The Capitulation of Grimes

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24 Aug

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Imagery for “I Wanna Be Software” by Grimes and Illangelo

Michelle Santiago Cortés on whether we have lost something essential to the appeal of Grimes. 

Grimes is just your average pop star: A name assigned to an iterative process–a series of personae and transformations connected mainly in name and flesh. Pop stars tend to become what we imagine them to be, while the artists try to dodge our expectations through cycles of reinvention.

Grimes is a musical act, a brand, and something born in the space between the artist and the audience–as much a representation of herself as a reflection of us. Grimes–as co-created by Claire Boucher and our cultural imagination–is the annunciating Art Angel of the not-so-distant future. The Eve of the Anthropocene and Matriarch of the Exoplanets. She’s the popstar that plays with AI and plans to die on Mars. With her digital avatar War Nymph (circa 2018-2020), she hoped to create an alternative psyche that could step in for her. With the more recent Elf.Tech, an open-source software program powered by AI, anyone can use her voice to make their own music.

For most of Grimes’s existence, the audience trusted the whole enterprise to tell a clearly dystopian story–one committed to the tension between our human selves and a technological other.

Grimes has always been the pop star intimately linked with technology. Her DIY ethos relies on her technological prowess–she engineers her own work, naming the software she used to make it. A love of gaming and strong sci-fi influence means cutting-edge technology regularly appeared and appears in her work to paint a dystopian picture. On Twitter, there is @Grimezsz, the thoughtful creator, and there’s @Grimes_V1, the AI Twitter bot with a “despotic and murderous nature.” Together, they build on the delicious tension between the well-meaning creator and the errant invention. For most of Grimes’s existence, the audience trusted the whole enterprise to tell a clearly dystopian story–one committed to the tension between our human selves and a technological other.

But the 2019 single, “We Appreciate Power” (featuring HANA) convinced many fans of Grimes’s aggressive turn toward accelerationism. A few months before the single’s release, she joined the Mindscape podcast where she said humans yearn for perfected simulations and that computer intelligence will soon surpass our human abilities. People were certain the pop star had herself capitulated to the desires of her very rich and powerful boyfriend, Elon Musk. And “We Appreciate Power” was the proof: Grimes wasn’t just red-pilled or pink-pilled, she took the whole bottle.

Subsequent media coverage fixated on Grimes the Futurist. A 2020 cover profile for Rolling Stone insists on this “future shock-y” version of Grimes. We learn from this profile that Grimes also goes by “c,” the symbol for the speed of light in a vacuum. And that, in fact, her whole being is accelerated: “She talks faster and with fewer pauses than most humans,” it reads, “like a podcast played at 2x speed.” Even her physiology, it seems, is optimized to interface with advanced recording technology: Her lisp might be a speech impediment but mics “have an easier time with her voice, with zero sibilance problems.”

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Press materials from Grimes explain that “We Appreciate Power,” is written from the point of view of a “Pro-AI Girl Group Propaganda machine” that uses dance, sex, fashion, and music to “spread goodwill towards artificial intelligence.” The song makes your steps feel heavier and you walk differently. As if it was your job to be hot and tell people to submit. And it’s directly inspired by North Korea’s Moranbong Band, a state-sponsored girl group paid to spread goodwill towards the supreme leader, Kim Jong Un.

In defense of Grimes and her fifth album, Miss Anthropocene, Simon Lewsen wrote for The Walrus that to assume, “that she’s a propagandist for a kind of techno-dystopian future is a misreading of her work.” Indeed, she is perfectly attuned to the “aesthetic appeal of dystopia,” but depicting that appeal does not a techno-fascist or accelerationist make. Lewsen is sure that “We Appreciate Power” is about the tension. The singers are frustrated. What will it take to make you capitulate? The other side is putting up a fight, they’re staring each other down, feet digging into the ground. Right?

“To depict dystopia honestly,” Lewsen writes, “one must consider not only the things that are terrifying, but also the things that make it alluring.” To consider the alluring might very well be the job of a pop star. While promoting Masseduction in 2017, St. Vincent explained that seduction is a group of forces that stand “just out of reach of the black hole” and “can swallow you whole.” Before seducing us, I think pop stars have to seduce themselves.

Before seducing us, I think pop stars have to seduce themselves.

For her August 2023 cover interview with Wired, c shares her plans to publish a book called Transhumanism for Babies and considers the needs of the human brain as we “accelerate into the future.” C also returns with a refreshed, and perhaps clarifying, take on what she wants to do with Grimes: “Do you know Moranbong? They’re like the North Korean official state K-pop band, and they’re like a propaganda machine. I want to be that for the Martian cause.”

Her latest single, “I Wanna Be Software” (with Illangelo), released in July 2023 begins: I wanna be software / Upload my mind / Take all my data / What will you find? With Elf.Tech, now it’s more than a desire. Now, it’s more than some future possibility. That future is now, and the pop star is bringing us with her as a condition of our fandom.

For Grimes, the only thing separating seduction and capitulation is the act of giving in. “The sort of tragedy of agreeing to it,” she says of having a baby with Musk. For a self-identified troll like Grimes, capitulation can be the ultimate risk, the culmination of Carsonian desire, a surrender that yields to oblivion. She adds: “...I have never capitulated to anything, so it was just a profound commitment.”

For Grimes, the only thing separating seduction and capitulation is the act of giving in.

The difference between 2019 Grimes and 2023 Grimes is the difference between talking about the technological “other” and becoming it. At the advent of what was previously a future possibility, the tension between Grimes and the future ran out–and a version of the pop star died. A new version is being birthed through her latest single, one that yearns to be software, and it seems that the site of tension has moved back to the gap between the artist and the audience–the birthplace of pop itself.

Is that enough to keep us hooked?

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Good links from the Dirtyverse.

  • More pop stars: Lana Del Rey’s California Gothic (The Baffler) “A consummate bricoleuse, Del Rey is most herself when alluding to others”

  • “The First Great Novel About Virtual Reality?” (The Nation)

  • What do Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen have in common? According to a new book, they are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” (Vanity Fair)

  • A sentimental essay about why we share online to make it feel better (Compost)

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