We have come to a point in our society of blatant insult to free expression. Is this because free expression is so feared by so many, related to how even in the ’00’s we had all those absurd “Is indie dead?” type articles?
Via the recent New Yorker article about Grimes, “becoming a star” is the primary objective of making noise these days. Two critically acclaimed albums down, but folks, the “coolness” arbiters of today, now that indie is “dead,” won’t be satisfied until Grimes is financially lucrative, you know, like on the To Pimp a Butterfly cover.
After asking, “Can a former noise musician become a star?”, apparently having never heard of Sonic Youth, Kelefa Sanneh wields an almost palpable hatred for the Montreal scene denizens who Sanneh says “often seemed to be making music for one another.”
What? Excuse me? Could somebody take me please back to planet Earth? What the hell is this oaf-ish sh** I am reading here, it is stinking up my entire room. Anybody this disinterested in the grassroots music scene in Montreal has no business writing about the craft. Be a fashion prig, or maybe count the Madonna concerts that Sean Penn attends, but don’t proffer a divulged investment in the progress of music in the Western world, because you clearly can’t see over the price tags in your clothes.
It seems that The New Yorker has chosen Grimes as a subject for this article because she is weird-looking, she does not look like a typical “star,” and so the objective comes to build a sort of suspense, can the moribund aesthetic velocity of outcasts exceed a certain tax bracket in music, given enough artistic force. They are unconcerned with her already-pocketed critical acclaim to an utterly loony extent. With two classic albums under her belt, Grimes should at this point be asked things like, “What young artists are you championing?”, or, “What do you want to do with your life after music?” Their valuing of financial success is one of the most sickening things I’ve seen in a long time, and if they think it’s unprecedented for socially askance artists to become “stars,” apparently they’ve never heard of Jimi Hendrix: “If 6 turned out to be 9 / I don’t mind I don’t mind / ‘Cause I got my own world to live through / And I ain’t gonna copy you.”