The first time I found myself enraptured by Grimes was on a quiet afternoon in the fall of 2020 — while clicking through my friends-of-friends’ Spotify playlists. Much of my life at that point was soundtracked by my constantly running bedroom speaker and Zoom classes, and Grimes’s album Art Angels suddenly parted the clouds and opened my ears to a whole other world of music. While I don’t consider myself a Grimes superfan by any means, I would be lying to you if I said I didn’t like her music at all. Her music is, until recently, where my interest in Grimes ended. But with the current state of the world, I have been inclined to examine my own relationship to Grimes.
Who even is Grimes?
Claire Elise Boucher, stage name Grimes, is a singer-songwriter born in Vancouver to her well-to-do parents, who, after being expelled from McGill University, went on to pursue music and has been making waves from the start. Her 2010 debut album Geidi Primes, inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, launched her career in the Canadian indie scene and planted her firmly in the spaces of the fledgling social media culture. Her 2012 album, Visions, is by far her most popular to date, winning her the Electronic Album of the Year at the 2013 Juno Awards. Lead singles “Genesis” and “Oblivion” are still being featured everywhere, from television to TikTok, cementing her prevalence in popular culture with more than 700 million streams between them on Spotify alone. Her music blends electronic and synth-pop and is a sonic treat to listen to — one that has been a cornerstone of indie since her debut in the music scene.
Beyond her music, she’s a fascinating person — In 2009, she and a friend tried floating down the Mississippi river until their impoundment in Minneapolis. In 2020, she revealed there was a period of her life where she “only ate spaghetti.” While there’s a sharp awareness of her distance from normalcy, I think she’s incredibly open and honest with her fans and the internet as a whole. Grimes has curated herself as a sort of brand, but without any sort of pomp.
However, Grimes, in all her zany glory, has become more faded for me over the last few years. Her self-stated role as a feminist artist began to ring hollow as her online activity shifted into more controversial spheres — notably praising patriarchy for its role in “developing society” and selling her art as NFTs. More recently, she’s best known on the internet for dating Elon Musk, a man she is still affiliated with to this day for having three children with him. This was in 2018, well before Musk rose to infamy in the U.S. government, but their partnership didn’t exist in a vacuum then, and it certainly does not now.
The elephant-sized Tesla in the room
I won’t give you an exhaustive biography of Elon Musk. There are enough people examining his upbringing, his life as a child of emerald mine owners in the wake of South African apartheid and his current role within the U.S. government. Buying out Tesla and founding SpaceX made the name Elon Musk synonymous with progress prior to recent years. For the longest time, he worked hard at attaching his name to a future that would be full of electric cars and trips to Mars. But Musk’s problems couldn’t be overcome by this glossy idea of the future. Apart from taking credit for the work of Tesla prior to his actual involvement, he has taken both of these companies and made these objectively cool things accessible only to people willing to pay the price. For example, his “Tesla Tunnels” under cities like Las Vegas are not only reinventing the public transit wheel but also overcomplicating and overcharging for something that already exists. His Tesla vehicles themselves are riddled with paywalled features and updates — under Musk, the future is not for everyone.
Hold on, aren’t we talking about Grimes?
Grimes’s partnership with Musk came about from their mutual love for posting online — specifically, it was a pre-Musk Twitter that brought them together. At pure face value, Grimes and her interests in the unusual and science fiction would make sense with Musk — his less savory traits don’t seem to have turned her off, either. On their eldest child, Grimes has said that X Æ A-12’s life “mirrors Paul-type stuff” from the same Dune novels that inspired her first album. While aesthetically Dune is cool, critics (and myself) argue that Paul’s white savior-esque path is a cautionary tale, not an aspirational one. Projecting this “chosen one” mentality not only on her child but onto herself (in the books, Paul’s mother is integral to the prophecies he eventually fulfills) just feels weird.
Considering that Grimes, despite working her way to the top, was given opportunities that others aren’t by way of her family’s wealth, her being comfortable with putting a starving artist veneer over her currently glitzy life does not sit well with me. In my own opinion, she has also weaponized this quirky, spaghetti-diet persona to lighten her actions done in the context of people like Musk. Even her lofty delusions for their shared child can be shrugged off with the understanding that she just really likes the Dune books. There is nothing damning for Grimes herself, only for the people she surrounds herself with.
Earlier this year, after Musk’s “Roman salute” at Donald Trump’s inauguration, Grimes went on X (formerly Twitter) and denounced Nazism — but definitely not Musk. This doesn’t seem to be enough for me. Despite Grimes’s current distance from problematic topics, it is not as reassuring as I would like it to be. I’m not sure if I want to salvage an artist in my mind who hasn’t taken issue with things that I would in my own personal life, so I am taking a step back.
In my own opinion, this is a long-overdue examination of Grimes. For the longest time, I didn’t want to look at her critically because of her contributions to the Canadian indie scene and general musical talent. The void she’s left behind in my playlists is felt, but nothing that some deeper research into similar artists hasn’t been able to fix. No one is perfect, but my patience with Grimes has run out with her constant alignment with the alt-right and fascist people. There’s a saying that’s been floating around online, “RIP Grimes, you would have hated Grimes,” implying that the old Grimes, the person who created music that shifted the scene and was beloved online, would have despised the Grimes we see today. I don’t hate this analysis — it’s one part death of the author, one part separating the art from the artist. However, Grimes is, in fact, still alive and well and attending parties celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration. Maybe this is the person she was all along, maybe people change as time passes. Either way, Art Angels is good, but I don’t think it can fully eclipse my own problems with its creator.
