Is Art Angels by Grimes Making Women Shave Their Heads? Deconstructing the Reddit Conspiracy
Words: Charis McGowan
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In 2012, tam-hatted interviewer Nardwuar asked his fellow Canadian Grimes a simple question: “Who is Duffy?” The young Grimes, who turned 24 that day, giggles a reply: “He’s my muse and he runs the cult that I’m in; I'm the high priestess. it's a surrealist cult ….”
Kneel in the water down low…
But you can’t go where they all go…
“laughing and not being normal”, Art Angels, 2015
Grimes released her break-out album Visions that year. Now, she goes by c, ((c) = 3 × 10^8 m/s, the speed of light in a vacuum). Back then, she was known simply as Grimes, the moniker for experimental Vancouver-born pop musician, Claire Boucher.
By 2013, she’d toured the world and grew increasingly frustrated with the media’s reduction of her as an airy-fairy pop star — glazing over her credentials as a pioneering producer. She’d confronted grating sexism in the industry and was exhausted by the pace of fame. “There was a point where I remember putting a hand up and grabbing a piece of my hair, and I could just pull my hair out,” she told Fader in 2015.
一個女人徒手拔掉滿頭黑髮
在夢境的山稜線行走
思念聚集成蚊蟲
Translation: A woman pulls out the headful of black hair with her bare hands
Walks along the ridges in a dream
“Scream” ft Aristophanes, Art Angels, 2015
This mental state formed the backdrop for 2015’s Art Angels, Grimes’ third album which is now the subject of a sparkling new internet conspiracy theory almost a decade after its release: it contains subliminal messages that make female listeners want to shave their heads.
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In August, a Reddit user posted that they’d “noticed several comments” in which Grimes fans had “shaved their heads” after listening to Art Angels. They proceed to post evidential screenshots: “I fully shaved my head towards the beginning of this year, and I was listening to a HEAP of Grimes at that time" wrote one; "I cut about 15 inches of hair off after Claire chopped all hers off too" said another. "Yes, but I didn't actually shave my head, I had the strongest urge ever and was fully committed to doing it" exclaimed a third.
The OP concluded: “I wonder what kind of demonic messages were encoded in her music to make this happen. Very strange. Never heard of anything like it.”
Why you looking at me again?
What if I pulled my teeth?
Cut my hair underneath my chin?
‘Venus Fly’ ft Janelle Monáe, Art Angels, 2015
“I wonder what kind of demonic messages were encoded in her music to make this happen. Very strange. Never heard of anything like it.”
It’s not the first time the elusive singer has been at the centre of a conspiracy. She started dating billionaire Elon Musk in 2018, bonding over a mutual interest in morbid sci-fi scenarios and gifting one another animal bones. At the time, Musk’s biographer described the Boucher saga as a “chaotic new subplot”; laced with bat-shit wild acid trips (as witnessed by the reputable Azealia Banks). The pair had three children in their five-year relationship: X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk and Techno Mechanicus.
Grimes’ conjugal connection to the world’s richest, most powerful men — alongside her longtime penchant for the otherworldly — sent conspiracy theorists into a frenzy. In 2019, she released a video for her new single, ‘Violence’ which saw her wearing a face mask. In an Instagram post, she promoted the song with a picture of a rock engraved with three syringes. “Violence” was on her fifth album, 2020’s Miss Anthropocene, alongside dark-synth track called “Before The Fever”, and drum & bass flavoured “4ÆM”.
Madness, intellect, audacity
Truth and the lack thereof
They will kill us all, I've no doubt
“Before The Fever”, Miss Anthropocene, 2020
You're gonna get sick,
you don't know when
“4ÆM”, Miss Anthropocene, 2020
Months later, COVID-19 struck.
For Reddit conspirators; Grimes’ suspected celestial gifts were confirmed: ‘“Grimes literally created the coronavirus”,“She openly admits to being in secret societies”, “she's high priestess of the Illuminati” they conferred. Did Elon, one of the most powerful men on earth, already know what was going on before the rest of us? “He told it to her during pillow talk”, conjectured another.
Of course, a conspiracy stew needs a dash of Illuminati to spice the pot. Musk is at the centre of countless conspiracy theories linking him to the secret group of global elites with a thing for pentagrams, triangles and the all-seeing eye. Musk is also a core promoter of unfounded internet speculation. In the aftermath of his Twitter ownership, now X, he unblocked tens of thousands of accounts linked to antisemitism, neo-nazism, and hardcore fascist opiners spouting to fake news, all as part of Musk’s nobel crusade to uphold “free speech” to counter “wokeism”.
Grimes ≥ Musk, placing c is firmly in the realm of this dark side of the internet, where conspiracy is embraced as the truth, where coincidence is upheld as vision, propagated with such force to propel men like Trump to positions of deranged power.
And so, we come back to Art Angels’ shaven head theory. Is c, demon priestess, trying to deindividualise by stripping the masses of hair? Are we, Art Angels fans, now shaven like prisoners, part of a gullible mass evermore susceptible to messages from Musk and the Illuminati elite? When the aliens come (and they will come — have you not seen the foreboding “Need To Know” video?) — will we proclaim Musk as Earth leader to save us?
Well, the best way to test a conspiracy theory is to try it. I, a cis-woman, with longish hair, listened religiously to Art Angels upon its release and felt no inclination to shave my head. I’ve listened to it a few times now, and the razor remains at bay.
I did listen to Art Angels at a time of life where I permanently went really gay in my mid-20s. Is this turn from feminine heterosexual subservience akin to head shaving? Is Grimes, rather than subduing us, trying to liberate us from convention? Have more people gone bald, or gay, after listening to Art Angels?
Or, maybe, she was a young artist navigating a tough time in her life, who sought release by making some really good electro-experimental pop with complex themes on identity, self-loathing, and renewal. We’ll never know, but the truth is out there.
