Grimes: A Series Of Observations From Oyster #108
Mysterious and extremely likeable human Grimes hung out with us to talk clickbait journalism, her obsessive process and the complicated mythology of “Grimes” for Oyster #108: The Origins Issue. Read an excerpt from Laura Bannister’s profile of Grimes below and get your hands on an IRL copy for more ~observations~.
One November many years ago, a friend of mine had what they would later describe as their “first proper sex” (upon probing, this occasion gained legitimacy over previous forays because “we both came, and he was like a boyfriend I guess.”) They were in the basement of a Frenchwoman’s house and there was no door, only a curtain, meaning they had to be very quiet, keeping puffs and pants to a minimum. The soundtrack, which was meant to do what all sex soundtracks do — heighten activities inside the room, disguise them to outsiders — was played via laptop speakers. It was Grimes’ 16-track Halfaxa album, which had just been released, and with its witchiness and glitchiness and all-consuming eerie gloomscapes it made the whole experience “very fucking intense”. (This, of course, is what Grimes’ music does. You play it alone and with not-so-strangers, you play it through headphones and at parties, because it elicits something other music doesn’t. It’s hyperactive, jubilant, weirdly cathartic.)
It is evening, summertime, and Grimes — real name Claire Boucher — is late (with apologies) to her interview and photoshoot, presumably because she is in the middle of a demanding tour, or because it is peak hour. When she arrives with manager and label rep in tow, everyone waiting in the studio quickly gets to their feet: an editor, a stylist and her assistant, an effervescent nail artist who has a beauty spot above her lip (and who I am more than a little transfixed by). We all stand up and shake hands with Grimes, because if there’s such a thing as music royalty in 2016 then this slight Canadian is probably it. Boucher’s hands are as dainty as you’d expect of someone routinely deemed ‘pixie-like’ and she flickers each of us a smile as she takes in her surroundings. I wonder how many rooms like this one — filled with lights and unfamiliar clothes — Boucher and her entourage have visited this week.
I should note, before we get too much further, that it’s hard to know if she should be referred to as 'Boucher’ or 'Grimes’ in print. Descriptions of the 27-year-old artist oscillate between the two. I ask and she insists the difference is simple: a demarcation between musician and stage name. “It’s not really a conceptual thing,” she sighs, hands outstretched as the nail-artist applies a set of pre-prepared acrylics. “It’s just — well, the job is Grimes… I think a lot of journalists have tried to turn it into a big conceptual art piece, but it is what it is.”
Boucher tells me it’s the same with songs — especially those on her latest album, where tracks like 'Kill V. Maim’ (written from the perspective of Al Pacino in The Godfather II) aren’t really about employing alter egos. It’s a narrative tool, nothing more. “I think the media likes the idea of alter egos, but I’m just making the song and the song has a theme. Like 'Man Down’ by Rihanna — Rihanna doesn’t live in Jamaica, it’s just the song. It’s not like there’s this alter ego [who resides in Jamaica that] she’s reliving each show. You know what I mean? There’s not a version of Taylor Swift that is 22 and comes out every time she plays '22’.”
I do know what she means, even though she recently said sort of the opposite. In a mini-documentary released by The Fader last December, Boucher opened with the following: “At first I guess there was just Grimes. I don’t technically have control of her narrative anymore; she very much exists in pop culture right now. Grimes, as one person, cannot represent more than a couple of ideas. That’s why I started developing some of the other characters, like, really abstract from who I am and how I am. You can start being an actor, adding in more voices, and understanding that not everything has to reflect you. The art angels are the face of it; more like superheroes, more like villains. They are performers and I’m the producer-writer.”
Before adopting her stage moniker — which incidentally she borrowed from the grime genre, having noticed it on Myspace and liked the way it sounded — Boucher was studying arts and science (or maybe neuroscience, it’s never clear) at university in Montreal, with plans to become an astrophysicist. (She was later kicked out for non-attendance, largely due to that burgeoning music career.) Before that, in primary and early high-school, she took pre-professional ballet lessons but stopped after she shaved her head and evolved into someone markedly different from her peers. In her teens she did ordinary and less-ordinary side jobs, waitressing and being a busgirl, undertaking the “pretty good gig” that is freelance mural painting. “It was like $15 an hour, mostly schools and community centres. I usually had a brief. They’d be like, 'It has to be a dinosaur with this and this and this.’ They’d have [reference] pictures. It was a chill time.”
But by 2011 or 2012, Boucher recalls, she was making enough from performing that her music — off-kilter, dark, ecstatic, masterfully multi-layered — constituted her primary income. I wonder how blissful autonomy felt. She shrugs, “It was pretty easy in Montreal because it’s a really cheap city … It felt good.”
Between 2010 and 2013 Boucher released three LPs: Geidi Primes, Halfaxa (the sex one) and Visions, the latter of which was named by NME as one of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The making of Visions, like much of her career, quickly became shrouded in myth, morphing with each repeating. Offhand quotes in interviews were spun into new, more radical retellings. In the now-common Public Version of events Grimes transmuted into an ascetic, locking herself in a room and blacking out the windows, binging on Adderall and barely sleeping, determined to meet the record label’s deadline. This is all, as far as I can tell, true, but often accompanied by a quasi-spiritual sense of sacrifice and weightiness that Boucher never really intended. Her audience, however, clings excitedly to stories like this — you only have to find the forums in which to witness it.
Text by Laura Bannister for Oyster Magazine - to read the full feature you nedd to get a physical copy.
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