As a longtime champion of the DIY and carving out what the “Grimes brand” meant to her–especially as she put all the work into it as a producer thanks to GarageBand and Pro Tools–our waifish Claire Boucher a.k.a. “c” has decided to take things to the next level by allowing fans a chance to edit her latest video and the next single from Miss Anthropocene, “You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around.” Her own version is punctuated by a volcano-y backdrop, complete with flicks of fire and ash as her mechanical wings move about as though not of her own volition (in truth, it looks like she ripped off Edward Scissorhands’ act, but as a post-human angel).
Recalling the editing k-hole she entered while working on the post-production for “Delete Forever,” Grimes decided the present quarantine of the world was as good a moment as any to let others take the reins on editing, and all the time consumption it entails. Or, as she phrased it, “Because we’re all in lockdown we thought if people are bored and wanna learn new things, we could release the raw components of one of these for anyone who wants to try making stuff using our footage.” Is that “we” her and Elon Musk, or the bifurcated personae of Claire and Grimes? It doesn’t matter. The point is, she wants the common man to challenge themselves. And if they actually do, it could be yet another push toward the further lo-fi democratization of the entertainment industry.
As it stands, Hollywood is basically cancelled for the rest of the year–something that is sure to have grave implications in the coronavirus fallout year called 2021. And as people fear such petty phenomena as “running out of content” (along with the pettiness of women being concerned about getting their hair and nails done again), this small step in the music video realm–a genre that’s already easier to DIY than TV shows and movies–feels like a premonition of the future. At which time reliance on “audience participation” (e.g. audiences doing at least some of the work to create the content they want to see from entities they’re fans of) will be more norm than one-off. The fact that something as grimy and analog as Tiger King has also caught like wildfire in the midst of quarantine also appears to presage a general okayness with jank production value.
Even late night hosts who have been forced to dispense with their precious, ego-affirming live audiences have admitted that they’ve started to figure out how to work around the “problem” of not filming on a huge stage in front of roughly a hundred people. If anything, it at least allows the freedom to tell a more “experimental” joke that doesn’t rely on audience laughter to land. With even those accustomed to a more “high-budget” approach to production getting used to a janker way of life, 2020 is setting the stage for people to take the “cheaply made” aesthetic with a grain of salt (this, too, has also been affirmed by the popularity of TikTok).
Although Grimes can semi-bill this experiment as an act of artistic altruism and concern for people getting bored in quarantine, it is, of course, also because her present state of pregnancy makes it a risk for her to perform as dynamically as usual (it’s kind of like how Madonna relied on an animated action segment for the “Music” video in 2000 while she was pregnant with her second son, Rocco). That said, her largely stationary stance throughout the unfilled narrative is helpful to those who might be novices in the editing process. Sharing the raw files via WeTransfer and putting artistic power in the hands of the people, Grimes could also very well be giving the average person too much credit as many will inevitably tinker with the video in such a way as to make it look, let’s say, “inappropriate.”
What’s more, opening the Pandora’s box of giving control to the proletariat is always a risk for those in a bourgeois position such as Grimes’. Yet, there can be no denying this might just be another way in which the chanteuse has chosen to acknowledge the realities of the future (including how we’re at the end of human art) well before anyone else. With the “average Joe (Exotic)” realizing that one can create their own content with the same tools as even the most mainstream celebrity, everyone’s inner narcissist is liable to be all the more unleashed. For just as coronavirus has forced a majority to accept what essential versus nonessential means, so, too, has it made quite a few understand just how unspecial–and unneeded–famous people are (that is, unless they are personally Venmo’ing you money).
Even the song’s title seems to be an allusion to what those who remember a time before 2020 recall about media of the past: it had production value. But it all just plays into the ironic fact that as the future arrives in fits and starts, existence feels more ghetto than it does “advanced.”
