Claire Boucher has spent a decade battling the press to reclaim her reputation. Dating Elon Musk means she’s never been more controversial – but could her new album set her free?
Grimes has always had a tortured relationship with visibility. No sooner had Claire Boucher broken beyond the Montreal warehouse scene at the turn of the 2010s than she was telling journalists that she only fronted her music because she couldn’t afford to hire someone to do it for her. She wanted to be Phil Spector – though maybe she also wanted to be Britney. “I really hate being in front of people,” she told Pitchfork in 2012. “But I’m also obsessed with being a pop star.”
That ambivalence colours Boucher’s earliest press. She could make “dumb fucking hits all day” but didn’t, because “that’s obviously not how I want Grimes to be perceived”. She once asked: “What’s the difference between Napoleon and everyone else? Napoleon had great image branding.” Given that her style and hair colour changed in every photo, Boucher disrupted the possibility of ever solidifying into the kind of stable pop silhouette connoted by either bicorne hat or cone bra. She craved a new archetype: whether she resembled a space lieutenant or racoon-eyed wraith, the one consistent would be her iconoclastic skill as the sole producer of her music.
Grimes was deified like a pop star, and there was a triumph-of-the-weird will to see her become one
Against all odds, Miss Anthropocene is Boucher’s continuing personal testament to creativity as resistance against destruction
Continue reading...by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian
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