GRIMES—how we’re feeling now; a love letter, a query.

INTRODUCTION

The video for recent single Player of Games from Canadian ‘pop’ artist Claire Boucher-aka-Grimes is a parodic orgy of cinematic high fantasy, and if you can look past the fact the Sauron-looking romantic counterpart/antagonist is meant to be Elon Musk, then it’s a beautiful vignette of post break-up wounding which I couldn’t help but find completely stirring. There’s of course a renewed production budget for Miss Boucher’s work now, having spawned with a noted billionaire. But her creative vision remains, which here is still predictably maximalist. If anyone expected a maturation of the Grimes project, maybe a streamlining of ideas, then we are also perhaps pleasantly disappointed. The incorrigible maximalism of previous outings is still here, and as a taster we can assume the rest of Book 1 will be as unwieldy in it’s fusion of pop-cultural fixations and gamer-friendly visuals as anything she’s done before.

But what of Grimes in relation to Elon Musk? Certainly her profile has changed significantly since her relationship with Musk, that mega-capitalist whose unethical practices (including funding a Bolivian coup to obtain mining rights to industrial metals) have put Boucher in the firing line for proxy criticisms—such as the strangely amoral-apolitical flavour a proximity to Musk gives her brand of fantastic futurism. At one point prior to the release of Miss Anthropocene—an album that strives to profile the pending geologic-cataclysms which Musk and his hyper-techno-industrialist ilk are arguably responsible for—Boucher posted with allusions to her art-couched life being an exercise in ‘corporate surrealism’. As an aesthetic-fashioning of self close to monied frontlines most of us will never get a whiff of, how much of this is art, how much of it irony, and to what extent are we as an audience meant to separate art from artist and swallow this type of increasingly propagandised ‘pop’?

The following won’t be directly answering this question. Rather, I’ve spent time with the question merely to seek my own renewed commitment to an artist whose work has captivated to date, and which to my mind does so the more in light of the complexity Musk brings; like a shadow-presence whose exit from the in-frame Grimes project will indelibly have left a trace—if only because Boucher has consistently used her art to mirror reality (hers and ours) in ways which transcend the conventions of the genre.

In the four succeeding sections I’ll try and tease out just how Grimes has grappled with not just an extremely visible and vilified relationship, but also how she’s uncannily deconstructed the pop-artist cliches while still loosely inhabiting that space as a fluidly evolving avatar-version of herself. The first section is split in two, detailing in brief the narrative and aesthetic trajectories of recent albums Art Angels (2015), and Miss Anthropocene (2019). The remaining three sections will explore how the many thematic junctures from these albums braid together numerous textual and historical traditions of playful semiotic resistance, pushing back on various instrumentalities ala The Frankfurt School—perhaps especially her nearly-literary deployment of cosplaying and pastiche, and also how Player of Games (as the lead single from a forthcoming album) paves the way for her most insightful, and perhaps her most fraught, critique of life in late-stage capitalism. Hopefully by our conclusion it will be clear that demonising Boucher isn’t nearly as rewarding as thinking with and around her, even if for some the objective will be to think through her.

MISS ANTHROPOCENE, ART ANGELS; READYING PLAYER ONE BOOK ONE

i) MISS ANTHROPOCENE (2019)

The prettily enraged despair of Miss Anthropocene had all the hallmarks of a Grimes album—a welding of pop and experiment to baroque pantheons in the style of previous outing Art Angels—as well as being something of a revisionist methodology around the blasted-out guitars of nineties alternative. Despite Grimes having sworn off acoustics post-Art Angels, Miss Anthropocene sees the strings returning here, if only to be crowded and shredded with digital trickeries the likes of which drew Boucher’s original pop-leaning fan base in albums one to three (notably Visions which saw her crossing over from obscurity into indie stardom).

Genre-nods aside you couldn’t confuse this album with any other artist’s. A guitar, for Boucher, is more than a guitar, and with the exception of Delete Forever (a morose track detailing the loss of certain friends to heroin addiction), a guitar never appears nakedly—it is always present as an idea, a musical given layered with pointedly contemporary rhythm and sound. Pointedly because in her regurgitation of fantasy/science fiction/manga-tropes Grimes is a nostalgic futurist, rifling through discarded possibilities which for whatever reason never came to fruition (famous examples; hover-boards and flying cars by 2019?) and braiding these together to perhaps distill from them the optimism which is their vestigial impetus. Which is to say, nostalgias (like guitar-sounds) are packaged initially as wish-worlds away from intolerable presents, as Zygmunt Bauman makes clear in his treatise on Time as an aestheticised commodity (Retrotopia, 2016).

Boucher’s point of difference as a trafficker of futures past is that she encompasses so many of these past-futures—in various aesthetic forms—that a Grimes album is a miniature jubilee, a gathering of nostalgias so carnivalesque that their initial vigour is renewed. Her painted figures are so numerous, so saturated with hypertextual flags, that their settings are abolished and they are independently restored as icons of forward-moving re-conceptualisation (with allusions to the sublime; more on that later).

This is even more different with Miss Anthropocene from the usual deployment of such tactics because her own avowed thesis for the album was to fashion a pantheon of New Gods, making of the album a deliberate project towards transcending pastiche ala Frederic Jameson, seeking to model pop-cultural artefacts veined with the New rather than posit a self-serious Frankenstein comprised of older parts (the fetid practice of most of her peers—Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, Dua Lipa, Lorde, and with absolute affection, Lady Gaga). This is self-consciously avantgarde aesthetics, work which openly refers to the ritualised mechanisms of aesthetics even as she’s singing/dancing/mixing—in fewer words, art about art; even speculating on the divine nature of art as a mediumship primed for birthing the godly.

That these alleged gods (one for each track apparently) were meant as heralds of the Anthropocene—which Boucher figures as a sword-toting Kali-like goddess of planetary extinction—positions Boucher as a weaver of numinous mythologising and secularity, sacralising as she does processes of geologic degradation/transformation to girdle a thinkable interface with what is essentially unthinkable. As mentioned, Boucher’s relationship with Musk and his systemic complicity in eco-disruption/collapse complicate her own premise here. However, it could be argued her complicity is merely an amplified version of our own ‘normal’ complicity in these systems, magnified by celebrity and tabloid-dramatics. If anything, an impossible measure of purity by which we hold visible persons to account is exactly that—a reserve for celebrity, an outward diversion which renders our own complicities in toxic systems momentarily moot. The pleasures of indignation from keyboard citadels will always win out over personal inventory. And they are pleasures impossible without the ur-judgements of Good and Evil—a binary that blinds to the in-between greys of non-innocence, which to my mind is truer of our compromised worlding.

ii) ART ANGELS (2015)

Art Angels, preceding Miss Anthropocene, did similar things in as much as the work gestured towards presiding deities in and around the creative act—which we can assume in the album’s various nods to Greco-Romantic-Renaissance styles, was meant in the manner of classical muses. If Miss Anthropocene sought to birth a new order of prevailing gods, Art Angels merely acts to provoke lesser demiurges not so much consumed with cosmogony as they are attuned to play. In typical Grimes fashion the album came about from her experiences with major pop production which in her mind is was and remains a male-dominated sector, and brushes with which tended to result in patronising encounters where producers assumed her label-independence (and womanhood) meant she was incapable of big-time mixing herself. Undeterred, Boucher declared she was more than capable of making a chart-ready pop album. Thusly Art Angels was born, an effort to wrangle the Grimes project into top-forty territory. It arguably fails in this endeavour—but as a Grimes album, it bears typically esoteric textures.

Instead of gods, with Art Angels Boucher (for the first time) donned a litany of personas which were so convoluted they required some unpacking for the less-than-casual consumer. Which was a feat in itself—offering on the one hand an album which works on a surface level, but which dually services an existing fandom for whom more esoteric readings are both irresistible and inevitable. This respect for her audience is one of Boucher’s points of difference as a ‘pop’ artist, and will continue to be so long as pop (which in it’s present form exists as ‘post’, despite the earnest resuscitations of hyper and glitch) cannibalises itself over and again—ironically, one of the signalling traits of the genre.

As mentioned guitar was not an instrument Boucher was privy to before this album, and certainly not an instrument compatible with the futurist whimsies of her work to date. That said, it was the perfect instrument by which to mould a self-consciously ‘pop’ album, seeing as the genre fixates on recycling the past and proffering reconfigurations of existing syntax. It is perhaps for this reason Boucher decided to couch an experiment with ‘conventional’ acoustic sound in a tableaux of characters and deities—some of which speak to the transpersonal-transhuman vectors of late-stage capital as famously delineated by the scholarship of Donna Haraway.

These characters run thusly—there’s a concretion of her Grimes persona (Rococo Basilisk) which she famously murders in the Flesh Without Blood video, signalling how the album is a pointed departure; there’s a time-travelling gender-fluid vampire called Kill V Maim (who she plays in the video to the titular song); there’s IV, demon overlord who also appears in the Flesh Without Blood video—a fallen blood-spattered angel with sinister white eyes; and finally there’s Screechy Bat, who Boucher in this motley crew says is the performer, the pop-singer avatar for the album’s amorphous mythos. Amorphous because each character is an iteration of the same body in time, who Boucher loosely gestures at having time-travelling abilities which throughout the album they’re using to find and kill Rococo Basilisk—presumably to correct some faux pas on their shared timeline (so yeah, convoluted).

SHAPESHIFTING IN THE 21ST CENTURY—CYBORGIAN IDENTITY, CITATIONAL THIEVERY, COSPLAY, & DEFIGURATIVE PAINTING

It’s in this playful amorphousness where Boucher’s identity as an artist can be found—ironically, in the fluidity of identity itself. In the vein of Judith Butler, where gender exists only in it’s expression (Gender Trouble, 1990), Grimes perfectly encapsulates everything we’ve come to appreciate about media convergence and the Self as a constantly evolving performance coterminous with media, rather than being somehow separate from and thusly interfaced with it. Via Donna Harroway we are all cyborgs, irrevocably enmeshed with the augmentations of language (of which media is property) and our performances therein (Cyborg Manifesto, 1985). The self, much like gender, only exists in these performances—paradoxically making the symptom of self it’s own reflexive cause.

This ties in heavily with Boucher’s frequent deployment of cosplaying as an aesthetic, which she does even outside of costuming as her invented characters. Cosplaying, behind which there’s scanty literature (though what’s out there is erudite enough), also extends the performative nature of identity under post-internet convergences, whereby consumers are turned into “critical readers and retellers” of popular narratives—be they manga science-fiction or fantasy derived (Paul Mountfort, Anne Pierson-Smith, Adam Geczy, Planet Cosplay; Costume Play, Identity, and Global Fandom, 2019). Grimes herself often dresses up as Babydoll from Zack Snyder’s Suckerpunch (2011), a movie as fraught with misguided female-empowerment messages as it is distillations of a then-burgeoning cosplay-as-subcultural-phenomenon. That she does so in the video for recent single Player of Games makes sense, seeing as that film is a pastiched configuring of the gamer-aesthetic du jour. Before even overtly playing with cosplay as futurist signalling though, Grimes’s crossover album Visions was critically tagged with the micro-genre ‘post-internet’, by which her genre-experiments were even then recognised as symptomatic of an internet-specific disaggregating of self—whereby pre-internet modalities of being in the world were becoming less tenable under the accelerant of globally tethered data-networks (and arguably, the smartphone).

In the French tradition of detournement, cosplaying—which Miss Boucher deploys liberally—also enjoys the same potentially subversive rerouting or hijacking of commercial aesthetics as those pioneer culture-jammers of the late sixties and early seventies. Artists and artist collectives like Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists all contributed to this tradition of detournement in differing degree and style. As Mountfort Pierson-Smith and Geczy also point out, the act of cosplaying is citational, in as much as it establishes canon-specific referential branches of meaning (2019). That the bulwark of cosplaying’s citations are embodied doesn’t stop them from having the same intertextual (frequently hyper-textual) function as regular or literary citations, the major difference here being canonical; one in academic registers, the other retrieving from a popularly delineated canon of science fiction, fantasy, manga, and video-games.

On top of being citational, the detournement aspect of cosplaying is derived from the commandeering of commercial registers towards new branches of meaning, frequently diverging from cited text; often radically, and against the legal tenets of intellectual property. In this way, Boucher’s use of cosplay attempts to consolidate it’s manoeuvre of detournement towards a futurist aesthetic which holds a surprisingly legible program; that program being a reconfiguring of existing disparate elements—all the details of a compromised present, commercial or otherwise—towards a more integrated whole. Furthermore, the program begins with conscious re-fashioning of the self, deconstructing the self as consumer and reconstructing it as a subject couched in a contemporary mythic; this mythic being necessarily peopled with a pantheon of gods and characters which, though augmented with recognisable pop-cultural citations, are meant to elicit newness. In less words, it’s Boucher’s morning of the New Gods (to quote a track from Miss Anthropocene which acts as that album’s thesis).

What Boucher actions in her particular deployment of cosplay is also similar to the breaks from a ‘representative regime’ with painting in the nineteenth century. Rather than the transgressive borrowing of detournement, select nineteenth century painters sought to separate from the instrumentality of painting towards a more impressionistic approach, seeing as figurative painting at the time tended to serve specific ideological functions. Here public art was almost exclusively commissioned and displayed to stress the authorial position of monarchy and papacy. The gravitas of ‘modern art’ today, in abstraction or impression from anything we might concretely relate this type of painting to (re actual objects in the world), is a trace of this cleavage which produced then-radical departures, but which now arguably flounders in search of subject matter and form as unbounded aesthetics (Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image, 2007).

In fact, modern art is popularly disdained for it’s objective gratuity, it’s perceived elitism, and the wilful esoterica of it’s subject matter. More recently symptomising luxury consumption and affluent tax evasion, at one point this type of image production represented the medium’s divorcing from oppressive systems to realign it’s speculations with an “internal necessity”(Ranciere, 2007), rather than abiding by the legibility of the given (a ‘rational’ visual lexicon, an oppressively totalising ocular logic). In less words, modern art wilfully against simplistic representation is anti-hegemonic, and thusly—sans the stratified apparatus of high-end consumerism—subversion in it’s purest form (though this carries little weight in a time where subversion itself is a mostly harmless affective commodity).

In The Future of the Image (2007) Ranciere also calls this break defiguration, a dispelling of the representative habits of painting towards the aforementioned “internal necessity”, which to nineteenth century painters meant that unrepresented or perhaps technically unrepresentable private-resonance between viewer and world—the felt necessity towards expression, a subjective tension seeking reconciliation with an external medium. Furthermore, a subjective tension which has no issue thieving or crossing generic borders in it’s quest for intuitive delineation. In effect Boucher’s grabbing use of cosplay defigures the original texts from which these ‘types’ are borrowed, creating a hyper-space or hypertextual sublime by “virtue of it’s multiplicity and disorder”(Ranciere 2007). This is not unlike Edmund Burke’s summation of the sublime (to quote The Future of the Image one last time), specifically in responding to Milton’s portrait of Satan from Paradise Lost; that the sublime was here reached through assembling “images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs and the revolution of kingdoms” (Ranciere, 2007). In the vein of Dadaist detournement, establishing a new aesthetic by displacing embedded symbolism (commercial narrative or other) from given rationales and letting each run amok and speak freely to each other in previously impossible ways.

POP-STARS—A MOST DANGEROUS GAME

It could be observed that most pop musicians display this type of synthetic-aesthetic holism—for example, previously mentioned contemporaries of Boucher have all dabbled in whimsical futurism, most notably Gaga’s recent Chromatica whose work therein, it could be argued, strives for the same sublime utopianising as Boucher’s. That said, the major differences here stem from two places. Firstly, Boucher’s work is consistent throughout, where other artists (again, repeat offender Gaga) will cycle through studio-prescribed aesthetic turns, putting on and taking off thematic hats in attempts to lure broader listenership (and the impossible task of maintaining relevance/chasing the zeitgeist etc).

Secondly, Boucher’s continuous adoption of cosplaying motifs—in that both Boucher and cosplayers cite the same canonical texts—exhibits a prolonged rumination on a single theme(/s), meaning between each album there’s no commercially schizophrenic cleavage (for example, Yeehaw Joanne Gaga versus Sci-fi Chromatica Gaga). Rather, we have an artist whose process is bared, whose digestion of popular culture is co-present with that of her audience—and in the relatable, visible, and subsequently legible permutation of Boucher’s aesthetic choices, there resides an almost literary continuity (though this artistic earnest, like anything disseminated en masse, is immediately affectively commodified).

Female pop-stardom is a categorical ‘type’ in and of itself, fetishised and vilified in equal measure. Philip K. Dick, whose fantasist musings are never far from the science fiction canon, repeatedly used female pop-star characters in his narrative worlds to bear messages from the divine, beggaring the kinds of “too-close reading” of popular media normally reserved for that fraught scholarly rubric of denotative versus connotative (Connie Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, 2019). In Dick’s world the sacral is ever-present, and ‘profane’ text (like a pop song) is as appropriate a carrier of revelation as spontaneous cursive on a stone tablet or a burning bush in the desert.

In a roundabout way Dick’s almost exclusive use of female characters as divine instruments is not dissimilar from the way women or their images are consumed IRL, as corporeal nullities upon which every fleeting collective fantasy is projected and excited. For the female pop star, the body is a canvas upon which a gendered teleologic—an entrenched history of signs—is written, the female body as object and commodity, packaged to invite specific looking relations (usually heteronormative, almost always eroticised). It’s in conjunction with these habits and logics that a female pop star such as Boucher, or Gaga, is persuaded to explore incremental aesthetic ‘eras’ in which their work and presence is cohered episodically—as artists in their own right sure, but more often than not as vessels for commercially friendly ideology. This is perhaps how a pop star can be political, in as much as their work either stands in resistance to or compliance with the inherent instrumentality of the platform itself. Pop stardom as an elevated ‘magic circle’ with only a few functioning ladders thence, and within that circle a finite set of ludic boundaries—for the lucky few, a variously limiting game.

GAMES WITHIN GAMES WITHIN GAMES—A CONTINGENT STACK, A PERFORMATIVE WEIRDING

Thematically Player of Games, both song and video, points at the canons which cosplayers frequently cite in their reflexive donning, but within Boucher’s tableaux there’s more going on than capitalising on popular aesthetics. If the lure of cosplaying is to insinuate oneself into a broader narrative, thereby remaking the body as a fantastical object and effectively transcending (effacing?) real-world identity-tethers, then Boucher’s use of it here (specifically in Player of Games) is doing this and more—namely, making a fantastical allegory of the ‘games’ which constitute her lived experience, while dually giving those games critique. As Mountfort Pearson-Smith and Geczy point out, the first incentive is common amongst cosplayers, whereby personas are chosen for nostalgias and spiritual affinities, like with the nominal liturgical value of Catholic name-saints—though as they also point out, incentives have shifted concomitant with social media where documentation of cosplaying is trafficked as a cache of cultural capital less to do with the textually-collaborative spirit of cosplaying, and more to do with exposure and celebrity (Planet Cosplay; Costume Play, Identity, and Global Fandom, 2019).

The most obvious game Boucher’s critiquing, or at the very least drawing attention to, is the game of celebrity itself. Before her relationship and subsequent breakup with tech mogul Elon Musk Boucher’s following was already substantial. However, to an existing fan base the pairing seemed at odds with Boucher’s (presumed) liberal stance, garnering the artist criticism for a perceived tone-deafness—making Boucher fodder for continuing internet vitriol. By any measure the Player of Games video is an indulgent allegory for their now defunct relationship, in which Grimes and Musk are royalty in a castle playing various rivalrous games—fencing, saber-duelling, and something like Rowling’s wizard-chess.

In the tradition of masquerades and even drag cosplaying is cross-pollinated with the same symbolic exoticism, whereby an unreachable fundament of Otherness (gendered, Orientalised etc.) is intentionally commingled with (Catherine Bell, Ritual; Perspectives and Dimensions, 1997). Normally this functions to entertain potentially subversive concepts and gestures without threatening a society’s primary values, which in feudalist societies meant a ritual mixing of classes as a kind of safety valve for historically entrenched tensions (Bell, 1997). In Player of Games this precedent of class mixing is elided with hypocritical irony, as Boucher’s alluded-to realm of otherness is fantastically representative of wealth and celebrity—and Boucher and Musk’s fortress-like existence therein.

What then are we to make of this? That Boucher considers herself and ex Musk members to a feudalist elite of money and talent ala Ayn Rand? Or perhaps, seeing as she’s already painfully aware of these fan-readings of the pairing, the video is a knowing self-satire in which she’s giving trolling oxygen to her own rumoured hubris. Recent twitter-posts of Boucher reading Karl Marx in a Fremen water-recycling suit from popular science fiction series Dune suggests that Player of Games is the latter, in as much as that image was nuanced towards criticism she’s joined league with an insidious ruling class; while also (yet again) cosplaying.

There’s another tradition ala Julia Kristeva where cosplaying intersects with the solo female artist (and which is also repetitiously evident in the work of Grimes), and that’s elevating the body to a spectacle of grotesque or abjection (Powers of Horror, 1980) . Like with the ritual topsy-turvy of masquerade and carnival, cosplaying creates a fantastic or “abject body” whose mere presence elicits the upsetting and momentary inverting of existing norms (Kristeva, 1980). What Kristeva is getting at here is, much like in the ritual-function of carnival and masquerade, the fantastic or grotesque body is singularly representative of valuations that exist outside of mainstream discourse and are subsequently perceived as threatening—to the normative, singly symbolic of the breakdown of meaning itself. Despite the allowance of these bodies in liminal spaces designated entertainment for their triviality/frivolity (the ritual appearance of the Harlequinn, Lady Gaga again), the grotesque or abject body remains threatening if not properly mediated; cordoned off in the manner of a contagion. The abjection which this body signifies is inherently infectious, if improperly exposed to the masses a potential dissident force against which increasingly convoluted prophylactic measures must be deployed. This is conjecturally why genre is policed, to fortify against the drift of mainstream discourse and it’s political instrumentality when coexisting with a variety of abject bodies (lest one contaminate the other).

To speculate even more wildly, perhaps the genres of superstardom afforded certain solo female artists is itself a generic container for the systematised grotesque-ness of womanhood, period. Not that womanhood is fundamentally grotesque, but certainly it’s been historically configured as such—if only to justify the subjection of femininity and it’s bodies to a totalising patriarchal metric. In this vein, female celebrity can be seen as a kind of martyrdom, whereby the gendered assumptions of our society are projected onto these feminine bodies—bodies situationally functioning as blank canvases towards presenting instrumental configurations of gender in amplified ways. Which, if Britney Spears is a right and recent example of, is a script containing a certain disdainful brutality when it comes to the production and mass consumption of femininity.

IN CONCLUSION

What then are we to make of Grimes in this milieu? Certainly she’s suffered vitriol in the manner of Spears, though perhaps without the egregious loss of personhood which Britney Spears has been battling (and recently triumphed over) since 2007. That said the rage with which Boucher’s been targeted, all for her choice of romantic partner, is approximately drawn from the same well of gendered bias and resentment. However, her almost playful approach to internet hate and increased visibility via Musk seems to point towards an awareness of her tethered position to precedents of celebrity and gender, not as societal constructs/compulsions but as games in which she retains her autonomy.

Also, her artistic incorporation or echoing of her own shifting status in this rubric bolsters the view that Boucher is aware of herself as a body tethered to games, some of which she was born into (as a woman) and some of which she willingly opted into—neither of which, however, being isolated sequences of action and response, but games which are themselves tethered to other games. In fewer words, Player of Games is a commentary on the gamification of society broadly, and the place in which she finds herself—which is both isolated from her fan base by wealth and class, but also distantly tethered by the universal understanding and spectatorship of these games. If anything, it’s a framing of gamification as radical contingency.

Furthermore, Player of Games both lyrically and visually allegorises that other game which has universal breadth in our society—the game of heteronormative coupling. That these normative romantic tensions are all but satirised as mythic battles, less between mutually supportive-affectionate lovers and more between lethally driven competitors, seems to be a critique thereof rather than a starry-eyed affirmation. Even more so considering the music video culminates in Boucher’s death at the hands of her armoured suitor. As per Butler’s cited critique on the performative nature of gender, it is perhaps not surprising that the Grimes project—already proficient in performative identity-construction (and deconstruction)—would liken coupledom to a duel of isolated players whose lives literally depend on their scheduled performances therein. Scheduled because as with normative couplings certain consumerist age-specific landmarks solidify the performance (or win the game), such as reproducing and purchasing property. Bonnie Ruberg calls this scheduling “chrononormativity” (Video Games Have Always Been Queer, 2019), perhaps nodding to Saturn (identified with the Greek Cronus or Chronos) jealously devouring his own children.

There is perhaps another rounding-off coda within Art Angels which testifies to a reading of the game of pop-stardom in which Boucher finds herself. As explored that album gathers a selection of personas sharing a single body but separated in their supposed immortality by an enormous communal timeline. Filtered through the conventional episodic nature of artist ‘eras’, we can grasp this move as a critique on that consumerist logic in which the pop-artist must make coherent their creative licenses through stop-start aesthetic turns, all the while juggling a secondary continuity without which their commoditised signature dissipates. That Boucher’s characters here have the ability to weave in and out of each other’s temporal localities is perhaps the artist’s commentary on the arbitrariness of these turns or eras, and how episodic rhythms—when imposed—create abominations like Roccoco Basilisk. Which of course Boucher’s other Art Angels characters are collaborating to assassinate. Which begs the question; in the court of Boucher’s avatar-muses (or literally Art Angels), just what is the crime Basilisk has committed to warrant capital punishment?

The video for Flesh without Blood bears some insight. It’s here we’re introduced to Roccoco Basilisk, in a tangerine Antoinette-gown and purple wig. IV is also present, wielding a bloody knife that Basilisk later pulls out of herself, seeming to suggest the assassination has been successful and IV the triumphant perp. Of these personas Basilisk is the most overtly feminine, occupying a queenly position for best performing the expected gendered tenets—and it is perhaps in the limitations of gender itself the reason for Basilisk’s death lies. Not killed spitefully, but as a necessary escape from gendered strictures. In the pleasures of self destruction, a queering (Ruberg, 2019).