On Grimes and God

What I learned, and didn't, from a lifetime of music.

Instead of touring The Art of Being Free on the weekend of its release — inauguration weekend 2017 — I went to the high desert outside Joshua Tree with my band Vast Asteroid and recorded the live tracks and basic overdubs that would become our self-titled full-length LP, released on vinyl through a boutique Greek label in 2018 and, of course, available on Spotify.

Being late January it was cold and wet in the desert. Hailstorms kept us boarded up in the studio — the legendary Rancho de la Luna, the converted home of Eagles of Death Metal’s Dave Catching. Dave made pasta and kept the potbelly stove roaring and told us stories: yes, he had watched from the front of the stage at Bataclan as waves of concertgoers were suddenly murdered by the terrorists who had infiltrated the venue; yes, he had scrambled for cover and wound up in a closet he did not leave for two hours, becoming the last member of the band to exit the building; yes, everyone thought he had died.

Surrounded by walls of amps and bizarre desert tchotchkes strung with Christmas lights, dropped in on by sales reps from mic companies with offices in Siberia, running our headsets through boards with jacks still individually labeled for the members of Queens of the Stone Age — this was the vibe at Rancho, and as our three-day booking drew to a close I felt that sinking feeling of deep reluctance — not just an unwillingness to leave, but to return to the waiting, unraveling world.

Above all it was music itself I felt unraveling at that time, from top to bottom. The art form, the industry, the genre I was in, the scene I already no longer was. The technology hadn’t simply made it harder for “artists” to eke out a middle-class living — it had held up a kind of mirror to all that was and used to be, and threw back a new kind of unflattering image. Instead of the perversely comforting visage of the corrupted soul all aging artists must confront eventually, and in the fundamental way are groomed to expect, to befriend, the digital workover of contemporary music presented a disenchanting spectacle, a great why bother. It was the feeling of learning that the only way to know when the object of desire — of meaning, of mattering — was over was to find out after the fact. The mojo had left the building.

I thought then, and still think now, that this melancholic and barren exhaustion, which has only spread and deepened since the fleeting lacuna of that final grace period I felt in the desert, is the American equivalent of what Europe experienced and Nietzsche described as the death of God. The shock of discovery of having drunk up the sea; the falling in all directions; the shadow of the presiding presence lingering horribly, nostalgically, cripplingly on, with no end in sight but no life, either. This seemingly abrupt visitation by an unwelcome guest that had actually been here all along — at what point did we let him in? when should we have known? — this is an encounter with Death itself, Death’s claim on us, and with the way Death rides in (yea, all the way into our hearts) on a concealing cloud of dreams and passions and self-manipulative calculations, erotic positions that only in hindsight, amid our willful confusion, we recognize as the errors — the sins — that they are.

It hasn’t been easy to carry on as a musician since 2018. We had one unfinished track left in the bag after the album dropped. A reworking of the very first song I’d professionally recorded with my drummer — December 7, 2003, under a full moon, on 2-inch tape at a former Hollywood rehab on a cliffside in Malibu that, like the rest of my life in music, no longer exists — it was finished sitting on my bed under covid lockdown and released on June 26, 2020:

Has it been so long since we sealed our fate 

Yeah we couldn’t go wrong

We really took the cake

We took our chances

Lover, that’s growing old…

Maybe I’ll write, record, release something new. But it’s so difficult to find something that speaks what needs to be spoken through music today. It’s getting harder to see how music itself can speak. Buried under ever more layers of technologization, the technologization of music and man, the spirit it is so hard to summon to music is receding, retreating for its own protection, into places of spiritual protection — places like this, where the purifying suffering of patient humility can still be unsealed in the requisite stillness and silence. It is easier now to give music to God than to give myself to music.

—

So, at least at the outset, a wave of mixed feelings swelled in watching Grimes, in her new interview with Mike Solana, try to wrestle with all of these things by giving them up to the borg.

For someone so devoted to courageously facing the full unbuffered blast of technology into even music’s most intimate and human of places, the naivety is breathtaking, to the point that one wonders whether such artificial childishness is an essential energy source for the progressive and systematic technologization of things visible and invisible. The heart of the matter is on display in the interview’s final exchange: