Some people have a much easier time being proud about parts of themselves than others, and I am reminded of this more than ever at Lollapalooza. The music festival has a wide variety of music, bringing forth an immense amount of diversity in the festival-goers.
My jaw drops as I watch people of different ages, ethnicities, body types, and personalities move around me in different directions. I take in the outfits and how they act when they’re listening to music. There are thousands of people and the ones I see, I don’t know any of them.
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I don’t know their stories, but I watch with gaping eyes as these bold and shameless people have the time of their life and I just wonder how they got to be so brave.
My eyes take in some musicians who wear long conservative dresses and look so into their banjo solos, some who wear t-shirts and jeans, and some who wear tight bodysuits with heels and shades. Who were they influenced by? Where did they get their confidence?
Then I see Grimes, and she blows me away.
Claire Boucher, otherwise known as her stage name, "Grimes," is a singer-songwriter who performs with one hand holding a mic, and the other usually on a synth. If not there, she’s playing the electric guitar or doing jerky dance moves and sometimes writhing on the floor and screaming into the mic.
It’s crazy because between songs she has this cute voice and for a world-renowned music festival artist, she seems friendly and genuinely happy to be there. But when she’s in the thick of a song, she controls every sound on multiple boards, and the look in her wide, dark eyes is straight up ferocious. Her fearlessness is so blatant and loud. I’d never seen anything like this, and in my barrier spot, I was front and center to this art form.
She’s a tidal wave of mind-bending energy that makes you feel electrified, more alive.
The guy standing next to me sasses his friend after the performance. “You’re a fake. fan. Do you even know her middle name?!”
Well, you don’t need to know someone’s middle name to enjoy their music, right? I bet Grimes wants audiences to dance the life into the music she slaves over just as much as she does on stage.
I couldn’t walk away from the stage without still dancing. I was obsessed and days later, still her lingering energy had me obsessed. So the obvious next step was to scour the internet for articles, interviews, lyric annotations, and her influences.
This girl from Canada grew up in Montreal and was on the track for pre-professional ballet for 11 years. That was until she arrived to class one day in 8th grade with a shaved head and the snickering wouldn’t stop. She was going to college studying astrophysics, Russian, and philosophy but was basically kicked out for missing too much class by making music in "GarageBand." The project came to be because she says, “the real world was always just this thing I had to deal with, and then Grimes [a fictional character/alternate persona] could be a thing which was how I wished it was.”
Her project set on fire with popularity, and today she writes all her music, produces it, directs and edits her music videos, creates all her album artwork, and knows all the technology like a math wiz. Her influences are almost all fellow masterminds at creating their music from start to finish. She’s a music threat to the enth degree.
The Guardian described her performances as "creative abandon and calculated moves”, and it couldn’t be worded better. If you gathered all the adjectives journalists have used to describe Grimes and her music, you’d have an impressive list of words you’re not sure are all real (mad pop scientist, phantasmal, bizzaro, faux-saccharine to name a few?).
I’m wary to share her music with anyone who wasn’t there with me, because it’s music that makes you feel uncomfortable at the first listen. It makes your heart beat faster, invokes some dance moves, and incites some mild concern for anyone catching you jamming to this other-worldly music.
What I love the most is the image she portrays with this character. Grimes is this metal, vampish character because she is too scary to be objectified. Her addictive, weird music emphasizes her incredible talent and destroys any possibility to be reduced by “dainty” appearances. But don’t get her wrong, she’s not a feminist icon-- when people got too excited about her never shaving her body hair, she started. Strangers being too involved in something as small as body hair has got to be weird, so I feel her.
Her staccato-y, rock and electronic anthems sing from the perspective of Al Pacino as a gender-changing space vampire, to the more mellow tunes can be about not “need[ing] hands to touch me” to just “be a body.”
Grimes teaches me to be the highest level of daredevil. Whether it’s making music, or aspiring for anything not traditionally accepted-- if it’s it’s important to me then it’s important. Be fierce, be honest in your interests, and be unabashedly passionate in your creations. Oh, and always dance.
