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> Grimes built her artistic persona in association with crust punks and anti-establishment sentiment. She claimed to be a communist and told stories about how poor she was in Montreal. People took this to mean that she was a leftist political radical who grew up in a working or middle class family. You know: normal. It was part of her image and what endeared her to many of the weirdos and social rejects who were her fans. She was "one of us" who happened to be a musical genius and was making it big and we loved her for it.
> When she shacked up with Elon Musk she shattered that image and revealed how much of a lie it was. She grew up rich. She's not a communist or a political radical. And she has no qualms about jumping into bed with uber-capitalist Godzillionaires like Musk even though people like him (read: the elite of the world) are largely responsible for ever-increasing suffering and exploitation around the globe.
> She gets backlash about her relationship with Elon Musk because fans perceive it to be the point at which she 'sold out' and hypocritically compromised her previously stated values to bag herself a technocrat billionaire boyfriend (who himself has a contentious reputation). She's now enmeshed in a world of money, status and power that some people find hard to stomach considering how relatable she was once seemed to be. This change has led people to perceive her (accurately IMO) as intellectually incoherent and superficial, which is where a lot of the mockery towards her stems from. In the end, it boils down to that age-old conflict between authenticity and artificiality.
i don't want to spend much more time on claire boucher, but i think this is a really interesting phenomena that tends to deflate or misdirect anti-establishment cultural trends. possibly not entirely on purpose either. i can't exactly imagine boucher doing all of this tourism as a calculated move to ride and difuse crust punk for her own gain. i try not to underestimate people though, so this could all be part of a wierd plan and the naïveté i'm seeing is a ploy to that end.
i want to consider the process that's teased in here. a mirror of the colonial methods of stealing resources from the third world: taking undergroud culture, buffing off the edge, removing the claws, and selling it for a profit. even tourists are a damaging force here. the game doesn't have to be zero sum, but in many cases these forces end up being a direct economic assault on the marginalized people that exist in third world USA.
> When they were saying it is the renaissance of Harlem
> They didn't mean that we had stake in that
> They meant to say that they could make money out of us[...]
> those people are putting up condominiums which start from a million dollars
> How many people in this community make that kind of money
> How many people HAVE that kind of money[...]
> Whether the struggle is in Panama, in Africa, Cuba
> We spend money with the wrong people
> We are looking for love with people
> Who don't love us
> What's wrong with loving each other and making sure we are protected?
the issue of class becomes really important when you think about this stuff. all it takes is some wealth and talent and anything can become a pop sensation that is completely decontextualized. no matter what it is, somehow there are wealthy people who can take advantage of their resources to drown out the original artists, to drown out the culture and the struggle. robbing people of the prosperity of their own culture. i don't believe in a culture of exclusion and supremacy like the white power structure does. i don't what to say that we need to be that way, but there are things to watch out for and a big one is class.
it always matters where the artists are coming from and where the money goes when its given to them. especially if they have a very successful trajectory. does that money end up back in the community? do they waste it on displays of wealth or is their success invested back into the people? what kind of ideology do they promote and does that harm or help? if we are going to place artists in privileged positions, they need to be able to answer these questions. we have been betrayed many times and i'm sure it will continue into the future. reckon it would be nice if some of that wealth could go towards feeding, clothing, and housing people. ideally in some kind of cooperative economy that's specifically set up to care for people.
i can dream..
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