When I opened Spotify in late November of last year, I received a notification: New Music For You — We Appreciate Power by Grimes. As the somehow harmonic nu-metal screeching filled my earbuds, I was filled with rage, because the song was good. And I was mad.



For almost six years, Grimes has been one of my favorite artists. Though her sound shifts from album to album, I’ve found comfort in the arms of bubbly, poppy Art Angels and gentle Geidi Primes just as often as I have in the GarageBand wonder that is Visions. I even dabble in the mystical, synth-heavy Halfaxa from time to time, although my appreciation for discernible lyrics in (most of) the other three often wins out. But recently I’ve found it difficult to enjoy her music the way I used to, due to the fact that over the course of the past nine months, she has become a singular ball of nonsensical chaos.



If you have any internet presence whatsoever, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. From her defense of her boyfriend Elon Musk’s union busting to her feud with notoriously controversial rapper Azealia Banks to her other feud with internet personality Poppy (over a feature on We Appreciate Power, the song I just mentioned) to a bizarre Twitter thread declaring that the Japanese schoolgirl pornography known as Hentai was “important”, Grimes went from a major inspiration and (dare I say it) an idol of mine to someone whose music I’m embarrassed to say I once listened to. It’s been a weird and crazy journey, to say the least, and now I’m unpacking it for the world to see. So fasten your seatbelts, everyone. It’s going to be a wild ride.



—



I was first introduced to Grimes in 2013. It was the summer after eighth grade. I was spending a week in the thick humidity of Long Island at my cousins’ house. My far more worldly older cousins Lucia and Paloma were lounging around on the couch, fighting over the aux cord to the giant speakers in the living room. Lucia, the eldest, emerged victorious, and it was from her iPhone 5 that it all began.



I never walk about after dark

It’s my point of view

Cause someone could break your neck

Coming up behind you, always coming and you’d never have a clue

And now I look behind all the time

I will wait forever, always looking straight

Thinking, counting, all the hours you wait

See you on a dark night

See you on a dark night

See you on a dark night

See you on a dark night



And now another clue

I would ask if you could help me out

It’s hard to understand

Cause when you’re running by yourself it’s hard to find someone to hold your hand

You know it’s good to be tough like me

But I will wait forever

I need someone now to look into my eyes and tell me—



“GIRL YOU KNOW YOU GOTTA WATCH YOUR HEALTH,” my cousins sang in unison, pointing to each other and then dissolving into laughter.



I just laid there staring at the ceiling in awe as the pulsing synth and ghostly vocals collided around me. It was the beginning of a love affair that would continue over the course of the next five years until May of 2018, when everything came crashing down.



—



Claire Boucher adopted the stage name Grimes in 2007. Visions, her third studio album, garnered massive amounts of critical acclaim and catapulted her to indie stardom shortly after its release in early 2012. The album found comfortable spots towards the top of over eight “best albums of the year” lists by the time 2012 had come to a close. Pitchfork also named the album’s second single, “Oblivion,” 2012’s song of the year and later, in 2014, song of the decade. It was this song that I first heard on my cousins’ couch that day in Long Island.



The 30-year-old Canadian artist is known, aside from her experimental music, for being unapologetically raw, honest, and politically outspoken. And for a long time, this was the exact reason I loved her so much. She embodied this picture of the radical, intersectional, socialist feminist that at the age of thirteen I was just beginning to realize I aspired to be. I followed her on all social media platforms, drinking in the many rants about sexism in the music industry and anti-capitalist beliefs she espoused on her Tumblr. For a long time, her Twitter bio proudly declared her to be “anti-imperialist,” among other things.



However, when the news broke that she was in a relationship with Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and founder of aerospace company SpaceX, those words disappeared from her Twitter bio.



—



2018. It was May 7, the day of the Met Gala. Two days before I moved out of my dorm and my first year at Yale officially came to a close. Before bed, I stopped at a friend’s room for one final night of lying around listening to sad music. When I collapsed on her bed next to her, she had her phone in her hand and was scrolling through what I assumed to be Met Gala outfits.



“Oh,” she said, “Did you hear?”



“What?”



“Grimes is dating Elon Musk.”



I fell silent for a second, then let out a laugh. “God. You almost got me there.”



She looked at me. “I’m serious.”



I was still laughing. “No.”



She gently placed her phone in my lap. The number one trending topic taunted me from the screen: Grimes attending the Met Gala with her boyfriend, Elon Musk. Wearing a necklace shaped like the Tesla logo.



“No,” I gasped.

After the two initial stages of grief, denial and anger, had passed, I found myself at the third stage, bargaining. Maybe, as my friend and countless Twitter users suggested in the minutes that followed, she was plotting to steal his money and redistribute it to the rest of the population. But as the tweets kept coming, it slowly began to sink in that this was not a joke. This was real.



Grimes is dating Elon Musk.



—



In every interview she gives, Claire Boucher is completely unfiltered, and often has to follow up her impulsive outbursts with “I probably shouldn’t have said that.” It was a quality I had once admired in her. Before the news of her relationship with Musk broke, the last time Grimes was in the news was late February of 2018, when she referred to her record label 4AD as “my shit label” in an Instagram comment replying to a fan asking about her two upcoming albums. In short, she’s a PR nightmare. And on May 21, 2018, barely a month after the news broke, she lived up to this reputation.



On this day, Twitter user @jcfrancisco told Grimes, “tell Elon to let his workers unionize”. Boucher replied with this since-deleted tweet:



But it quickly appeared that the one spreading “quite literally fake news” was Boucher herself. Tesla workers have long reported safety concerns in factories, but Musk has repeatedly attempted to prevent the workers in his Tesla factories from unionizing. In fact, the situation in Tesla factories has gotten so bad that the safety lead at Tesla Inc., Justine White, says that “it’s just a matter of time before somebody gets killed.” Fans were quick to point out the discrepancy, and Grimes did damage control the only way she knows how: by deleting most of the tweets in the thread and ignoring the stream of links and facts flung her way. To this day she still has not addressed the controversy, nor has she released the two albums she claimed would be out by the end of 2018. So not only was Grimes in a relationship with a union-busting billionaire who would rather his workers suffer in deplorable conditions than spend a minuscule fraction of his $21.6 billion fortune making his factories compliant with basic regulations, but now she was also defending those horrific practices.

If Grimes was a capitalist or a Republican who agreed with these views, or even a moderate who genuinely didn’t care either way, and also happened to make good music, then this would be sort of unfortunate but not a huge deal. This is not the case. Grimes has built a brand on identifying as feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist. It was a major part of her image. So when this happened, many fans, including myself, felt betrayed. It wasn’t just that she was turning her back on these ideas she claimed to champion. She was turning her back on us.



—



Despite my middle school devotion, when Grimes released her fourth studio album, Art Angels, in late 2015, I didn’t notice. It had been over three years since she’d released any new music, aside from two ill-received collaborations with other artists, and to be honest I’d sort of forgotten about her. And then, Florence + The Machine (my favorite band of all time), announced that they were going on tour, with Grimes opening. So in one of the most epic episodes of retail therapy I’ve ever experienced in my life, I bought tickets.



I won’t go into the minutiae of every single emotion I was feeling or sight I was seeing during her set, but suffice to say that when Claire Boucher bent over backwards onstage two yards in front of me in a wash of strobing yellow light and fog and released a demonic scream into the microphone at the close of “Realiti,” I saw God.



The weeks that followed were torturous for my parents. It was all Art Angels, all the time. They, like many of Grimes’ longtime fans, couldn’t stand the heavily-produced synth pop, so honest in its artificiality. Some of her fans even complained about the fact that they could now clearly understand her lyrics. I ate it up.



Full disclosure: I love pop. I think it’s fun and accessible and easy to dance to, and sometimes that’s all you really want from music. But running as I did during 2015 in mostly creative and alternative circles, many of my friends proudly declared that they “didn’t listen to pop” and that it was “vapid.” So I felt ashamed for a long time about my affection for the genre, and tried to keep it quiet, as I did most other parts of myself. But Grimes was not ashamed about making Art Angels. In fact, she proudly declared that it was her favorite album she’s ever made, saying, “it’s the first time I’ve had the world at my fingertips.”



I felt a similar way after my first run-through of the album. In the summer of 2015, I was anticipating my junior year with dread. I was insecure beyond belief. I genuinely thought I didn’t have a personality. The idea of having a voice of my own or a concrete sense of self was so foreign I never truly thought it would be a reality. Everything was confusing. Compounding this was the slow but sure splintering of the friend group I had been a part of since I was ten. Barbs were tossed; sides were chosen; hearts were broken. Normal teenage melodrama magnified by hormones and the American Public School System.



It didn’t help that I was at the epicenter of the splintering. It had all started over some silly fight between myself and my then-best friend that I honestly can’t even remember anymore. But the cruelness of teenage girls who hate themselves is unmatched, and I do remember that it left both our prides so profoundly wounded that afterward, we could never be in the same room again. Without her, I was lonely. And as time wore on and our group fractured more and more, I only got lonelier.



Instead of doing what a healthy person might have done and pouring myself into my schoolwork or a particular passion of mine, I let myself sink into the dark. I might have stayed there forever, but then Art Angels found me. It is one of the most cliché things I have ever experienced, and I am very sorry to make you read the following sentence, but this album saved me. Every single song perfectly articulated a different aspect of what I was feeling in that bleak year. To name a few:



“Flesh Without Blood,” a song about a broken friendship (that Pitchfork called “the sweetest fuck-off of 2015,”): I don’t see the light I saw in you before / and no, I don’t care anymore […] you had every chance / you destroy everything that you know



“California,” a song about the music industry that I decided to take literally because I used to live in California and have spent my whole life missing it with my entire being: the things they see in me I cannot see myself / when you get bored of me I’ll be back on the shelf / and when the ocean rises up above the ground / maybe I’ll drown in / California



“World Princess part II,” a song about being underestimated: I know most likely / how I used to be a frail and silly thought in your mind / don’t be unkind / you’re so far behind me



“Scream,” a song about, well, screaming (this is a translation of the lyrics which are sung in Mandarin): if you can’t scream, then swallow it down



“Realiti,” a song about exhaustion: every morning there are mountains to climb / taking all my time / oh, when I get up this is what I see / welcome to reality.



Listening to Grimes assert her confidence and worth as a person while at the same time candidly acknowledging the insecurities that threatened to ruin her in fourteen tracks taught me how to do the same. A year later I was making new friends at school, applying to college, and generally maintaining stability, if not happiness. I know it sounds ridiculous that an album did all of this for me. But when you are in that kind of depression, it feels impossible to pull yourself out. What I needed was help from someone that wasn’t going to talk down to me, from someone that wasn’t going to dismiss my problems as trivial as they truly were. Because to me at age fifteen, everything I was going through was a big deal. Everything was the end of the world, and nobody could see it except for me. And then, Grimes did. So despite all her wild behavior over the past few months, it’s been incredibly hard for me to cancel Grimes, because her music has done for me what nobody else was able to do during one of the darkest times in my life: see me.



—



I have been working on this piece since May of 2018, right after the Met Gala. For a long time I couldn’t articulate exactly what my problem was with the choices Boucher has made in defending and dating Elon Musk. I only knew that there was a problem, because whenever I thought about the situation I felt sick to my stomach. But it felt like an issue I in some ways had no right to approach. When I told people I was writing this article, some asked me, is it even any of our business? It’s her personal life, isn’t it? Why should we care who she or who anyone dates? And honestly, in the case of most normal, non-absurdly-wealthy people, I’d be inclined to agree. But when billionaires are involved, it’s not that simple.



Today, one in nine people across the world go hungry. Over half a million people in the United States experience homelessness on any given night despite the fact that there are an estimated 18.5 million vacant homes across the country, or six empty homes for every one homeless person. Citizens of the richest nation in the world die while begging for their lives on GoFundMe and rationing their insulin because they can’t afford skyrocketing copays. Flint still doesn’t have clean water.



These are all issues that disproportionately affect members of marginalized groups, particularly low-income and black people. And they are all issues that are entirely fixable (in the cases of world hunger, homelessness, and Flint) or at least alleviated (in the case of our broken healthcare system) by a fraction of the money that men (and it’s usually men) like Musk or Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos possess. But they would rather marginally increase their own exorbitant wealth through mistreatment of their workers and put it towards things like space travel or ridiculously expensive underground trains following already-existing subway routes.



Don’t get me wrong: you can reasonably become a millionaire through nothing but hard work and smart business choices. But a billion dollars is an exponential increase that’s honestly hard for people (including me) to wrap our heads around. For reference, a million seconds is just over eleven-and-a-half days. A billion seconds is a little over 31 years. You simply cannot achieve this kind of wealth at the speed with which Musk and Bezos achieved theirs without extensive exploitation of the working class.



It boils down to this: possessing that much wealth while millions of people are literally dying from a lack of any wealth at all is in and of itself an immoral act. Identifying as a proud communist and anti-imperialist, Grimes had previously appeared to know this. But her inherent privilege as a wealthy white woman also allows her the additional privilege of not caring. At the end of the day, aside from feminism, she does not have a real stake in most of the issues she claims to support. It is not her life being politicized.



On the other hand, much of the people who make up her fanbase (myself included) fall into the categories of people whose existences are inherently politicized, whether because of the color of our skin or our income or who we love. We have grown up feeling alienated and lost, and we found solace not only in her music but also in her public persona. She put up this front of fighting for all of these leftist policies and capitalized off of a fanbase that thought she was truly on their side. And then, in one fell swoop, she showed that she actually didn’t care about any of that, thereby decimating any trust we’d had in her. How serious could she really be about any of those beliefs, especially the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ones, when she dropped everything to date and defend a billionaire who has a record of abusing his workers?



Above all else, I just feel hurt. I know it’s silly, and I know it’s my own fault for idolizing a celebrity who at their core is nothing more than a normal, flawed human being with a whole bunch of money they don’t know what to do with, and I know it says more about her than it ever will about me. And in many ways, I know it’s my own fault for holding her to an impossible standard. Nobody’s perfect. But I’m writing this while listening to “Oblivion,” and every second of it stings just a little. This song, the song that made Grimes famous and hypnotized me on Long Island all those years ago, was written as a way to cope with a violent assault she experienced. The album Visions as a whole was in large part an examination and takedown of toxic masculinity. The unapologetic departure from lo-fi electronica to pure pop in Art Angels was a grand statement of self-determination, of finally becoming comfortable with being the person you want to be rather than the person everyone else expects you to be. These were messages I desperately needed to hear (and sometimes still do) as I navigated the chaos of growing up. Without them, I don’t think I would have made it here to Broad Recognition, or to Yale.



So where does that leave me and Grimes? Honestly, I’m not sure. Like I said, “We Appreciate Power” slaps, and I’m reluctantly intrigued about what’s next for her music. But I don’t think it’ll have the emotional effect on me that it once did. I don’t know how to explain it, exactly, but there was something so powerful about hearing the lyrics of all those songs and knowing that they came from someone that I knew wanted the same things as me: liberty, equality, and justice for all. Then again, maybe I should’ve known this was a façade all along. Maybe the last line of the last song on Art Angels was not a simple declaration so much as a warning.



If you’re looking for a dream girl / I’ll never be your dream girl.

Illustration by Victoria Xie.

