Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene holds a mirror to Elon Musk’s Mars Mission
Songwriter, vocalist and producer Grimes (Claire Boucher) has floated in and out of the limelight for the last decade now, no more so than since her public relationship with celebrity billionaire businessman and investor Elon Musk. While some might have thought this an odd pairing, teased and ‘memeified’ especially with the birth of their first son named X Æ A-12, looking in depth at both figures’ projects in recent years reveals certain parallels between their philosophies.
Among certain ventures into the mixing of A.I and art, Grimes’ most notable work in recent years is the album Miss Anthropocene, released right before COVID reached pandemic level and just a few months before Musk and Boucher’s first child was born. Her first LP for 5 years, the work reimagined the artist as a heavy metal popstar, straying on a tangent from her typical ethereal hyper-experimental discography of previous albums. A concept album, Miss Anthropocene, depicts through it’s tracks a villainous ‘anthropomorphic goddess of climate change’1 as well as themes of A.I. reign and other human destructions. The titular character, whose name combines femininity and misanthropy in wordplay, is a villainous personification of environmental apocalypse, that sees global warming as a good and necessary event for humanity2. In feminising this character, and using it also to attach themes of sexual violence and gender to the villainy of climate change3, the LP comes across as an ecofeminist project. In a string of Instagram posts, Grimes revealed the meaning of the album and it’s tracks, including a letter from Miss Anthropocene that reads lines such as ‘Be who you are, embrace your demise,
For you are the architect of it’2, and a post that attached a different villainous demon or deity to each song. More and more the album becomes swallowed by it’s carefully orchestrated, yet somewhat messily-delivered concept.
The songs are good, despite barely competing with previous albums like Visions, and ever experimental, Grimes creates soundscapes in these tracks that captivate, and feel almost cinematic. Lyrics that portray the sought theme throughout the album are sparse; ‘Unrest is in the soul, we don’t move our bodies anymore’3 is one of the more poignant lyrics, repeated throughout the song Darkseid as a message about bodily detachment from the world. Lyrics like this that portray the albums theme get lost among the more dominant sounds of futuristic instrumentals and backing vocals, leaving this message about climate change and global warming almost trivialised.
Grimes’ artistic message about human extinction and climate change also reflects the philosophies of Elon Musks projects in recent years. As CEO and chief technical officer of SpaceX, Musk has been at the forefront of the strive to colonise Mars. Most of Musk’s narrative on ‘The Road To Making Humanity Multiplanetary’4 is focused on the long-term survival of humanity in the face of global warming and climate change5, inciting a somewhat apocalyptic anxiety about the future of planet Earth and the Anthropocene. Musk’s fears and ventures here, relay a similar message to Grimes’ album, about the crisis of Earth at humanity’s hands, our responsibility for planetary emergency. What they also advocate is escapism; creatively or scientifically the two projects and their creators promote what Joanna Zylinska calls ‘an escape to heavens in the form of planetary relocation’6. Musk’s position, especially, plays into the gendered reverberations of this recent planetary escapism conversation; as a man celebrated for being brilliant yet socially awkward, rich and clever yet difficult, Elon adheres to a new hierarchical cultural archetype of geek maleness that exists among his peers of Silicon Valley and their celebrity. CEOs and Billionaires of these male-dominated tech and science industries are fighting each other to become the new saviours of humanity, be it through A.I, new eco-friendly technologies or space excursions 6, and with this, a new level of masculinity is born and practiced. Not only does geek masculinity course through this era of technology-dominated culture and it’s leaders (Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sergey Brin belong amongst Musk in examples), but there is new egomania and inflation added to it with this talk of tech-dependent salvation.
Musk’s mission for an interplanetary humanity is further gendered, and racialised, by its very aim in colonising the planet, by the projects undoubted assumptions of conquest, dominion and succession – the patriarchal urge to colonise7. And while this mission is based off the need to save humanity from the collapse of Earth, it is men like Musk that are responsible for it’s collapse in the first place: CEOs and founders that have mobilised the very excess of goods, excess of emissions and carbon, excess use and thus depletion of the Earth’s resources, that are leading to the end of the Anthropocene that Grimes sings about. Zylinska calls this group the ‘ultimately redeemed Man, who can conquer time and space by rising above the geological mess he has created.’6
Grimes, too, does not truly address her positionality, and devalues Miss Anthropocene’s concept further in her hypocrisy. With a current estimated net worth of $12 million8, and her long-term involvement with the second wealthiest man in the world9 (be it romantically or just through their three shared children), Grimes exists above us mere mortals, within a bought freedom that would allow her to escape the very apocalypse she sings about. The artist’s celebrity status and standing among such neoliberal pioneers erases any sincerity that the album might have put across, and reclaims it as a propagandistic rationale for the same planetary escapism that Musk is assisting in. In a way Boucher feels like a new tool for the futuristic capitalism that the figures of Silicon Valley are trying to sell, hiding the same patriarchal, industrial reign behind a shield of what seems like ecofeminist art.
Miss Anthropocene is Grime’s manifesto for planetary escapism, and whether intentional or not, it is the creative, passive, ‘fun’1 promotion for Elon Musk’s mission to colonise Mars, a project shrouded in imperialism, patriarchy and neoliberal hegemony. The album may stand alone as a great futuristic work of eco-feminist themes, but it can’t be disentangled from its maker and message. It becomes a perfect example of celebrity culture’s ability to distract and discipline it’s audience while instilling the hegemonic values of the ruling class.
- – Perry, K. (2019). Grimes is ready to play the villain. Crack Magazine, [online] 29 Apr., pp.32–41. Available at: https://crackmagazine.net/article/long-reads/grimes-is-ready-to-play-the-villain/ [Accessed 6 November 2023] ↩︎
- – Grimes. (2020). I, Poet of destruction. Instagram [online]. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8YA2w_HMGz/. [Accessed 6 November 2023] ↩︎
- – Genius. (2023). Miss Anthropocene by Grimes. [online] Available at: https://genius.com/albums/Grimes/Miss-anthropocene. [Accessed 6 November 2023] ↩︎
- – SpaceX (2020). Mars & Beyond. [online] SpaceX. Available at: https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/. [Accessed 6 November 2023] ↩︎
- – Hutchinson, H. (2020). Climate change – is Mars the answer? [online] Available at: https://www.investec.com/en_gb/focus/harolds-herald/climate-change-is-mars-the-answer.html#:~:text=Elon%20Musk%20has%20suggested%20that [Accessed 6 November 2023]. ↩︎
- – Zylinska, J. (2018) The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse. University of Minnesota Press. ↩︎
- – Bianco, M. (2018). After pillaging Earth, the patriarchy looks to colonize Mars. NBC News [online] Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/patriarchal-race-colonize-mars-just-another-example-male-entitlement-ncna849681 [Accessed 6 November 2023]. ↩︎
- – Krishnamurthy, C. (2023). Grimes sues Elon Musk over parental rights of their third ‘secret child’. HITC [online]. Available at: https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2023/10/04/grimess-net-worth-in-2023-explored-as-shes-suing-elon-musk-over-parental-rights/ [Accessed 6 November 2023]. ↩︎
- – LaFranco, R. Peterson-Withorn, C. (2023). World’s Billionaires List. Forbes. [online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/. [Accessed 6 November 2023]. ↩︎
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