Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

and it's just day one of this, the worst possible album cycle

should say "make confronting climate change fun". she's definitely not saying that climate change is fun.

no but if you literally read it as it's written that's what it says. grimes is cancelled

I thought she was already cancelled.

cancelled

FOREVER

https://m.imgur.com/a/gZm7Z33

People don’t care about it, because we’re being guilted.

at this point I'm just happy she isn't saying it's fake

it could still be lore, though

““I see the polar bear and want to kill myself. No one wants to look at it, you know? I want to make a reason to look at it. I want to make it beautiful.” She wants the album’s iconography to include “pro-apocalypse PSAs” and a shoot in which she sits naked at a table a la The Last Supper eating bloodied corpses of endangered animals: “Like, I’m eating an elephant head.””

Crying my ass off

Musk chimes in over email, “I love c’s wild fae artistic creativity and hyper intense work ethic.”

wild fae artistic creativity

I haven't read the full interview, but just going from that quote above, I think I see what she's getting at... seems maybe similar to how, in the Cold War era, the terror of nuclear annihilation [which has hardly diminished, btw] was "processed" and represented in many different ways through movies, art, narrative, etc.?

Like, without knowing (or even judging) whether her album is good, bad, or whatever, it seems like a very understandable thing for "an artist" to try to do.

Yeah, it also doesn't seem that far away from what Oneohtrix Point Never did on his last album.

I mean, it’s not that her intentions are cryptic, the execution just seems irredeemably bad

Iirc she described one of the themes of art angels (or one of its songs?) as a story about a transexual al pacino who was also a vampire, so I wouldn’t worry much about this one.

Did you know that at one time Al Pacino was rumored to be up for the role of Lestat in the 1994 feature film adaptation of Interview with a Vampire? Even though Tom Cruise ended up in the role, the studio apparently wanted to see what Al Pacino would look like as the character. They hired concept artist Miles Teves from Stan Winston Studios to give them idea of that vision. Teves said,

"For a short time, at the beginning of the production, Al Pacino was rumored to have wanted the role of LeStat [sic]. I provided this image to help the studio make a decision. His presence as an actor, though an unusual choice, might have infused the character with more gravitas. Few command the screen like the indomitable Pacino."

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51b3dc8ee4b051b96ceb10de/t/5289229ce4b02806f9e52cd6/1384719005418/52p0fQp.jpg?format=1500w

lol this is so batty, does anyone genuinely think Claire Boucher thinks climate change is fake, or good, or not an actual problem? it feels super disingenuous and faux-naif to pretend that you actually believe she thinks this

I don't think anyone here thinks she thinks that

(I can only speak for myself and that Pacino Vamp sketch that will haunt my dreams, tho)

She has this idea, though she thinks it’s likely too expensive to pull off: She’s sitting naked at a table like it’s The Last Supper, only she’s surrounded by endangered-animal corpses, and she—Grimes/Miss Anthropocine—is eating the bloodied bits of raw flesh. “Like, I’m eating an elephant head.” She’s got bigger plans even than that. “What I really want to do are these pro-apocalypse PSAs, where I light a tree on fire and I’m like—” she snaps her fingers, does jazz hands, “Climate change! Yeah. Or, I’m there eating zebras and elephants...all this terrible stuff.” Ideally, she’d like to see these PSAs on MSNBC.

so edgy

it seems kinda of obvious to me that there's a sense of helplessness w/r/t climate change from those who believe it to be an issue, bc so many forces are in opposition to altering the course. half this country, likely most of the rest of the world, etc...they either deny it or they don't care. i think her point about being guilted is a fair one too, since it's become a partisan issue and it owns the libs to gleefully cackle about rolling back clean air regulations and so on. if she wants to make an album such as this it makes artistic sense. idk.

"I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me by suggesting I sup clothed."

The idea that we should not feel guilty about ruining the planet ...

The kernel of an interesting discussion is what is the extent something can be criticized by exaggerating it? A lot of acclerationist art romanticizes capitalism and uses this as an out and I’m more and more not buying it

What is an example of "acclerationist art"? Never heard of that

xp that is also not the idea of what she's saying. the idea would be to create the feelings inside people that spur the most positive action or maybe to trick them into feeling the guilt they would close themselves off to otherwise.

Yeah - I thought the idea was to overcome / get beyond feeling "helpless" (not "guilty")

“One song on the album, ‘Kill V Maim’, is written from the perspective of Al Pacino in The Godfather Pt 2,” Grimes said. “Except he’s a vampire who can switch gender and travel through space.”

imo that's extremely cool

My take is that she has a very awkward way of explaining it but I get what she’s trying to convey on her instagram post better. Explaining some of her visual ideas for it probably sounds stupid on paper but the idea of this “goddess of global warming” is kind of cool depending on execution... she refers to gods of death and destruction in other cultures so it’s not that cringey as a concept, it’s just that she gets overexcited about it and is hilariously bad at explaining it but she does have a good record when it comes to executing ideas in the past.

lol this is so batty, does anyone genuinely think Claire Boucher thinks climate change is fake, or good, or not an actual problem? it feels super disingenuous and faux-naif to pretend that you actually believe she thinks this

― vision joanna newsom (Stevie D(eux)), Wednesday, March 20, 2019 5:18 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a lot of ppl seem to really hate her :(

there's also the element that the stereogum post is aggregating a paywalled wsj interview and pretty clearly aggregating the weirder stuff (at least I can only assume, since I don't pay for the wsj, but know how music blogging works)

xxp on the other hand "we appreciate power" was a pretty bad concept (that now seems slightly less bad in context of the album concept, but still) that was also executed poorly so i'm not optimistic

"kill v maim" rules solely on a musical level - the lyrics don't really amount to much on their own and without her explaining it i'd really have no idea about her ridiculous concept for it

Fair enough, and I don’t mean to imply she’s like, you know, a Bad Person. Just that I’m feeling ideologically opposed to her and other tech-futurist artists like OPN or Holly Herndon. I’m also recently less convinced that art has a lot to offer in terms of politics these days.

For this, I took it as more like — climate change is just another interesting idea to make an album about, and situated it as something in the future involving mostly polar bears, rather than something that is happening now, to people. If people are already immured to the idea then idk how grimes’ psas will do anything aside from give her a marketing angle. the idea of some exaggerating and aestheticizing our relentless patterns of consumption as some badass elephant head eating anime goddess I guess just doesn’t resonate with me.

But I guess we’re at a better place than ten years ago where any talk of environmental issues in art world circles was met with sneers and derision.

I haven't read anything other than this thread but didn't Anohni already do the climate-accelerationist thing?

Good lord - who gives a shit?

xp Yes, so did OPN. Lots of people are addressing climate change in their work in this way and have been for a while. Only recently has the tone shifted from "Hopelessness" (the title of the Anohni album iirc) to "Fuck it" (the correct position)

I mean, what can you do but laugh in the face of extinction?

Hey this is interesting:

According to the timestamps on her original MySpace page, Boucher began writing music under the name Grimes in 2007. Her performer name was chosen because at the time, MySpace allowed artists to list three musical genres. She listed grime for all three, before knowing what grime music was.[18][19]

Relatable

if someone isn't british it's probably pretty easy not to know what grime music is

personally i'm too busy hating on her for providing tedious backstories for her songs up front to hate on her for her objectionable themes

Nothing makes me feel older than reading this thread

I don’t really know what grime music is either, tbh, and I’ve been reading ILM for 12 years

Don't feel bad, I still don't know the difference between drum 'n' bass, house or any of those subgenres. And I'm a professional DJ! (Not really.)

I’ve honestly tried. But so many things are called dubstep that sound nothing like each other.

It’s mostly the british ones. House and techno i get.

Grime music is music that is grimy.