REVIEW: Grimes' "Violence"
By Sylvia Lee
Grimes’s new single is delightfully extra-terrestrial and has me geared up for her alien apocalypse.
It’s 2012 and fifteen-year-old me has just discovered sonic nirvana on Tumblr. I listen to Genesis, marvelling at the celestial synthesis of Grimes’s airy vocals and punchy synth-pop beats. In the music video, Grimes drives into the desert in an Escalade, donning an albino python around her neck and serving looks with her too-cool friends, who could all be models for Burning Man’s unofficial lookbook.
This was the dawn of Grime’s (real name Claire Elise Boucher) career, which had humble origins in her Montreal bedroom and the digital realms of the early 2010s. Grimes would soon rise to stardom as the counterculture alien princess of experimental art pop, receiving several awards for her work in Visions and Art Angels, which gained notoriety as one of the best albums of 2012 and 2015.
In recent years, her unlikely relationship with Elon Musk — apparently, it was love at first sight because both of them had tweeted the same obscure pun about a “weird AI conspiracy” — have led to the genesis of some iconic memes, Grimes has publicly declared her intentions to legally change her name to c and in an interview with Wall Street Journal, announced her plans to “kill off” her Grimes persona in a “public execution”. And so, we have Violence, her first single release this year, which may or may not be from her upcoming record, Miss_Anthrop0cene (yes, you heard right), which she describes as “a concept album about the anthropomorphic goddess of climate change”.
In Violence, Grimes dazzles with her intergalactic marriage of ethereal synth-led melodies and dynamic, sci-fi-inspired production. In her typical airy style, Grimes croons, “I am like, begging for you baby… You feed on hurting me, off hurting me,” revealing the brutality contained by the angelic exterior of the song. The music video, too, is an aesthetic hit in which Grimes effortlessly steps into the role of a post-apocalyptic Greek goddess who proves her mastery of the art of war, together with her entourage of badass female warriors.
Ultimately, “Violence” revels in the self-destructive essence of humanity, a darkness that Grimes embraces in her quest for self-assassination. It is also a song that even years after my Tumblr days, envelops me in nostalgia and makes me remark, with knowing, wistful smugness, “That’s so Tumblr.”