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===Interviewhttps://www.wsj.com/articles/the-life-and-death-of-grimes-11553084548===
=The Life and Death of Grimes =
As she readies the release of her new album, Grimes—who now goes by ‘c’—opens up about her influences and relationships, and why she’s decided to kill off her musical persona
By Ryan Bradley
March 20, 2019 8:22 am ET
Claire Elise Boucher hates all her names, especially her middle name, but even the name she invented a decade ago, the name she performs music under and is famous as: Grimes. “I think I’ll kill ‘Grimes’ soon,” she says. “It will be a public execution followed by—by something else. I shouldn’t say yet.” Meanwhile, for now, she asks to be called c (italicized and lowercase). Just like, as she’s fond of pointing out, the shorthand for the speed of light in a vacuum, or 186,282 miles per second.
“ ‘Claire,’ ” c says, “is done and dead.” But “c” is not long for this world, either; “c is an intermediate name.” Her new name, after c, will be something else entirely. Not even necessarily anything like Grimes, but, c says, “the main character of my book.” In fact, c—or, for the sake of simplicity, she—is constructing not merely a book, but a whole world. “Like J.R.R. Or George R.R.” (Tolkien and Martin.) “Only, the songs will come first. It’ll be like Sailor Moon and Game of Thrones, and yeah, it’s super, super pretentious....” Conversation with c is like, well, it’s like traveling at approximately 186,282 miles per second.
The trouble with Grimes, she is saying, and why Grimes needs to die soon, is that she (c) needs to be free. “I’m super bound by the limits I’ve set for myself [with Grimes],” the 31-year-old says. “It would be easier for me if I wasn’t stuck with the branding I made in 2009, you know?” She is sitting on the floor, knees bunched up to her body, arms containing her legs. Sometimes she rocks back and forth slightly—a ball of restless energy. Sometimes her arms shoot outward in excitement or emphasis. She is wearing sweatpants and a baggy black hoodie. Her hair—dusty blond and pink in parts—is pulled up, but pieces of it slip loose. She is not wearing any makeup. She seems happy and thoughtful and most of all free.
Perhaps this is because the project of Grimes seems to be reaching its endpoint. About a decade old, it was meant to be, if not outright antithetical to pop music, then subversive. Grimes is raucous (her word). Also: dark and ethereal, catchy and strange. The kind of music you imagine a group of vampires would listen to if this group of vampires also happened to be on a cheerleading squad.
Grimes’s music is popular, but popular in a way you might expect from music that is often explicitly meant to be something other than pop. That is, it uses many pop tools—hooks, choruses—but manages to be less straightforward. You can’t sing along to many of the songs. A word that gets tossed around a lot about Grimes’s music is that it’s dense, which is true. There are the literal layers—sounds on top of sounds—but also the layers hiding the person behind the persona of Grimes. In this sense, she is working in a similar vein as artists like Lana Del Rey and FKA twigs, artists for whom the artifice is perfectly intertwined with the art.
In 2013, Jay-Z signed her to his management company, Roc Nation. The next year, Pitchfork, that bastion of hip music credibility, named “Oblivion,” a song from her album Visions, the greatest track of the decade so far. And in 2015, Grimes released Art Angels, a sprawling, genre-jumping record that included collaborations with Janelle Monáe and ended up near or at the top of just about every best albums of the year list.
A year before Art Angels, Grimes released a single she initially wrote for Rihanna called “Go.” Her hardcore fans were very mad about “Go.” Who the hell was this, pretending to be Grimes but making music that sounded like pop? “I’ve trolled myself by putting out pop songs, to the great annoyance of my fan base,” c says, talking about Grimes.
The most recent Grimes track, “We Appreciate Power,” which will appear on her new album, to be released later this summer, might be the Grimesiest track ever made, not sonically (it’s heavy with the chunky sounds of nu-metal guitar power chords), but conceptually—it’s written from the perspective of a pro–AI “Girl Group Propaganda machine.” The refrain—“We appreciate power”—repeated throughout is more chant than chorus, interwoven with lines like “AI will reward us when it reigns” and “Simulation is the future.” “We Appreciate Power” grew out of a fascination with the Moranbong Band, a North Korean pop band constructed by the totalitarian regime (the band has at various times been described as Kim Jong Un’s personal girl group).
She laughs a little when talking about the song, then sits up and sighs. “This song represses my spirit,” she concludes, and it’s as though she’s talking about something that is not her own, which is kind of exactly what she’s doing. It’s not her song. It’s Grimes’s song.
Maybe this is the crux of her problem: that she is creating and performing as a person who is not only not her, but is actively working against her—whoever she is. And whoever she is—c or otherwise—might be not just entirely different from Grimes, but actually something closer to the opposite of Grimes.
“If you say you’re something, then people get super upset if you appear to be a different thing,” she says. And it’s true, not just for artists and their personas but for anyone who has at one time or another assumed a role they thought they were supposed to be playing, while realizing that this role is nothing at all like the person they are.
Sometimes the person who isn’t Grimes is revealed, if only for a moment, during a Grimes show. It happened recently while she was performing “We Appreciate Power” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. At the very end of the song, after Fallon has walked onto the stage but before the smoke has cleared, Grimes and her guitarist are still frozen in place, heads hanging down like robots that have been shut off. Suddenly, she lifts her head up to steal a quick glance, like, “Are we still doing this?” And then, realizing that, yes, everyone else onstage is still performing, she drops her head back down.
Another thing she hates is performing live. She actively dreads touring and does it only because it makes her enough money to pour into projects that will expand and deepen her lore. “I call branding that is art, lore,” she explains. “Prince has lore. Rihanna has great lore. It’s essentially world building. It’s my favorite art form.”
Music videos are, she says, one of the main creative structures for lore. But music videos are expensive, and doing them right is hard. She directed the video for the Art Angels single “Flesh Without Blood,” just as she writes and produces almost all her music. She is reflexively self-critical of her songs; she picks apart all that went wrong with that video. It was too hokey, shot too fast, made too cheaply, and, mainly, it wasn’t ethereal enough. “I will regret it until the day I die,” she says of the video. “It’s just,” she continues, “I f—ed with my lore, you know? Lore is sacred.”
The past year has been a strange one for Grimes’s lore. She became famous in a way she never intended; she became a meme, a controversy, a punch line, a player in a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. All of it circles around the fact that roughly a year ago she began dating Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. When his name is mentioned, she nearly collapses on the floor in a long, pained groan.
“Don’t tell him I groaned just now,” she says. “I groaned out of, I don’t know, feminism. I mean, he’s a super-interesting goddamn person.” Then she stops. Up to this point, conversation has raced at a speed-of-light clip. Now there are vast pauses, chasms of ellipses while she talks around an entire aspect of her life she seems to still be figuring out how to navigate. (Musk says via email, “I love c’s wild fae artistic creativity and hyper intense work ethic.”)
But quickly, before we get there, some context. The pair reportedly met in the most modern meet-cute of ways: Musk made a joke on Twitter, a pun on rococo (an 18th-century baroque art style) and an AI thought experiment called Roko’s Basilisk; someone pointed out that, years earlier, Grimes had made the exact same pun. Musk reached out to her. The two attended the Met Gala together last year and several corners of the internet went insane. But even after all of that, the most famous-slash-infamous incident of the Grimes and Musk pairing so far was surely the surreal period in which the rapper and singer Azealia Banks spent a weekend last August in Musk’s Bel Air mansion; she was waiting, she claimed, to “hang and make music” with Grimes. Banks posted a series of Instagram stories detailing her time there, which happened just a few days after Musk tweeted an announcement about his intent to take Tesla private. (“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.”) We now know—after an investigation by the SEC—that the funding required to take his company private at $420 a share was not, in fact, secured. It was exactly the kind of story that is catnip for everyone in the media, bringing together as it does the worlds of pop culture, tech and business.
In January, a judge ruled that Banks and Grimes preserve all correspondence over text, Instagram and otherwise, as part of a lawsuit brought against Musk by Tesla investors. Banks publicly posted their text exchange from those days in mid-August, in which Banks called Grimes a “brittleboned methhead” and Grimes called Banks a “narc.” (Grimes and Musk declined to comment on the matter; Banks could not be reached for comment.)
Anyway, she’s got some things to say about all of it, but mostly about Musk. “I was simply unprepared,” she begins. “I’ve just been wallowing in indie music for, like, a decade.… I just thought I could keep going along in my funny little way, and then you casually respond to someone in a tweet and it’s on Fox News, and you’re like, Ugh, you know? That was a very disturbing moment.” She’s referring to a now-deleted tweet in which she responded to allegations that Musk attempted to squash a union being formed at Tesla. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can never tweet about…. I need to watch who I f—ing retweet,” she continues. (In June, Musk tweeted that he is “not against all unions,” while Tesla wrote in July to then–U.S Rep. Keith Ellison that the company “adhere[s] to the nation’s most stringent labor standards” and respects employees’ decisions on whether to organize.)
“People, friends, keep being like, You shouldn’t have to change! But you know what? The world is a bitch. Accept the world. Instead of wishing it was different, figure out what you gotta do and do it.” Then, a moment later, “And look, I love him;”—she won’t even say his name, but she’s talking about Musk—“he’s great. There’s got to be some reason. I just think....” And now, starting and stopping again, she begins to contort her body slightly smaller, as if disappearing into a ball. “I wish.” Another stop. “Yeah. It doesn’t matter.” More thinking. Contorting. Shrinking. Then she straightens up. She has moved on. “Cool,” she says. And that is all she will say about that.
When Claire Boucher was 8 or 9, she and her younger brother Mac would make videos together in the basement of their home in the Vancouver suburbs. Mac found one of the videos a few years ago, of the two of them doing stand-up comedy routines while listening to Tupac Shakur and wearing basketball jerseys. “We would just be weird and make stuff,” Mac says. “We had an elite training force with the neighborhood kids, and we’d do drills with, like, Super Soakers. We also had a Spice Girls fan club.”
The story c tells about her own musical upbringing is that it was all classical and metal and that she hated pop music until she started making music herself while an undergraduate at McGill University, where she studied neuroscience and philosophy. But at that point she was in the process of creating Grimes. She’d come up with the name while making a MySpace profile for her musical persona (this was the late aughts), checking the boxes of all the music genres with “grime” in them. Grime is a London-centric form of hip-hop, and not at all like Grimes’s music. But Grimes was an accurate reflection of who she was circa 2009: edgy and alt (her words), a person who gave herself tattoos all over her hands, a person who hated pop music. But she’d also been, before all that, a person who had a Spice Girls fan club with her brother. And she is, now, a person who is more like the one she used to be, someone who unabashedly loves pop.
Lately, she’s also been working more and more with Mac, a photographer and filmmaker who has helped direct Grimes’s videos. Their tastes are not just similar, but eerily similar. HANA, a recent collaborator who plays and sings on “We Appreciate Power,” was touring with them and told her how in the dead of night c would bolt upright still asleep and say something and Mac would respond. The siblings often have an identical thought or idea and text each other about it at the same time.
Most of those thoughts these days are related to the art around the new album, which is titled Miss_ Anthropocene. “It’s a concept album, about anthropomorphizing climate change,” she says. Miss Anthropocene is “like, this death god.” But also: “It’s fun. I want to make climate change fun. People don’t care about it, because we’re being guilted. 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 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 Anthropocene—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.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the new album is the track “So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth.” It’s not at all dystopic; instead it’s a very beautiful love song. She says she was inspired to write it by the movie trailer for Assassin’s Creed. There are soaring synths, echoey guitars, dark electronic sounds—all the elements of her classic sound. Only, on so much of her music, Grimes’s voice is nearly hidden in the mix; here it’s front and center, holding its own. The difference feels revelatory.
For her entire artistic public life, Grimes has said she hated her voice, that singing was the thing she liked the least in her recordings. But lately even her voice has begun to charm her. Just a few days earlier, she’d made a song that was so simple; everything that was making it work had to do with her lyrics and her voice. It was, she says, a real pop banger and a true expression of her emotions. “I probably have to sell it,” she says wistfully. “It’s probably not a Grimes song. It’s got a lot of heart.”
But she’ll be killing Grimes soon. She smiles when she’s talking about what might happen with this new song, and with this new her. Maybe the song will be sung by someone else who isn’t Grimes. But maybe, maybe, that someone is actually her—not Claire or c but whoever comes next, whoever she will soon be.
Corrections & Amplifications
The original version of this article incorrectly spelled the title of c’s forthcoming album. (March 20, 2019)Category:InterviewCategory:2019