how it seemed to me and I've explained that personally I'm at a loss to understand what people see in her as the album, in my opinion, isn't that good. Then, I had the privilege of watching her gig from the side of stage and seeing how it went off. People were screaming for her deafeningly even while she was setting her gear up. Apart from a pretty cheesy rubber n'angel wings dancing dude there isn't any show to speak of and she commanded our biggest crowd of the day by what I would call force of personality. But this is just what I got from it, obviously most other people would disagree with me and say that the album is full of tunes etc. But as observations go, I now accept that it was a bit shit and maybe not totally thought through properly.

I don't think Doran was out of bounds. I think a lot of listeners DO respond to her personality; it seems like it is a significant apart of her appeal (and certainly a significant apart of her recorded presence). I don't think that's an inherently bad thing at all, but it's something I wrestle with listening to the album, which I really love. I can't always tell how much I'm responding to her music and how much I'm responding to her overall endearing, cool-girl vibe. There's probably no need to even make a distinction between the two, b/c they're so connected.

I guess that's part of why I'm so conflicted about that Blood Diamonds song. I dig it, but it's so sexually charged that it makes me question my motives for liking it and Grimes overall. Am I into the music, or am I just another dude crushing on the cute girl? And again, how can I even make a distinction?

But as observations go, I now accept that it was a bit shit and maybe not totally thought through properly.

the only thing that bothered me about with comment was the suggestion that grimes' audience was responding more to her personality than to the music (something we can't really determine from outside other people's heads). in saying that, you at least seemed to denigrate the way grimes' fans relate to her, intentionally or not.

I guess that's part of why I'm so conflicted about that Blood Diamonds song. I dig it, but it's so sexually charged that it makes me question my motives for liking it and Grimes overall. Am I into the music, or am I just another dude crushing on the cute girl? And again, how can I even make a distinction?

i don't think there's anything wrong with liking a song in part because you think it's sexy - same goes for performers. i mean, people sometimes get gross about this kind of thing, but i think we all pretty much know when we're perving.

I think the other thing is she has a little girl voice, so when she sings that "talk to me daddy" line, she's playing into some sort of icky fantasies

Visions is sexy too, of course, but its sexiness comes from her overall energy and intimacy and the romanticism and physicality in her lyrics. This is the first track I've heard where she seems to be going for a deliberate Lolita thing, so it just feels a little cheap and easy

maybe it's just me but the title feels like a bit of a red herring - i can't decipher all of the lyrics, but it seems there are a lot of tones going on in there besides sexual, and the sexual side itself seems to have some conflicting facets to it.

I have pretty much no concept of who Claire Boucher is but I really, really like this record.

as rich and interesting and fun as her music is, I don't get how someone would only be able to imagine her appeal as only possibly being due to her image - appealing as it may be

There's this thing that ppl do when they're defensive (I include myself in this, BTW) which is, when they're accused of saying/doing something sexist (or racist or homophobic or whatever) which is to say "but I'm not misogynist so I REALLY resent that!" which is infuriating and counter productive.

It's like - we live in a culture which is just soaked in sexist values and we pick them up, consciously or not. I mean, I'm soaking in these ideas even though I've been actively resisting them for 30+ years. They're the things that pop out when we're shooting off the cuff, when we're tired, or not qualifying things or thinking them through.

And it's much better to own it, say "that was a sexist assumption" and move on to a more thought-out reflection or assessment - this actually helps work against that subconscious, internalised sexism in a way in a way that flat-out denial does not.

Just putting that out there, you can do with it what you like.

For the most part, I'm with Tim - drawing conclusions about why people like music that you don't is a fool's game.

You can interrogate your own tastes but trying to go in on others' is a bent mirror.

i'm on the fence about the music, but like scik mouthy, i don't know much about grimes/c boucher. i don't even know what she looks like. while i sometimes think musical voices and personae are sexy, it's usually a rather abstract sort of appreciation, separated from the tangible, bodily things that tend most immediately to engage my erotic imagination. "phone sex" does't even spark that kind of secondhand frisson. there's no sense of physicality or lust in it.

(one of the few songs i do find genuinely erotic, sonic youth's "eliminator jr." is apparently about a famous sex crime, so maybe my calibration is off, i dunno...)

^^I've explained and apologised for what I'm going to. You can't dress me down for presuming too much about other people while doing exactly the same to me. Well, you can, but I'm fucked if I'm going to 'wear' anything. Sounds like by your own admissions you could do with getting your own house in order and stop projecting your own standards on to others. Also you could do with checking the dictionary meaning of "seems" as it pertains to perception.

I didn't know anything about her or know what she looked like before I saw her live but one of the many things that led me towards thinking there was perhaps a cult of personality at work was the fact she looked really cool and there were girls dressed like her in the front row. (Not that these things always correlate - for example I don't think Slipknot are over-endowed with personality...)

A friend of mine heard the album and then saw the Oblivion video and went out and got that haircut within two days fwiw.

okay, so i watched the video. still my by far my favorite thing on the album. funny that i should only notice this while watching her pronounce the lyrics, but she lisps a little, right? "look into my eyeth and tell me..."

anyway, i now know what she looks like, though i don't think i want that haircut.

Doran if you would stop being so viciously defensive and actually looked at the things you were saying...

Like, why is Grimes as an "image band" indicative of "personality" while Slipknot, who are just as much an "image band" - how it that not coded as "personality" in the same way? If you'd stop kneejerking we could have an interesting conversation about that. But you have to admit that there are things in play here.

I guess it's because you're projecting things onto me that just aren't true (as far as I'm aware)... I'm not viciously doing anything. I didn't say Grimes were an image band. I didn't make a sexist/misogynist assumption about Grimes.

Last things first - I don't have to admit anything, I have no idea what your last sentence means.

I don't think a band/singer having a strong image is a negative thing. In fact I'd say that out of all my favourite bands/artists most (Prince, Bowie, Slayer, TG, PE, Kraftwerk, SunnO)))) have a defining visual look and only a few (PJ Harvey, The Fall) don't. So I think the fact that Grimes has a strong visual identity is a positive thing. Slipknot who are a passably entertaining band with one good album, who were quite exciting to watch live at a certain point are positively lacking in personality. It's all just mall nihilism, Hot Topic, Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, merch rights nonsense dressed up as the apocalypse. So in this, I'm suggesting that Grimes is far superior to Slipknot.

So, this conversation you were talking about, I'm all for it but I feel we'll both - not just me - need to pay closer attention to what the other one is saying.

You might wanna change that screen name first.

That is a fair point.

Done.

lol

Doran, I think you're being treated unfairly here but that was cute.

late to the party but wasn't there an interview/thinkpiece/whatever about how boucher is like hyperaware of her image/persona and puts a lot of effort into it? thing is it's not a bad thing imo and it's dishonest to suggest that the majority of artists don't care about their image or the majority of listeners don't care about an artists' image. there's nothing wrong or inauthentic about merging personality with art; it's essentially unavoidable. the annoying thing is that it's almost always used as a criticism of female artists because hey ingrained sexism.

I liked her music before I knew about her personality. I think it really came out in the "Oblivion" video, but she had two albums before that that people liked. There weren't many interviews with her before Visions so I didn't know much about her or her image. Only the "Vanessa" video which is nice but pretty anonymous.

It becomes so impossible to talk about this stuff, no matter how nicely you dress up the conversation, because people freak out and go "OMG you're accusing *me* of misogyny!!! how DARE you!!!" (see also the Erykah Badu thread ad infinitum) when what you are trying to say is "this stuff does not happen in a vacuum." The dialogue surrounding the way music made by men vs that made (or even liked) by women is discussed is loaded at a societal level.

It's this thing that outsidery dudes *love* to do when they are so tied up in their "OMG, I'm such an outsidery dude, I'm so not *affected* by society's mores!" that they don't even notice that they are telling a woman to "get her own house in order" from a screen name with a vastly derogatory term for women because that's just a cute or funny word to them, rather than a term of abuse which has been used to degrade you, personally, and hold back your entire kind. I don't know if it was intended to be *ironic* saying "I'm not going to wear that" when you were, literally, wearing it. You might insist you're wearing a plain white shirt but if you are existing in an environment where every single light shining on you is red, that shirt will look pink. Shouting that you are wearing a white shirt doesn't do anything about the red lights. They're still there, and denying that they exist makes the problem worse, not better.

This whole thing of "image" and "personality" is something that does get held against female artists in a way it just doesn't with male. That if you go to a Grimes gig and the front row is full of girls with her haircut who are dressed like her, that gets held against her and her fans, in a way that if you go to a metal gig and the front row is full of men with long hair, weedy beards and scruffy black clothes exactly like the dudes on stage - that doesn't get counted against them as being "just image." Even though it is the same kind of use of image for drawing tribal boundaries or identity. As far as I'm concerned, it's not a valid complaint against either. But it sure as hell gets used much more on one side than the other. (See also: Wayne Coyne's eccentricity gets him painted as creative, wacky, hoopy frood, while Erykah Badu's eccentricity gets her painted as "crazy.")

I get that you're saying that you didn't mean it in a gender-loaded way, you were doing the whole thing of saying "I'm old and I just don't understand why this is so popular because ugh X and ugh Y" when X and Y might actually be the things that are attracting that audience to that music in the first place?

That you hear music which is "thin" when I hear music that is light, playful, fun, joyous, that she has a mixed-bag, magpie approach to genre and style where everything gets thrown in together to create something frothy which is about mood and tone and creating these kid of theatrical set pieces.

That you dislike her voice - you'd rather listen to Julee Cruise. Which is kind of point-missing, to me. That Julee Cruise uses an airy, ultra-high voice to create things that are pretty, ethereal, beautiful, and generally nice to listen to. While Grimes takes that same vocal style, and uses it to create things that are sometimes pretty, but more often weird, theatrical, odd, strained, unnatural. It's like saying you'd prefer Katherine Jenkins to Diamanda Galas. I, personally, *love* what she's doing with her voice because she specifically uses that ultra-feminine coded high voice and uses it in a way that isn't always pretty, but is sometimes like a parody of feminine-coded voice pushed to absurdity and even ugliness. It's saying, to me, "look at this performance of gender, how fucking weird it is when you push it to extremes!" In a very similar way that The Knife pushed the performance of male and female voices to be slowed down and sped up so you could never tell if it was the man or woman singing or both. (I'm sure that metal dudes love the cookie monster voice, when I fucking hate it - and possibly even for the same reasons, because it's similarly a hyper-exaggerated take on performance of "masculine" voice.)

It's absolutely very much filling the kind of space created by The Knife - that's why I posted her on the post-Knife aesthetic thread on the Sandbox. I respond to many of the same things. The taking a grab-bag approach to the aesthetics of dance and electronic music as suits the song, rather than trying to fit to a specific genre. That air of theatricality - of pretence and masks (literal in The Knife's case, but figurative in Grime's. She doesn't mask her face, but she does mask her voice) is something I find very, very appealing. The whole idea of "give someone a mask and they will tell the truth."

That might be semi-political for me, but that goes way beyond the scope of a Grimes thread. (In a world where Straight White Male is seen as default, people who aren't one, or even several of those things, often already have to wear a metaphorical mask to pass or get by. So a mask seems less like a put-on and more like a tool. But that's another thread.)

To me, interesting stuff comes out when you push beyond that "I dislike (or like) this artist, and I can't freaking understand why people would (or wouldn't!)" kneejerk thing. That often you find out that the thing you hate is precisely what they love. But sometimes you have to have the conversation about whether your shirt is pink or the lights are red (and perhaps both societal and personal attitudes about pink as a colour for shirts, and what that means, though that's perhaps a metaphor too far) before you can get to that point.

Sorry for wall of text. I don't imagine anyone is going to have the patience to read through all of that.