Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

I just want to say that none of this is particularly unique or noteworthy or even special. Grimes isn’t the first “oh this person is a reactionary racist fuckwit, not the sympathetic nice person I assumed them to be” in music and, sadly, she won’t be the last.

So, “elf tech”

On a bad note: the snippet for her new song has the most cringe lyrics ever and is specially annoying in context described in the previous posts.

On a good note: the “grimes ai” is very impressive, these cover of Paris Texas by Lana sounds great considering it’s not actually her:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7re3PEtFGIE

irregardless of everything else, this is kinda cool imho

I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings. pic.twitter.com/KIY60B5uqt

— 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (@Grimezsz) April 24, 2023

(more details & replies to questions about this on her Twitter)

How much money is there to be made in a cover of the Horst Wessel song?

just off to make a grimes version of "tomorrow belongs to me" then

irregardless of everything else, this is kinda cool imho

"everything else"

"irregardless"

sorry about that - I must have seen the word being used more than once, I didn't know it was wrong (or that there's discussion about it, at least) - I'm not an English speaker at home :(

all good!

jesus alfred

Lol “irregardless” was not the biggest problem with that post

AI voice thing is pretty clever since now anything she records that turns out too fashy she can say it's a deepfake

I don't think the public persona of Grimes is worth anything more than lazy dunks at this point. I've long held that it's kind of mortifying to be around adults who think quoting goofy lines and catchphrases that were burned into their minds from comedy bits and movies decades ago is a good idea. But what we're seeing here is a 35 year old tumblr teen and it's terrible

uptown churl with some good posts. there are definitely some historical currents directing this kind of trajectory right now. capitalist nihilism and fascism are kind of made for each other. also as we start to stretch global limits and elites want to hold on to / entrench capitalism, fascism makes an intuitive kind of sense. not directly related to grimes but the class of other i'm noticing it's ok for everyone to be hateful towards with like a genocidal flavor lately is the unhoused. maybe that's just my locality.

that ai splitting royalties thing is grimes version of elon throwing out an "egalitarian" move every once in a while, it's a total fake-out.

Her being 35 has fazed me a bit cause obv any adult should have outgrown this kind of thing but also it’s too young because this flavour of musk-adjacent cringe is so quintessentially gen x to me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ9VBMBS3qE

idk there's nothing wrong with having youthful interests and being kind of nerdy about a few things but the AI/SV/dork enlightenment/Thiel think tank axis is just a bunch of adults who congealed into this nonsensical "we need kings to rule us, but maybe the king is AI, so we need to throw a bunch of money at that and listen to the people who are funding it (aka Thiel and company)"

how to make a grimes thread immediately better: post a neneh cherry video xp

Haha speaking of quintessentialy gen x just read this post on reddit.

While every generation gets out of touch with age, and millennials are no exception (likewise, gen z will also one day find its ideas being seen as passé) Grimes is an example of a very sad and different phenomenon—a person who ignores their own generation (let alone keeping up with the younger ones’ ideas) and instead attempts to gain favor with the older ones, in this case, with gen x and boomers. These tired 1960s-1980s science fiction cliches she continues to reference, are the media of Elon Musk’s youth, not of her own.
Dune has been a longtime fave of course, but it was only one of a constellation of influences she used to have. Now, she has latched onto everything that came out of Musk’s childhood—from racist techno-orientalism, to dumbass and disproven “posthuman” and “singularity” stuff. This is a girl who grew up in the era of Gattaca and X-Files (media with lessons of how eugenics sucks), UK jungle and experimental dance music (Black led music genres with true innovation), If you look at other geeky millennials in the electronic, vaporwave, or even accelerationist hyperpop sphere, ‘00s, ‘90s or mid to late ‘80s works are their touchstones. So why are her references all, like, Star Wars and some dated novelists from the ‘60s and ‘70s? Because this is Elon Musk core, it’s a new persona she developed for herself to try to flatter her corny conservative gen x partner.
I can’t think of a single other millennial artist who is out of touch in this particular way. In fact Grimes’s blind techno utopian eugenic ideology was heavily criticized by fellow millennials such as Zola Jesus and Alice Glass, and even if you look at the more accelerationist-adjacent millennials like Caroline Polachek, Charli, Weeknd and Oneohtrix Point Never, none of them are talking the way Grimes talks.
Tldr: it’s a gen x/boomer thing not a millennial one.

I'm just gonna say there was SF critical of eugenics before Gattaca

That’s not what that post says.

xxp yeah it’s a simple aesthetic observation, not saying the fascism would be better if she were referencing dumbledore or other shite millennials like

Like she called her actual child X bazinga epsilon or whatever, that is not just embarrassing it’s a prev generation’s embarrassing

baz coombes

Grimes: I will share 50% of the royalties for any AI using my voice!

AI: No thanks.

To me Gen X Science Fiction is 80s stuff like Kim Stanley Robinson and cyberpunk. Musk feels like a throwback to Heinlein.

Definitely.

Musk totally sees himself as a Hari Seldon

xp charli xcx and the weeknd are "accelerationist adjacent"?

Grimes: I will share 50% of the royalties for any AI using my voice!

AI: No thanks.

― This machine bores fascism (PBKR)

AI responding in the voice of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5neabZ5pVQ

What I mean is that they’re adjacent (Weeknd aside, but he is connected with OPN) to the London leftist philosophical circles that originally developed the ideas of accelerationism, and they reference these ideas in their work. Most of them don’t have any clear ties to the creepy right wing form of accelerationism like Grimes. OPN did cite (right wing accelerationist) Nick Land as an influence on his work, but not necessarily in a positive way. Dasha Nekrasova (right wing posing as left podcaster) dated OPN and is friends with Charli, and Nekrasova’s pod Red Scare is funded by Peter Thiel, so there could be some fascist connections in there. None of those artists are openly right wing tho, they’re not going to like Nazi parties.

Grimes: I will share 50% of the royalties for any AI using my voice!

AI: No thanks.

― This machine bores fascism (PBKR)

username / post

This is a girl who grew up in the era of Gattaca and X-Files (media with lessons of how eugenics sucks), UK jungle and experimental dance music (Black led music genres with true innovation), If you look at other geeky millennials in the electronic, vaporwave, or even accelerationist hyperpop sphere, ‘00s, ‘90s or mid to late ‘80s works are their touchstones.

i don't really understand - gattaca, x-files, jungle, all of that was made by gen x and listened to by gen x

to dumbass and disproven “posthuman” and “singularity” stuff.

I'm not saying it's not dumb, but I think these ideas still come up all the time in tech-bro circles, so I'm not sure what "disproven" means in this context.

I think grimes' dorky boomer sci fi tastes predated Elon by awhile, she named an album giedi primes long before he was a thing, pre-visions.

everyone likes dune it's fine

lol @ the assumption that millennials in North America would have grown up with UK jungle

_This is a girl who grew up in the era of Gattaca and X-Files (media with lessons of how eugenics sucks), UK jungle and experimental dance music (Black led music genres with true innovation), If you look at other geeky millennials in the electronic, vaporwave, or even accelerationist hyperpop sphere, ‘00s, ‘90s or mid to late ‘80s works are their touchstones._

i don't really understand - gattaca, x-files, jungle, all of that was made by gen x and listened to by gen x

xp the internet existed for teenagers over there too I assume, especially if they were into music

Millenials in the US did grow up witj d&b via video games. Might not have identified it as such thom

lol tho, not thom, not bringing radiohead into this

xps right but like there's no reason jungle specifically should be on her radar - speaking as someone who is Grimes' age and is also a perpetually online music fan

i'm sure she knows what jungle is but it's not a pervasive cultural touchstone on the level of X-Files

The point is not that it necessarily should ito probability but all else being equal given growing up online that her touchstones could very easily have been something else. But clearly she is working from a certain set of values and is drawn to particular cultural touchstones more than others for reasons that are now clearer

fair enough

Grimes on boomer SF classic Solaris:

“This book scared the shit out of me. I picked it up after watching the film adaptation by Tarkovsky, which is one of my favourite movies. Sometimes I feel like the only explanation for human life is that our planet is a terrible god. I like thinking that planets are living, sentient behemoths that we completely misunderstand. I’m horrified to think what it would be like if such an abstract sentience had no regard for us, or enjoying toying with us. The act of repeatedly killing a doppelganger or a loved one seems so horrific; how could anyone think of something so awful? Whenever people pour cream into coffee in a clear glass, it reminds me of this book, because that’s what I imagine the surface of Solaris to look like.”

so much of this sounds like rich or successful artists who haven't had much formal philosophical/theoretical education latching on to ideas that sound kind of cool and that flatter their sense of identity, but who don't really go much deeper than that to ever reflect on the political consequences of this stuff

Moodles otm

the artists (Holly Herndon and her partner Mat Dryhurst come to mind) who tried conversing with Grimes about the actual philosophical and technological basis kind of got brushed off by her because they know more of what they're talking about

Yeah and at this stage Herndon is writing much better music as well