Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

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.

perhaps her riverboat alias, Veruschka

I bet Grimey would love this song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0gnnVcOLNc

She would certainly agree that Marconi's innovations in Mamba playing are among the peaks of white civilization

is she finally enough of a nazi now that the music press won't cover her at all because she put out some garbage 'nightcore remix' version of one of her old albums last week and i only just found out by accident

I think it's a little of column A and a little of column B, the latter being "what the fuck is a nightcore remix", also I could be wrong but no one really reported/gave a shit that Daft Punk put out that "drumless edition" of Random Access Memories either

well shit I'll listen to a drumless edition of R.A.M. thanks Murgatroid

pitchfork reviewed that drumless RAM fwiw

As lazy as the drumless version of RAM is it probably took more time that this “nightcore” remix. I haven’t listened -or intend to do it ever - but for those unaware “nightcore” just means a sped up and higher pitched version of a song:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcore

So she probably did this in like 15 mins and called it a day.

No wonder why noone is taking a minute to review it or even mention it.

well.

i guess i should say _something_ here.

lame move to stay relevant? most likely. kinda worked on me tho, because it prompted me to go back to the original album.

and she was definitely onto something else for a minute back then. the world really is a weird place. what did any of this music mean back then? i don't think it's for me to know, but it always sounded fucking great in every situation. it wasn't my soundtrack, it was my smarter friend also realizing we're lost again, but being... well, more intelligent than me. yeah, i agree! let's go this way!

idk. i might listen to the nightcore version, but this music has already tormented me enough.

weird how a subconscious works+experiencing her music as a multiple. what a wonderful hiding place. she never did break my heart in the dark.👋🏻