Grimes has become a really big deal, she was headlining one of the FYF fest stages last Saturday night, and even though I didn’t see her, I am sure the lawn was very crowded. This weekend, she will appear in Jay-Z’s Made in America Fest, the Philadelphia edition (since she signed with Jay Z’s Roc Nation) so she is practically everywhere at the moment.
However, after watching her last video for ‘Go’, I have absolutely no regrets to have skipped her to go see Interpol (and even Phoenix) this past weekend. I am not a big fan of EDM music – this is the least I can say – and although Grimes is easy on the eyes, this boring rhythms and mellow pseudo-R&B melody, which could have easily been sung by any sexy hot number of the moment, do not excite me at all. I never was into Grimes’ music, but at least it was not that mainstream commercial shit!
And it’s not because Grimes wants to pump up her work with some intellectual references and a few lines of Dante’s Inferno at the beginning of the song, that my opinion is gonna change… did she even read the Inferno? May be, as she seems to make us believe in this statement published by Rolling Stone magazine:
‘In the inferno, people’s actions in life echo eternally. Mike [a.k.a. Blood Diamonds] (Virgil) and I (Dante) wander through the circles of hell. It’s not a traditional hell, it kind of reflects stuff that’s going on today. We shot a bunch at the Salton Sea, which is basically an apocalyptic wasteland filled with dead fish because of human carelessness, a hallway of bullet holes à la Korn ‘Freak on a Leash.’ If you look closely you can find clues. But in the usual fashion it is also abstract enough to just be a trippy visual accompaniment to the song.’
Sure, the video, which she directed with her brother Mac, looks good with scenes of her dancing in the dark or in the middle of the desert, but I got bored after a few seconds,… clichés? Don’t even get me started.
On her Tumblr, she also wrote this:
‘It’s supposed to be dante’s inferno (abstractly), different layers of hell etc. super visually inspired by like x men, metal gear, dune. haha, maybe thats too all over the place and doesn’t make sense, but yea, enjoy!’
Exactly! Dante, the X-men, Dune (this is actually what came to my mind first, but I am old) and why not, I would also throw a bit of Burning Man and Mad Max in the lot, but this looks like a very messy way to steal a little bit from everybody and turn the result into something as flat as a Rihanna video,… anyway this song (a collaboration with Blood Diamonds) was originally written for Rihanna, so no big surprise there.
