In 2011, Grimes was eager to say in aninterview that she had “been studying pop stars.” Since emerging 10 years agoas a DIY ingénue out of Montreal’s freewheeling music scene, the artist bornClaire Boucher has become known for her experimental production that oftentraded discernable lyrics for otherworldly and synthetic vocal textures. Thewords she sang didn’t figure into what made her music so fascinating—it was howshe used her vocals to mimic whalesong or aliensong, a futurist reimagining ofthe transfixing voices of Enya and Mariah Carey, over irresistible melodies.Yes, Grimes always wanted to be a pop star, but on her own creative terms.
2011年在一次采访中，Grimes迫不及待地对外宣称她“正在研究流行歌手”。自10年前作为一名DIY少女歌手从蒙特利尔当地信马由缰的音乐圈中横空出世以来，这位本名为Claire Boucher的艺术家已经以她实验性的音乐制作为很多人所知了，她的作品中常常使用制作得仙意飘渺的人声，而歌词唱得什么已经不是那么容易辨认了。让她音乐如此迷人的并不是她的词，而是她在让人难以抗拒的美妙旋律之上用自己的声音来营造鲸鱼和外星人歌声感觉的做法，可以算是对恩雅和Mariah Carey那种让人咋舌的声线的一种未来主义的重构。是的，Grimes一直都想做一位流行歌手，不过是她自己定义中的流行歌手。

Miss Anthropocene is Grimes’ fifth albumand her first as that bona fide pop star—the result of widespread acclaim forboth 2012’s Visions and 2015’s addictive and upbeat Art Angels. With this newcelebrity, accelerated by her relationship with tech billionaire Elon Musk,Grimes wants to talk about the climate crisis—although she doesn’t use thatmore accurate phrasing herself. “I wanted to make climate change fun,” she’ssaid in interviews and on her Instagram. Meaning, Grimes is using her preferredlenses of fantasy, villainy, and pop iconography to attempt to engage with reality.
《Miss Antropocene》是Grimes的第五张专辑，也是她作为真正流行歌手的第一张专辑——这要感谢2012年的《Visions》和2015年让人着迷和昂扬的《Art Angels》两张专辑给她带来了广泛的赞誉。凭借这份名声，再加上她和科技界的亿万富翁Elon Musk的恋情，她想要对气候危机进行探讨——虽然她自己并没有用这样明确的字眼。“我想让气候变化这个议题更有趣一点，”她在采访和自己的Instagram上如是说。这意味着Grimes在尝试用自己偏爱的幻想、邪气和流行符号的眼镜审视现实。

The result is a record that’s more morosethan her previous work, but no less camp. Art Angels was the result of a decadespent feverishly honing the tenets of songwriting, production, and engineeringin order to show listeners who she was, and what she could do (be a pop star).Miss Anthropocene is the willful destruction of that self-conception. Grimescalls the sound “ethereal nu metal,” and the vibe is more honest to thepensive, sometimes cynical, public persona Grimes has shared in public over thelast decade.
结果就是这样一张比前作更阴郁但却同样逗趣的专辑。《Art Angels》是她对自己的创作、制作和设计理念十年狂热打磨的结果，向听众展现了她是谁，她能做到什么（当然是做一名流行歌手）。《Miss Anthropocene》则是对之前自我观念的故意摧毁。Grimes称这种新的音乐为“仙音新金属”，这种感觉更重于过去十年里Grimes向大家展示的深刻、有时愤世嫉俗的公众形象。

In November 2018, Grimes released “WeAppreciate Power,” a collaboration with her best friend HANA, and a cunninglymeta prelude to Miss Anthropocene. Though the propulsive, guitar-driven trackdidn’t end up on the album, it reveals the aesthetic cynicism behind it: abeckoning chant about capitulating to A.I. supremacy from the perspective of agirl group, the ultimate vessel for artifice and propaganda. Surprisingly—ornot, given Grimes’ track record of being more outspoken on Twitter andTumblr—the 10 tracks that make up Miss Anthropocene are lyrically moreambiguous about this ambitious theme. Instead, we’re left with a convolutednarrative about personifying climate change through a fictional cosmology ofdemons and villainesses giddily celebrating global warming as a force of good.In that sense, Miss Anthropocene reflects the creative state in which it wasmade: “negative, aggressive, and isolating.”
2018年11月，Grimes发行了《We Appreciate Power》这首和好朋友HANA合作的单曲，用这样一首狡黠的金属曲子作为《Miss Anthropocene》的先导。虽然这首用吉他制造强劲推动感的曲子最终没有收录进专辑，但它让我们得以一窥专辑在美学上的愤世嫉俗之感：以女团这一穷各项花招、宣传煽动之能事的身份歌咏呼唤我们臣服于A·I·的统治。让人感到惊讶的是——考虑到Grimes在Twitter和Tumblr上一向更为直言不讳，也许也并不奇怪——《Miss Anthropocene》十首歌曲的歌词对于这个野心勃勃的主题表现得更为含糊。反之，我们看到的是一个虚构的宇宙，这里恶魔和坏蛋欢快地将气候变暖作为一件幸事来庆祝，以此营造了一个将气候变化拟人化的迂回叙事。这样看，《Miss Anthropocene》反应了创作过程中的状态：“消极，到激进，再到孤立”。

Miss Anthropocene thrills when it reveals arefined, linear evolution of Grimes’ long-standing interest in rave nostalgiaand alluring pop music from around the world. On “Violence,” a vocal trancebanger co-produced by Deadmau5 affiliate i_o that’s destined for a RuPaul’sDrag Race lip-sync, Grimes gives one of her most dynamic performances. Throughgauzy overdubs and steady four-on-the-floor drums, she flips between whimperingand a snarl to delineate perspectives of an abusive relationship. And “4ÆM,”which she teased two years ago as an “ethereal chav jam that’s like a cyberpunkinterpretation of the [Bollywood historical fantasy blockbuster] BajiraoMastani,” delivers on the mind-bogglingly referential impulse. It’s Hollywoodfuturism: an Orientalist fantasia colliding with a revved-up hook; thesoundtrack to a John Wick fight scene.
Grimes对锐舞音乐的复古和美妙的流行乐一向很感兴趣，《Miss Anthropocene》让我们欣喜地看到她在这方面一以贯之且不断深化的进化。《Violence》里，和Deadmau5合作制作，并拉来i-o参与的一段火树银花般的人声trance仿佛是为路保罗变装秀唇舞环节量身定做的，Grimes在这里面贡献了自己最具活力的演唱。辅以飘渺的附加音效和平稳的4/4拍鼓点，她的声音在哀泣和低声絮语之间切换，描绘了虐恋中的种种。她两年前曾抖机灵戏称自己的歌“像是赛博朋克版【宝莱坞史诗大片】《帝国双璧》的仙音派即兴口水歌”，而《4ÆM》这首歌曲则给人延续了这样让人错愕说法的感觉。它是好莱坞风格的未来主义：东方主义的幻想曲和高速盘旋的hook碰撞；可以给《疾速追杀》的动作场景做配乐。

So much about the actual music of MissAnthropocene succeeds that the choice to bury it below a warped—and yes,misanthropic—concept about “The Environment” makes it hard to connect with whoGrimes is as an artist today. Standing in the way of humans reckoning withclimate emergency are multiple delusions: that wealth brings freedom, thatboundless acquisition and unchecked growth remain tenable, and that politicaland economic institutions are inherently trustworthy actors. Grimes sounds likethe pop star she’s worked very hard to become, but her imagination seemsdiminished—or, like many of her celebrity ilk, is cordoned off in a bubblefloating above the rest of humanity. In 2020, revolutionary pop stardom mighttry to clarify, rather than obscure, the havoc that systems wreak when it comesto, say, gender roles and social compliance, technology and surveillancecapitalism, nationalism and land exploitation, or whiteness and pathologicaldenial.
说了如此之多《Miss Anthropocene》音乐本身是多么多么成功，就显得Grimes将音乐掩盖在扭曲的——而且也是厌世的——“环境”概念之下的做法让我们很难将其和Grimes如今的艺术家形象联系在一起。阻碍人类处理气候危机的是多重的错觉：认为财富必然带来自由，无止境的索取和不经反思的增长是没问题的，政治和经济部门一直都是值得信任的。Grimes听起来已经很像她努力成为的流行歌手了，可是她的想象力似乎衰退了——或者说，和很多其他明星一样，她被困在了俯瞰其他人的泡沫中。2020年，讨论性别角色和顺从社会、科技和对资本主义的监督、国家主义和土地开发或是白种人和病理性否认等方面的问题时，革命性的流行歌手们可能更倾向于阐明自己在系统崩坏带来的浩劫方面的立场，而不是晦涩地含糊其辞。

And that’s the obstacle, the slimymouthfeel, standing in the way of Miss Anthropocene offering genuine catharsis:Grimes, the self-taught, self-possessed iconoclast, as insincere. In this veryspecific political moment rendering climate crisis as dystopian aesthetic isprivileged and indulgent, and perhaps even more frustrating given Grimes’ stagewink of an album title. Who exactly is the subject of her misanthropy? Havingachieved recognition and acclaim for what she can do with Visions and ArtAngels, the question remains: Who is she now? And so, some footnotes fromGrimes’ life feel useful here: childhood ballerina, daughter of a banker andformer Crown prosecutor-turned-journalist, managed by Roc Nation (currentlytrying to sell the public on its profit-turning deal with the NFL), and in arelationship with a man whose real-time net worth literally jumped $4.1 billionto $44.2 billion between drafts of this review. Sometimes it is important to bereminded that celebrity is also a system, a way of distracting the powerlessand nurturing ruling class values through notions of exceptionalism and vanity.Perhaps, before she was a pop star, Grimes might have made a statement withthis album—but what the world needs now is less obfuscation, not more.
这正是阻碍《Miss Anthropocene》宣泄真实情感地障碍，它总给人假惺惺的感觉：即Grimes这样一个自学成才、固执己见、打破常规的人是不真诚的。在这样一个政治节点以敌托邦美学来阐释气候危机像是在纵容，考虑到她在舞台上对专辑中一首曲目的表演，者甚至让人更加失望。她这个厌世的主体究竟是谁？凭借《Visions》和《Art Angels》她向人们展现了她的才能，获得了认可和赞誉，但这个问题仍未得到解答：她现在是谁？所以，Grimes生活中的一些小事也许给我提供些有用的注脚：童年时跳过芭蕾，是一名银行家和一名（后转行做记者的）前皇家检察官后的女儿，她目前隶属于Roc Nation公司（该公司目前正向公众宣传其和NFL签下的利润颇丰的合作协议），并正和一名实时净资产在写作这篇评论的过程中就从41亿美元飙升到442亿美元的男人谈恋爱。有时候我们要想到名人们是一个体系，是一种让我们这些无权无势的人能够转移注意力，同时通过美国例外论和浮华的观念给人们灌输统治阶层价值观的方法。如果这张专辑发行于她成为流行歌手之前，Grimes也许能传达出些什么——但现在这个世界需要的少一些对焦点的模糊处理，而不是更多这样的行为。

支持

ddddd

支持

支持

辛苦啦

所以说音乐总体是好的，但探讨问题出发的角度与探讨的深度不尽人意？