Continuing to feed us but only small doses of new music as we await her long rumored fifth album (the one that likely Elon Musk is helping to finance thanks to misogynistic, restrictive labels like 4AD and how “the music industry is trash”), Grimes persists in the tease of a theme that is coming more and more to fruition after being firmly established by “We Appreciate Power.” That theme, of course, is a future run by technology and the augmented reality implied by such. Except she is sure to stress that the “Pretty Dark” demo is part of an entirely different project, specifically a musical. Hence her Newspeak-filled declaration, “So gna start making AR (or illustrated?) ‘sub-members’ within Grimes (The art angels, as it were lol). (Kinda like the Loona sub-bands X the Gorillaz?… ..psychedelic post k pop-ish fake band for my non-Grimes musical ventures.”
And yet, Grimes, ever the lovelorn nymphette, has only wielded this motif so as to make herself come across as even more of a wounded little bird. A fairy (literally at one point in the accompanying “lyric video”) with broken wings. For with the augmentation of reality comes the augmentation of love’s pain, evinced by Grimes bemoaning, “I wish I could be your first love the way you are mine/Wish you didn’t remember this feeling/But knew it the way I know it/Wish you were impaled/And injured with love the way I am.” Even despite the fact that she’s “donned” some form of alien-inspired “mask” (clearly she has an exclusive version of Snapchat that no one else does to provide her with these guises) throughout the sized for Instagram video, we can’t help but take her sadness seriously. Empathize with her as she stares into the screen with that tinge of narcissism that no one can help exuding when they see themselves in this twenty-first century version of a mirror.
In a pink ruffled shirt, slicked back ballerina hair and two butterflies atop her bun, Grimes shoots herself from the sort of perspective that you get when you’re in John Malkovich’s head and he’s fucking other people (except she’s on top while he’s predictably viewing from a bottom angle). Beating her chest and pantomiming tears running down her cheeks, it’s evident that Grimes is breaking out of the tunnel vision of “just music” into more performance art-oriented mediums–thus, the aforementioned musical that has inspired her to “drop stuff as [she] see(s) fit” while she’s waiting to finish the production on her album. To that end, she further commented, “Been doing this exercise where I try to write and produce a whole song in like ~1-2 hrs… f*ck technical proficiency and whatnot.” Certainly we already knew she felt that way based on her uncomfortable Apple commercial. And we already knew she was, as reiterated, “bored of being so precious abt music and also feeling boxed in by the Grimes branding and I have this whole other world that’s rly fun to write for” when news of her writing a book (not of the Lana Del Rey persuasion, mind you) came out a couple years ago.
Yet even through all the striations of how she expresses herself, music is the foundation for these “characters” she creates. It is what’s happening behind the screen where Grimes is reveling in her despair, therefore herself, that we find ourselves most interested in–and eventually the camera does only show us this bizarre scene of Grimes (presumably with the previously alluded to “sub-members”) in water with fairy wings. Will they let her fly into new territories of experimentation without crashing? It would appear so. Even if there’s a subpoena thanks to a sub-penis in between.
