This morning I read two essays about Grimes, but not really about Grimes. Since I’ve listened to Grimes, but not really listened to her, I thought it would make sense to talk a little about these essays and what they seem to be getting at, since that’s maybe more interesting — that is, definitely more interesting to me, possibly boring or even infuriating for you.

Here are a few preliminary facts about me. Before I read Mark Richardson’s piece, I actually did not, in so many words, know what the Bechdel Test was. Even though I’m involved with a feminist writer! Do not tell her I said this! Another thing: growing up, in high school, at least, I mostly listened to Tori Amos (and Dave Matthews Band). They both sang about love and stuff — and really, for an emotionally under-developed negative like myself, then, the what they sang about didn’t seem that different. Yet another thing is that I’m known to write about the way women are written about in music writing. But I also think Hipster Runoff’s onerous phrase “alt baguette” is really, deeply funny. So, that’s some context.

First, Mark writes in his “Resonant Frequency” column:

Early on, I described my attraction to it using a metaphor I trot out once in a while, that of admiring a Fabergé egg. Such an object doesn’t “mean” anything, it’s just incredibly intricate and detailed and the craft and mix of colors and design conveys ideas without narrative or direct appeals to emotion.

He gets into how high praise for Grimes’s album, Visions, may fall along gender lines — at least as far as identification goes. He offers a portrait of deep identification: his, with Bill Callahan. (Full disclosure: “Dress Sexy At My Funeral” is perhaps the only notable Callahan song for me, but boy howdy how so!) As a means of transitioning back to Grimes’s music’s perhaps difficulty for some people to identify with, Mark quotes Leonard Cohen, in an interview, talking about a Buddhist teacher’s teaching him about the difficulty (I think) of maintaining one’s own personhood, that is, the fiction of the self (as unified, perhaps); it’s far easier, perhaps inevitable, to let the hero die. At which point “you just live your life as if it’s real — as if you have to make decisions even though you have absolutely no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions.”

This passage did not at first make much sense to me, but when I put it in a different framework — the Nietzschean one, I guess — of ‘life’ (as it were) being a text with no author (even though everyone’s running around all crazy insisting there is one!) it sort of totally made sense to me. It’s sort of like, people expend all this effort on creating and maintaining a consolidated, homogenous, sense-making self. But the self is not self-continuous or sense-making. It is characterized by breaks, ruptures, illogical chirrups spurring us on. And then, once you’ve given up the idea that there is an author authoring you (us, life, etc.) then you know, have this great responsibility. Precisely because you’re granted the freedom of having “no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions”, you have to take, I think, special care. And because parts of your self may start leaking or accreting and doing odd things. Watch out.

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