Lana Del Rey and Brit Marling interviewed Grimes for a new piece where they each talk about their craft, their controversial boyfriends and the big topics like religion, Trump and outrage culture.
Sharing their conversation with Interview, Del Rey and Grimes spoke candidly about their lives in the spotlight, how they write, what inspires them, and about Grimes' new album Miss Anthropocene.
When prompted to talk about the new record, Grimes dove deep into the topics that inspired her, namely religion, claiming that she's obsessed with polytheism and ancient mythology.
I love how the ancient Greeks or the ancient Egyptians lived in this weird anime world where there were just tons of gods that could be anything. It's like every form of suffering had a representation. I wonder if it almost has a positive psychological effect. If your kid dies in a war, you can literally go speak to War and be like, "Why did you do this?" Or, "I hope you did this for a reason." There's a weird philosophical justification for all pain, and there's an anthropomorphization of every form of pain. In our current society, we don't even know how to talk about things. So my album's about a modern demonology or a modern pantheon where every song is about a different way to suffer or a different way to die. If you think about it, god-making or god-designing just seems so fun. The idea of making the Goddess of Plastic seems so fun to me.
In a meandering exchange about public image, Grimes later spoke about the proliferation of internet culture to include and amplify people like Donald Trump.
I was reading yesterday about outrage culture, and for just about every emotionally loaded word that's in a tweet, the tweet gets 15 percent more interaction. We live in this weird time where we didn't evolve to engage with this many people, and we didn't evolve to be observed as much as we're being observed, or to observe other people as much as we're observing them. No one is considering the psychological impact of all this crazy technology. Especially since Trump was elected, this is the first time that the general public is fully on the internet. Grandma is on the internet.
Later, speaking with Marling, Grimes spoke about a potential Black Mirror-esque horror of AI and its impact on our privacy, somehow relating it to a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy.
What scares me is an artificial intelligence getting online, seeing everybody's search history, and then blackmailing all of us into doing whatever it wants. It just feels inevitable. We've all sent weird e-mails or texts. Even if there are laws to prevent that, there will eventually be a sentient technology that is smart enough and strong enough and has access to take everyone's shit, and then can make anyone do whatever it wants, Jeffrey Epstein-style.
Grimes goes on to outline the theory that Epstein was blackmailing a number of high-profile individuals before his imprisonment and subsequent death, and how she sees the role of blackmail in dystopic AI futures.
My theory on Epstein is that he had tapes of people with underage girls, and that's how he was getting all this stuff from all these people. Someone gave him a house and a plane. It's like, "What the fuck?" It reeks of deep blackmail to me. If you have everybody's stuff, you can control the world. It seems a lot easier than a violent takeover. If I'm an AI, do I hold everyone hostage with nuclear bombs, or do I just blackmail everyone? Killing a lot of people seems hard.
The conversations continue to tackle topics like monoculture, nuance, power and more with varying levels of coherence. Read at the full interview here.
Miss Anthropocene arrives February 21 via 4AD.
Sharing their conversation with Interview, Del Rey and Grimes spoke candidly about their lives in the spotlight, how they write, what inspires them, and about Grimes' new album Miss Anthropocene.
When prompted to talk about the new record, Grimes dove deep into the topics that inspired her, namely religion, claiming that she's obsessed with polytheism and ancient mythology.
I love how the ancient Greeks or the ancient Egyptians lived in this weird anime world where there were just tons of gods that could be anything. It's like every form of suffering had a representation. I wonder if it almost has a positive psychological effect. If your kid dies in a war, you can literally go speak to War and be like, "Why did you do this?" Or, "I hope you did this for a reason." There's a weird philosophical justification for all pain, and there's an anthropomorphization of every form of pain. In our current society, we don't even know how to talk about things. So my album's about a modern demonology or a modern pantheon where every song is about a different way to suffer or a different way to die. If you think about it, god-making or god-designing just seems so fun. The idea of making the Goddess of Plastic seems so fun to me.
In a meandering exchange about public image, Grimes later spoke about the proliferation of internet culture to include and amplify people like Donald Trump.
I was reading yesterday about outrage culture, and for just about every emotionally loaded word that's in a tweet, the tweet gets 15 percent more interaction. We live in this weird time where we didn't evolve to engage with this many people, and we didn't evolve to be observed as much as we're being observed, or to observe other people as much as we're observing them. No one is considering the psychological impact of all this crazy technology. Especially since Trump was elected, this is the first time that the general public is fully on the internet. Grandma is on the internet.
Later, speaking with Marling, Grimes spoke about a potential Black Mirror-esque horror of AI and its impact on our privacy, somehow relating it to a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy.
What scares me is an artificial intelligence getting online, seeing everybody's search history, and then blackmailing all of us into doing whatever it wants. It just feels inevitable. We've all sent weird e-mails or texts. Even if there are laws to prevent that, there will eventually be a sentient technology that is smart enough and strong enough and has access to take everyone's shit, and then can make anyone do whatever it wants, Jeffrey Epstein-style.
Grimes goes on to outline the theory that Epstein was blackmailing a number of high-profile individuals before his imprisonment and subsequent death, and how she sees the role of blackmail in dystopic AI futures.
My theory on Epstein is that he had tapes of people with underage girls, and that's how he was getting all this stuff from all these people. Someone gave him a house and a plane. It's like, "What the fuck?" It reeks of deep blackmail to me. If you have everybody's stuff, you can control the world. It seems a lot easier than a violent takeover. If I'm an AI, do I hold everyone hostage with nuclear bombs, or do I just blackmail everyone? Killing a lot of people seems hard.
The conversations continue to tackle topics like monoculture, nuance, power and more with varying levels of coherence. Read at the full interview here.
Miss Anthropocene arrives February 21 via 4AD.
