Grimes Talks about Sexism In The Record Industry, But Not To Us
Grimes
In a long interview with the Fader, Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, is sharing some thoughts about the record industry. She has an upcoming album which will drop this October on 4AD, and she is one of these artists who speaks up her mind while having a very loyal cult following, I will always remember seeing her at Pasadena Make music and watching these young guys going crazy, one of them almost broke his neck in front of a security guard to bring her flowers!
But she doesn’t like to be taken out of context, she doesn’t like it when websites repost what she writes on her Tumblr… ‘my tumblr is not a news source […] i dont like it when what i say on here is taken out of context and posted elsewhere. its not a story and its not an official statement,’ she wrote before deleting most of the posts on her Tumblr.
It’s simple, Grimes doesn’t like to be manipulated and being told what to do, and above everything, she doesn’t like to be patronized?
‘I think it’s just the constant, almost daily offers of people to produce your music for you,’ she says. ‘I was raised in a house with four brothers. My dad was like, ‘You’re gonna be good at basketball. You’re gonna be the fastest runner. You’re gonna be good at math.’ I wasn’t raised as a boy, but I was not just raised as a girl. I don’t wanna say I don’t identify as a girl, but I don’t fucking give a shit about gender. And the thing that I hate about the music industry is all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Grimes is a female musician’ and ‘Grimes has a girly voice.’ It’s like, yeah, but I’m a producer and I spend all day looking at fucking graphs and EQs and doing really technical work.’
She wants to be recognized for who she is and what she does, and basically can’t stand the sexism of the record industry:
‘I get threats constantly—all female musicians do. People want to, like, rape and kill you. It’s, like, part of the job. One time I was backstage at a show, and there was this random guy in my dressing room, and he just grabbed me and started making out with me, and I was like, Ah!, and pushed him off. Then he went, ‘Ha! I kiss-raped you’ and left. Shit like that happens quasi-frequently. When I play a show I have to have, like, three bodyguards in front of the stage, and then I have to have bodyguards on the side.’
Isn’t it crazy? Because she is a good-looking petite female, people think they can take advantage of her?
She gives another example of this later in the conversation. When she was recording a song, she was once again confronted to this macho behavior: ‘Going into studios, there’s all these engineers there, and they don’t let you touch the equipment. I was like, ‘Well, can I just edit my vocals?’ And they’d be like ‘No, just tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.’ And then a male producer would come in, and he’d be allowed to do it. It was so sexist. I was, like, aghast. It made me really disillusioned with the music industry. It made me realize what I was doing is important.’
Grimes wants to be in control of her life and art, and she will be, she has the right attitude for it. She wants to record and engineer her own music, edit her own videos, and she thinks that what she is doing is important? Yeah she is working hard for women’s recognition in music, she wants people to know ‘That women can do technical work, that I can be a producer and a pop star and also very experimental.’
Grimes wants it all, but will she succeed?
