Q/2016/Interview

Interview
Photoshoot
===Interviewhttps://grimes-claireboucher.tumblr.com/post/142352381960/grimes-for-q-magazine-uk-q358-issue-may-2016===
=Underground Resistance =
Grimes pours art-punk attitude, rave abandon and sugar-sweet melody into a bottle, shakes and releases a glorious pop. But as Dorian Lynskey joins the Canadian singer on the road in Berlin, he learns that being at the centre of an alternative/pop Venn diagram has its downsides. “There's so much bullshit,” she explains.
﻿
During November last year, on the night before the release of her fourth album, Art Angels, Claire Boucher sobbed. "I was pretty sure it was going to be a huge bomb and everyone was going to hate it," she says now. What actually happened was the exact opposite: Art Angels, a misfit pop epic, was almost universally hailed as one of the best albums of the year. But on that night Boucher, aka Grimes, was in a strange position. She was not exactly famous but, within a certain orbit, she was the iconic figure that people had been waiting for. She's a studio auteur who combines DIY ethics with pop aesthetics; an idiosyncratic fashion magnet celebrated by Karl Lagerfeld and Alexander Wang; a distinctive visual artist who designs album sleeves and comic-book covers; and a social justice activist who's clued-up on gender and environmental issues. In the Venn diagram of alternative culture in the 2010s, Boucher commands the centre. It has its downside.
Boucher released her breakthrough third album, the eerily infectious Visions, in January 2012, just as the music media was enthusiastically embracing clickbait. Social-media messages that Boucher intended for only her fans became news stories, which snowballed into controversies. It reached the point where, without a new album to reveal, her online personality seemed bigger than her music. "It was definitely stressful," she says forcefully. "And not expected."
Boucher is perching on a couch in her dressing room at the Astra Kulturhaus in Friedrichshain, a partly gentrified Berlin neighbourhood that has, like Grimes, retained its jagged edges. You can see why fashion photographers adore her: she has the rare ability to make anything look cool. Today the 27-year-old Canadian is wearing a sweater that forms a smiley face out of a rainbow and two peace signs and a fan- designed black satin jacket with GRIMES spelled out in red rhinestones on the back. Her ever-changing hair is a of brown, blonde and pink.
With her slight but strong frame, youthful features and quick-fire intellect, Boucher can seem both frail and formidable. She talks fast, racing ahead and then doubling back to qualify what she's just said. She edits herself transparently, telling you when she's not telling you something. You sense a battle between her natural candour and a newfound caution, as if she's imagining how a quote might mutate into a troublesome headline.
"I knew I had to make another record," she says, "because there was so much bullshit out there."
'My voice is pretty fucked," Grimes tells a practically empty Astra Kulturhaus. It's soundcheck time and she's meticulously honing the vocal mix. Too quiet? Too dry? More reverb? You suspect she could go on for hours. Boucher is militant about doing everything herself.
Apart from guest vocals by Janelle Monáe and Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes and mixing by Mark "Spike" Stent, she wrote, performed, produced and engineered every note on Art Angels. She often gets invited to appear on other people's records but won't put her name to anything she hasn't written. It's both an artistic choice and a culturally loaded one: as one of pop's few female auteurs, she wants to forestall any doubt about her abilities. "I feel it would undermine everything I say or do," she says.
This is why she's uneasy about considering herself a pop star. "It's the suggestion that I don't write my music," she says. "By my definition, pop music includes the Ramones and David Bowie and Radiohead, but for younger kids pop music means American Top 40. I'm just trying to distance myself from the idea that that's what Grimes is trying to be. That doesn't mean that I hate it but it's not how I function." (She often talks about Grimes in the third person, as if it's a project rather than an alias.) Boucher has a vexed relationship with pop. As a surly teenager, she favoured music﻿ by angry, noisy men: Korn, Nine Inch Nails, System Of A Down. "I think I was very sexist as a teenager, actually. I was so aggro about not listening to the radio. I just hated pop music." So when she finally changed her mind-she credits her dad with insisting she hear Mariah Carey during a cross- country road trip - Top 40 pop felt exotically new.
Little did she know it would prove controversial. She was savaged on Twitter when she dared to play Carey and Taylor Swift at one of music platform Boiler Room's bleeding-edge DJ sessions in 2013.
"If I play pop music I'm just trash but if other people I won't name do it they're transgressive," she says, still aggrieved. So when she joined Jay Z's management company Roc Nation and tried writing a song for Rihanna the story wrote itself: DIY underdog goes mainstream. The story, she says adamantly, was "really fucked up". She's still signed to hallowed indie label 4AD because "they let me do whatever I want."
Boucher has become a role model for young women who want to maintain control in a male-dominated world but when she starts to talk about patronising, lecherous men in recording studios, she stops herself. "Actually, I'm not going to go into this fucking tirade. I hate it when everything's about feminism, blah blah. It doesn't need to be. I don't want to be a victim. I feel like so much press focuses on, 'Oh, it's so hard and you're always fighting,' and that's probably a deterrent for a lot of women. Because it's also not that hard." She sighs. "It's more like I'm disappointed that I'm often underestimated."
Boucher is trying to wean herself off tirades. A 2013 Tumblr essay of hers about sexism in the music industry went viral, attracting so much attention that she deleted it, along with all of her previous posts, and complained: "my Tumblr is not a news source." When that post also became news, she deleted that too.
"You can't have any kind of a complex opinion in public," she says matter-of-factly. "It just doesn't work. In order to make drama, websites will pull a quote out of context and make you look bad, so there's just no point in trying to say something with any complexity, basically."
Presumably there are many things she'd like to talk about?
"Oh, all the time, yeah. There's a lot, but I just have to give up on it, because it usually ends up being more destructive to try."
These days, Boucher mostly sticks to posting uncontentious photographs and YouTube links. She's been cowed into hiding how interesting she really is. ﻿
Boucher has a lot of tattoos and she keeps adding more. On the couch, she bares the inside of her right forearm to reveal the latest: a crucifix which looks like it's been daubed in black paint. Her years at Catholic school clearly left an imprint.
"I like Catholicism a lot," she says. "I'm not super-overtly religious, but I just think it's gorgeous. It's kind of evil, too, but I kind of like that it's evil. I think about it a lot. It definitely informs a lot of my work. Growing up thinking Hell exists and there are demons everywhere is something of a formative experience."
Boucher was born and raised in Vancouver in a high-powered family: her father was a biotech executive and her mother a crown prosecutor. They taught Boucher and her four brothers to value academic and athletic excellence. Boucher studied ballet and got good grades for several years before mounting an almighty rebellion in high school, shaving her head, smoking weed and hanging with the outcast crew.
"I was a terrible, terrible child," she says. "I was charged with assault at one point, I did tons of drugs, I was really, really bad. I just got it together for Grade 12. From Grade 8 to 11, I was, like, a total piece of shit." She laughs. "I totally regret being an asshole in high school. I honestly think I was just bored."
Most of her friends were in bands but Boucher preferred to draw manga-inspired illustrations. She didn't start making music until she moved to Montreal to study, among other things, electro-acoustics at McGill University. "I was constantly around it," she says. "It's the worst thing to say, but I basically started making music just because all my friends were doing it."
The plethora of underground venues and cheap apartments in Montreal's Mile End district made for a lively art-rock scene which also spawned Purity Ring and Majical Cloudz. Boucher hung around an art space called Lab Synthèse and developed her GarageBand skills. "Had I not had access to a laptop and free recording software, there's no way I would have been a musician," she says. "Had I come up 10 years earlier, I would have had a different job." She started playing shows-"for, like, five people in a shitty warehouse. Truly terrible shows. I would usually cry and run offstage."
In 2010, she released her first two albums, Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, and dropped out of McGill, to her parents' horror. "Oh, they hated it. They were really pissed. I had to get on the cover of a magazine before they understood. It's obviously very upsetting if your child is suddenly dropping out of school, not working and being crazy."
She thought of herself less as a singer than as a Svengali producer whose only client was ﻿herself: Phil Spector and The Ronettes rolled into one. "All my friends had their own projects, so they didn't want to work with me," she says. "I tried producing for other artists but I'm so bad at compromising and most of the people that I like making music with are also very bad at compromising."
Under deadline pressure, Boucher made Visions, her first album for 4AD, in a manic three-week blur, reconciling her goth roots and lo-fi milieu with her new Top 40 infatuation. "Everyone around me was like, 'Rihanna? I don't even know any Rihanna songs.' So I was on this total roll where I felt super-separate from everyone else."
Visions made Grimes popular on a scale she never expected. "There was a lot of catching up that was very public," she says. In the middle of 2013, burnt out by touring and media attention, she sacked her manager, purged her Tumblr and experimented with writing for other people, making the EDM-influenced Go for Rihanna with her friend Mike "Blood Diamonds" Tucker. After it was rejected, she released her own version on SoundCloud, leading to claims she was selling out. It was worth it, though. "I learned probably more during that time than I've ever learned," she says.
She retreated to rural Canada with her boyfriend Jaime Brooks (who makes music as Default Genders), writing several songs which she later scrapped. Only when the couple moved to Los Angeles was she finally able to begin Art Angels in earnest. "I wanted to start afresh. People were giving me a lot of shit about getting it done. Everyone was like, 'Put out an album, put out an album,' and I was like, 'No one's going to like this, but I'm starting again,' which was obviously very stressful for everyone besides me." 
Art Angels is Grimes' kaleidoscopic vision of pop music, swivelling through K-pop, trance, Nine Inch Nails, Cyndi Lauper, Dixie Chicks, Paramore and Enya, striking a perfect balance of light and darkness. Her lyrics are sometimes obliquely political and often furious: the single Flesh Without Blood is a blistering attack on a former friend. "I'm not on speaking terms with them but I feel like they know," she says. "Most of the songs on this record are venting songs. Venting songs are usually the best kind of songs." 
She talks about crying from exhaustion while working solitary 16-hour shifts in her unairconditioned home studio, reworking songs until the very last minute. She still feels that the album isn't quite finished. "I probably would have worked on it forever," she says. But for all the technical graft and know-how that went into Art Angels, Boucher thinks she owes the album to more ethereal forces, hence the title. "It's just this weird, intangible thing that seems like it's a gift or like it's coming from outside yourself," she says. "I'm always chasing the voices of inspiration."
That evening at the Astra Kulturhaus, Grimes' live show resembles a feminist remake of an early-'90s rave PA. Flanked by two
dancers and the singer HANA, Boucher is both the charismatic frontwoman and the synth prodding gearhead. What's surprising is how anxious she seems between songs. A clean-living vegan, her only vice is one whisky before each show, to steady her nerves. She's constantly apologising - for her voice, for performing the "kind of controversial" Go, for not speaking German - even though the crowd worships her anyway.
In Mile End's punk-minded scene Boucher was the pop outlier; in the world of pop she looks very much like the punk misfit. She wants to keep moving and subverting what you think you know about her. Her future plans include a more stripped-down album, film projects, political activism and something that sounds expensive. "It depends how much money I can make this year," she says bluntly.
Boucher seems so smart, curious and driven, in such unconventional ways, that there's no telling what she'll do next. Hopefully, one day she will have sufficiently recovered from her online baptism of fire to say what she's really thinking.
"Oh yeah," she says with a wolfish grin. "Maybe 20 years from now I'll be a bigger bitch. Once I retire I'll be talking shit everywhere!"
CLAIRE'S ACCESSORIES 
Her top trash-talkers and art angels...'''
RONDA ROUSEY
"She's like me in the sense that she's in a man's world and gets shit for doing stuff her male counterparts do. Everyone in UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship]talks shit but if she talks shit, she's a bitch and everybody hates her. I appreciate her existence."
AI WEIWEI
"Ai Weiwei is amazing, just because he doesn't seem to give a shit at all, even about his personal safety. I think he's probably one of the most transgressive artists of our generation. Everything he does is really important and very visible."
BURIAL 
"Burial is a really big influence on me because it's essentially dance music but he doesn't party. It's really evocative, sad music but it's really physically satisfying. That's rad, those two things co-existing. I'm always trying to go for that."
MARGARET ATWOOD 
"I just finished The Handmaid's Tale. I thought it was a really scary book but gorgeously written. A lot of the sentences in it would be good lyrics. It's extremely poetic but matter-of-fact, which is a hard balance."
ANDRÉ 3000
"When I first heard OutKast's Bombs Over Baghdad, I was aghast, like, 'Holy fuck, I've never heard anything like this!' And I really respect artists who disappear. If you're not making your best work, it's good to go away and come back."
Category:Interview Category:2016