Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, never believed in rest. Like Lady Gaga, Madonna or David Bowie, she is a shape-shifting artist who constantly reinvents her music, her fashion and her public persona.
But lately, it’s like it upgraded the breakneck speed of its reinventions to 5G. She and her boyfriend Elon Musk have broken up. Then in a recent vanity lounge profile, she admitted she was back with the billionaire memester but living separately and hiding a secret baby with a name that sounds great for a Sith Lord: Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. Now they broke up again, and she might be dating Chelsea Manning?
Meanwhile, Grimes adopted the anime-like face of a dark cybernetic fairy queen in some photo shoots and music videos, as a retro-futuristic heavy metal magazine cover made of flesh. Last week, she even donned brightly colored luxury NFT “crypto clothes” during a virtual music performance for the first-ever Metaverse. fashion week – floating above a stage in Decentraland as a crowd of avatars look on.
Grimes’ shift in mood towards transgressive fantasy is at once exhilarating, exhausting and disappointing. The disappointment has little to do with his music (there’s no denying that his latest single “Shinigami Eyes” is a banger) and everything to do with his heel shift from the political left to some kind of supportive libertarianism. to Silicon Valley no longer associated with her ex boyfriend.
“When people say I’m a class traitor, it’s not. . . an inaccurate description,” she said. vanity lounge. “I came from a deep left-wing background and converted to basically be a capitalist democrat. A lot of people are understandably upset.
Social media exploded with wonder and outrage in mid-2018 when it learned that Elon Musk and Grimes had teamed up after a cute encounter on Twitter. After all, he was a union-hating oligarch on his way to becoming the richest man in the world. Musk was never completely MAGA, but instead embodied a Big Tech upgrade on the former Donald-Trump-as-celebrity-CEO role model, a media-savvy showman who thrived on hard work and worker innovation that he exploited but instead ruled Reddit. as glitzy real estate in New York, Florida and Las Vegas.
Before she became half James Carville and Mary Matalin of our very online generation, Grimes’ roster was something closer to chaotic good.
She was a feminist indie-pop star who supported Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016 and even deployed a huge Sanders Banner as a backdrop for her shoot at Coachella that year. His former Instagram avatar was a picture of Karl Marx, and “anti-imperialist” appeared in his profile bio.
Those images were erased shortly after she started dating the richest man in the world and began raising Musk’s banner alongside Bernie’s, metaphorically speaking. “When I look at my boyfriend’s goals and I look at Bernie’s goals, their end goals are very similar. Solve environmental problems, reduce suffering,” she says early 2020.
That might be true if you squint hard enough, but Bernie wants the government to embrace the Green New Deal and weed out billionaires like Musk to help end climate change and human suffering. Tesla CEO’s market-friendly solutions involve expensive electric cars with a dubious carbon footprint and colonize Mars. Musk and Sanders are not in the same planetary orbit, as their recent Twitter gaiters.
Grimes has drifted further to the right over the past two years. In 2020, she hinted that she had broken with socialism for a new love of free markets. She claimed she was “a bit of a socialist, but not economically”. It’s the cowardly equivalent of saying “I’m a chef, but not with food.”
But what about last fall when tabloids photographed she reading the communist manifesto while being dressed as an extra of the Lord of the Rings? Grimes later confessed it was a stunt meant to troll the media. It is clarified in a Instagram post that even if Marx had some good ideas, they are no match for Dogecoin. “I’m more interested in a radically decentralized UBI that I think could potentially be done through crypto and gaming, but I haven’t explained that idea enough to explain it yet.”
In her last interview, it’s clear she’s changed her philosophy to match her other world. Bride of Pinbot aesthetic. She is now a techno-optimist who believes the future is post-democratic and post-human. “As with the internet and everything, what’s happening is we’re all becoming individual neurons in some sort of superbrain,” she said in a recent maintenance. “And I can’t help but feel like there’s this super-intelligence that develops where we are at all of these individual parts.”
If Grimes had played Nintendo more, she would have realized that it looks a lot like maternal brain, the evil artificial intelligence from the Metroid series. The truth is, we don’t need unlimited AI, NFTs, or space capitalist ex-boyfriends to invent a better world. True democracy, including a democratic economy, is a dream not worth giving up.
