u/_coldershoulder

I think the thing that makes today’s Grimes songs feel so different from the past is that she writes very on the nose now.

If you look back at her early discography, her writing was opaque and cryptic and strange. Oblivion was about being assaulted, but the lyrics don’t give it away easily. She wrote an entire album about Dune that is…not exactly transparently about Dune (aside from the titles) upon listening.

It seems like possibly around MA is when she started writing from a worldview or theme moreso than whatever instinct was driving her earlier work, and when she got into book 1 is when I think her writing became very themed and on the nose. And to be clear, nothing is necessarily wrong with writing music on the nose, I personally do it….but I think maybe that’s the biggest reason grimes feels so different now, rather than having dated he that shall not be named.

Thoughts?

People throw around talk of the “AI bubble” as if bursting it means AI fails and goes away. But that is not how bubbles work. Did you know railroads and the internet experienced similar booms to AI? The railroad, dot-com, and AI booms share a recurring historical cycle: a transformative technology emerges, massive infrastructure overinvestment follows, stock valuations disconnect from reality, and a speculative crash eventually funds the permanent physical foundation of the modern economy.

Railroads and the internet are still obviously quite vital to society globally. But that’s after Amazon still lost 90% of its value during the bursting of the .com bubble, and today it still has not reached the implied valuation of its 2000 peak despite being one of the worlds largest and most profitable corporations today.

So, why are anti-AI people still wasting time trying to demand the technology go away for good? This will never happen, AI is actually here to stay no matter how badly the bubble bursts. Why not focus on better outcomes with AI instead of attacking realistic people for accepting it?

Lately whenever new photos of Grimes are posted here, the majority of the comments (and typically the comments with the most likes) are all about her appearance, specifically plastic surgery allegations and dissatisfactions. While I understand that it is of interest when public figures look “different”, the way this conversation goes has completely tipped into body shaming.

“Too much filler” “stop getting Botox” “she’s not herself anymore” “what has Elon done to her” “her facelift is botched” it’s a lot of the same thing over and over again and I’m just curious what it is some of y’all are trying to accomplish by doing this? This hardly applies to Grimes alone, many female celebrities are being torn apart right now such as Ariana Grande. Grimes went to bat for Selena Gomez over this exact thing not long ago.

I’d like to remind everyone here that celebs don’t just arbitrarily set beauty standards for everyone else thus giving us the right to shame them for how they look. We have a lot of power over how people in the public eye see themselves, they’re human beings after all. Let’s be honest, Grimes was never considered a beauty by conventional standards and the comments have never been abundantly kind towards her. Some of the cruelest and most misogynistic comments I’ve ever read were about her old appearance back in the day. It’s really not shocking that she chose to pursue conventional beauty, so why are we clutching our pearls over her touching her own face? We might have formed attachments to a certain version of her, but at the end of the day she has to live in that body and see that face in the mirror every day, it really is not up to us what she chooses to do with it to ease her own presence within it.

I don’t want this sub to be a place that would worsen her mental health were she to visit it, I became admin because this sub had turned into exactly that for a long time and it had to stop. I don’t want to have to take down a bunch of comments and reignite people’s dissatisfaction with heavy handed moderation here, but I feel conflicted because there’s already too much of this behavior online. I feel as though I’d rather just ask you guys if we can make a collective effort to be less shaming and critical here. If we should be giving her hell for anything it should be the lack of music, not her face. Thoughts?