Music being one of the oldest art forms has obviously undergone major evolutions with major sonic differences helping us classify our beloved art form better. Music has become such an ingrained part of everything we as humans do because it's the ultimate way of stimulating one of our major senses; hearing. All major art forms tend to remain dependent on music to further accentuate the intended emotional response they attempt to evoke from their audience; whether it be movies playing the Devil's interval in unsettling scenes or somber music accompanying a grand revelation in a video game.
Because of this aforementioned function of music in accentuating emotions in a lot of art forms, we as a society usually end up using music to accentuate our emotions too; playing the Lose Yourself soundtrack imagining yourself to be a protagonist of a movie, playing chipper Gorillaz tracks for when you're feeling good, blasting Death Grips on full volume when you get frustrated, playing Sufjan Stevens and making yourself even sadder when you're already feeling sad, and the list goes on. Capitalism has excelled at selling fractionalized emotions and we have grown reliant on them (will probably talk about this in detail someday on this blog). Major social events like parties/graduations can't function well without music to celebrate, animations/project guides/infographics/educational videos/tutorials just look unfinished if we don't have the right type of music to accompany them.
This evolution of the way in which we interact with music goes even further, where now a lot of music is made with the sole purpose of being a wallpaper/background to you doing work/chores/homework or sleeping [see lo-fi music and the billions of views it gets]. This wallpaper-esque music genre has also started meshing well with other pre-existing genres e.g. few trap hip-hop sub-genre artists seem to focus on making their songs rhythmic enough to be pleasurable to listen to while being superficial enough in their content (superficial used to describe the technical quality and not in the derogatory way it's commonly used) to avoid distracting or warranting the user to pay extra attention and hence are most common across "gaming playlists" and other activities where we just require some extra stimulation [sigh. we are doomed to be adhd-riddled facebook's dopamine hungry addict lab rats, aren't we?]
On the other hand of the spectrum is the music which requires you to pay active attention to it for it to be pleasurable to your ears. While of course all of this is highly subjective, for me the examples of this category would be: maximalist music with very meticulously orchestrated musical structure, lyrics with layers of metaphorical meanings/interpretations and surrounding context, dense rhyme schemes and wordplays, industrial overblown vocals/harsh dissonant riffs and sonic qualities. All of these warrant (for me) to pay full attention for them to be enjoyable to me.
Now that we have contextualized how our interaction with music has evolved and usually varies, we can get to our focal point: Grimes.
Grimes is a Canadian artist producing Dream Pop music and her music achieves an amazing intersection of the aforementioned background stimulus and maximalist music.
The production on her albums is usually heavily reliant on synths, bass, and a lot of instruments coming together yet the way she creates her vocals is so that the lyrics seem abstract despite being coherent sentences (for the most part). Her music is full of surreal vocals, chords that propel you into dreamy landscapes yet they never overwhelm you. She is able to touch on intricate themes like feminism which she flawlessly blends into her music, all while retaining her music's ability to act as a background for you and your thoughts.
The contextualizing took longer than it took to talk about Grimes because honestly, she is an incredibly talented artist and someone you should give a listen to.
The song I would recommend:
The album I would recommend:
I recommend reading my blogs with her music for a good self-contained litmus test on if my ramblings make any sense.
Oh, and if you're still reading this, thank you for reading my ramblings, and don't think twice before contacting me with music recommendations or if you just wanna have a chat about your day.
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