ok so look
claire/grimes is sitting a couple feet away from me right now. i love her more than i love anything else in the world. i am probably fully incapable of total impartiality when it comes to talking about her and arguments, like the one advanced in this tumblr post by katherine st asaph in response to the post right below this one, that it is not really worth getting worked up about the idea that she is special or unique or new or remarkable because there are probably hundreds of people doing the same thing and the only thing that distinguishes her from them is PR, like
i mean on a personal level that pretty much just goes totally against everything that is in my heart any of the time and as someone who is just like a person who cares about music a lot it just strikes me as totally nihilistic and gives me this really cold feeling in my stomach like a hunger pang that could not be erased by ten thousand of the world’s finest cheeseburgers
like even the most cursory perusal of my tumblr or any interviews with me should make it really plainly obvious that i am not a person who goes around saying that major labels are evil and that only cool authentic DIY music that does not acknowledge the existence of a music industry is worth anyone’s consideration. for the last few months i have opened every show i do with a spice girls cover. i was not doing that ironically. i was doing that because i totally fucking love the spice girls.
even in the tumblr post below this one with all the reblogs and stuff i say that i really like the sky ferreira EP and i don’t find anything objectionable about the way those projects are organized or constructed. i even say i think they are exciting. i did a remix of a song from the sky ferreira EP, which i got paid for. i got paid kind of a lot for it actually. if i were to suddenly decide that i want to get into the business of crusading against major labels, that would not only be kind of a weak argument but it would be an indefensible one coming from someone who has in the past been perfectly happy to cash their checks. the idea of me getting painted as the antagonist from “i love it” by icona pop, trying to get in the way of legions of ecstatic pop fans shouting “i don’t care, i like what i like!” by saying “no, it’s not authentic” really bums me out because that is like basically the opposite of my entire life’s work and stuff
like, this is all i was trying to say: the wikipedia for sky ferreira’s “ghost” ep lists the following people as producers: jon brion, dev hynes, greg kurstin, ariel rechtshaid, and cass mccombs. that is a really formidable list of a lot of really talented people. a lot of the time that is what it takes to make a really good album - i don’t think mike dean doing a lot of the legwork on my beautiful dark twisted fantasy makes it a lesser record, or that the new taylor swift album is like an invalid piece of art because max martin co-wrote three songs on it. those songs are fucking awesome
but like, a couple weeks ago, my younger stepbrother was asking me questions about grimes because he’d just recently heard it for the first time and he knew that i know claire. his first question was “does she write her own songs?”. not because he was probing to try to discern whether or not she was a legitimate or authentic musician or whatever, but because she’s a woman and in the real world, which is several decades behind the internet petri dish bubble universe we all live in where concepts like “rockism” and “poptimism” have already undergone several distinct cycles of death and rebirth, the idea of a woman writing all her own songs and playing all the instruments on and producing her own album is still kind of revolutionary
if you think signing to a record label and hiring a publicist completely diminishes how cool it is for a woman to not only make all of her music herself but for that music to be as successful or more successful than music that was made by crack teams of the best producers and songwriters currently working, then that is your perogative but oh my god you make my heart hurt and i am going to run away from you as fast as i can before you make me cry
there is a difference between grimes and charli xcx, and maybe that difference is meaningless to you personally, but it means something to me and that’s kind of all i was really trying to say. if it came out too mansplain-y or whatever that totally sucks and i am definitely sorry
if the point got lost because the most striking feature of the tumblr post right below this one is that it implies that “cloud aura” by charli xcx is terrible i am less sorry for that because it totally is terrible
ok thanks everyone sorry
love
james
