The Story Of Grimes [PART 1]: A Childhood (DOCUMENTARY)

in contrast to her traumatic teen years claire boucher's life started off with a heartwarming but extremely important ritual when she was free where every night her dad would read with her the lord of the rings they were finished by the time she got into kindergarten paired along with her childhood fascination for the dune comics which you would later write a whole album about is embedded in the mind of the young claire the possibilities and the magic of world building a subject she has referenced throughout her career most recently in miss anthropocene here is a quote from grimes that talks about how influential those works were informing her psyche and so my brain is kind of based on lord of the rings because my formative years were spent reading it it's so deeply embedded into my psyche everything exists in relation to that book born in 1988 raised in vancouver claire elise boucher is one of five children the only girl two brothers belonging to her biological mother and father the other two brothers coming from her mother's subsequent relationship after her divorce when claire was twelve her mother sandy garacino is a former crown prosecutor and is currently the national affairs journalist at canada's national observer as well as this sandy's siblings are both olympic figure skaters which sandy also pursued to a high level in her team claire's father maurice boucher is a former investment banker and now works as the executive chairman at renaissance bioscience a biotech company both parents are extreme workaholics with claire mentioning how she basically grew up with her grandparents because her mum and dad were always at work her parents are also strict catholics something that would be the root of a lot of problems as she grew up growing up in a catholic household as well as attending catholic school claire grew up with an intense fascination and fear of god and religion here is a quote where she talks about how impactful catholicism was on her life it totally influences everything i do she says i think i have serious latent catholic guilt issues he recalls being terrified of an omnipotent god as a child seeing the world as a huge crazy extreme psychedelic constant battle going on between heaven and hell here is another quote where she talks about her childhood fascination with the church i'm really nostalgic about my previous ability to believe in god i'm not a religious person but apart from now that was the best time of my life the world was this fantastic place and god existed i would go to church and there was jesus nailed to the cross people crying mary holding her dead baby and this choir singing it was such a messed up powerful thing i've always been attached to that feeling as a six-year-old life wasn't too bad her past times included consuming science fiction novels and comics and drawing which she learned by studying akira books she grew up in a middle class household with brothers she loved but was fiercely competitive with her brother mac boucher now a creative partner on many of her music videos was someone she spent a lot of time with and used to make skit videos together in their basement while listening to tupac and wearing basketball jerseys they also had a spice girls fan club because why not this was the start of an extremely close family connection that would only grow deeper as the years went along however one thing that caused problems for grimes early in life and the people around her was the movement disorder that she was born with called restless leg syndrome or acaphelia this meant that she would constantly be on the move tapping her leg playing with her hands or hitting the table it caused quite a lot of trouble at school even though they were allowed to mess around every now and then grimes mack and their brother daniel were growing up under a father who parented in a very strict and harsh manner grimes has recalled how her father was super intense and serious about everything especially food and exercise making her eat weird protein shakes every day and going on runs every morning she was also enrolled in ballet from the age of 3 and has said that this pressure and suppression caused her to go insane by the time she hit puberty by the age of eight grimes had pondered over religion long enough and announced at easter dinner that she was agnostic it was also around this time that the fierceness in her competition with her brothers grew and she started doing anything she could to quote defeat them such as taking up track and field because she needed to be faster than her brothers or defeating them at a pokemon video game what was happening on the music side well not much just about now britney and the backstreet boys were at their peak so just like any other young girl grimes was infatuated however everything started to change in her life when she was around 12 and her parents got divorced grimes had said in an interview that divorce really didn't affect her and she thought she was probably a bit mental because of it but around the same time grimes did start acting out whatever reason it was for at the age of 12 grimes got her first access to the internet which would be incredibly influential on her outlook and music as she got to listen to a wide range of musicians from a lot of different genres all at the same time an experience that would later lead her to describe herself and her music as post-internet she also used it to cyberbully one of her teachers the next year the bullying at claire's school lord bing's secondary school got intensely worse the memories grimes has of this time are being locked in a locker thrown in a bin the words [ __ ] and [ __ ] scrawled across her locker and being shouted disgusting hateful things for people in cars as she walked along the street grimes has said that she wasn't just a nobody in school people actively hated her saying in an interview i started being identified as being weird and then i was alienated and then being alienated started being part of my identity at 14 claire took part in a classic act of team rebellion and completely shaved her head as a result she was kicked out of her ballet company which at the time was what she wanted anyway this age of rebellion was extremely important for grimes because it gave her the impetus to find new alternative music that match her new edgy mana the artist that she came upon would become integral influences on the later grimes sound and iconography these artists included marilyn manson nine inch nails tool and the smashing pumpkins however she was forbidden to see any of them in consonant by her dad who only liked one of her favorite bands sister mother down because they were quote political and intellectual listening to this music at an early age would help ground the young grimes in an alternative lifestyle and help her appreciate being an outsider even though life at school was still very hard around this time she started to run away from home and stay at friends houses as she was so sick of being stuck under her parents strict rules she would eventually become friends with the rest of the bullied kids such as the goths art nerds and the gays and go on to try drugs with them as well grimes stated in this interview that she was more just thrill-seeking than acting out and would do stuff like going on a highway with the headlights off at night time or jumping out of windows to get her frail even though she was unpopular grimes actually became notorious on her school as rumors spread of her being a lesbian satanic hooker to tease the bully she even went as far as spider walking backwards down the stairs like linda blair and the exorcist fun anecdotes from this time include a wiccan phase in seventh grade when she tried to cast the spell on the other students but failed when the rosary crumbled in her hands or the time when she was accused by her classmates are throwing a snowball at queen elizabeth's car even though it wasn't her just because she was a goth however the fun quickly started to fade away with grime's friends getting expelled from school engaging in prostitution and dying from heroin overdoses teachers would talk to her parents and say things like claire could be so good if she would just stay away from those other kids this was also the time grimes was arrested for assault after she slapped the boy who grabbed her back he later dropped his charges after other girls came forward accusing him of assaulting them too around the time she started cutting herself her parents decided that it would be best to send her to reform school in some miraculous fortune or maybe just the fact that she is grimes she was still able to get into mcgill university in montreal to major in neuroscience and philosophy with a double minor in the russian language and psychoacoustics when she was 18. it was most likely that she just wanted to get away from vancouver as soon as possible when grimes arrived in montreal she found it to be a whole world away from her quiet town in vancouver everything including rent was super cheap in montreal which meant she could spend as much time as she wanted hanging out with friends studying or doing anything she liked although grimes had stated that she found it extremely hard to connect with anyone at her university as they were all quote upper middle class torontonian white kids who would be freaking out because it was cold outside end quote and had starkly different experiences and views to the rougher around the edges claire boucher it was in her first year at university that grimes made her first foray into music but there are two different stories on how it happened the first is that she was required to learn the music software program garageband for her psychoacoustics class and simply fell in love with music making from there the second is that one of her friends needed the female background vocal on their track and grimes volunteered after being complimented on her voice by her friend and watching him use garageband to create tracks she had a lightbulb moment and thought i can do this too whatever happened what we know for sure is that her musical progression was aided by a homeless friend who she traded two cans of chickpeas and some olive oil in exchange for teaching her how to use a sampler grimes was immediately hooked with music making and knew that there was nothing else she wanted to spend her time on soon after she created her first ep leafy in 2007 for her psychoacoustics class and started to work on improving her music and live performance she began writing songs performing live with the ukulele and then as she taught herself the rudiments of electronic music a cheap keyboard around this time grimes made an extremely important discovery she was on a road trip with her dad having just smoked some weed and the only music they could agree to listen to was r b so they put on some mariah carey to quote grimes it shattered the fabric of my existence and i started grimes mariah would also be incredibly influential on the development of grind's singing after practicing along to heartbreaker she managed to extend her range to four octaves but mariah carey wasn't the only actually discovered while in montreal instead listening to musicians as varied as hildegard von bingen billy idol brandy and animal collective grimes eventually joined labs on fairs a music collective performance space located in an abandoned textile factory co-founded by two of her friends david pete and sebastian cohen however tragedy struck the next year when two of her closest friends passed away one of them being david pete who committed suicide this was one of the hardest times in grime's life one of her best friends committed suicide the place where she lived and worked labs on fares was shut down and she got extremely painful frostbite on her feet which went on for months due to living on a hovel with no heating she decided she needed an escape with her then boyfriend william gratz grimes constructed a 20-foot houseboat named the velvet glove cast an iron with the attention to sail it down the mississippi river from minneapolis to new orleans the cargo included ducks that escaped and 20 pounds of potatoes they adopted the names varushka and zelda zox and set on what was supposed to be the adventure of a lifetime their engine broke on the first day after a three-week tangle with the cops their boat was eventually impounded and taken away safe to say grimes made it back to montreal even though it was an awful traumatic event the suicide of one of her best friends made grimes feel an even bigger need to become a successful musician as a tribute to someone who had supported and inspired her from the beginning sebastian cohen who co-founded labs on fairs with david pete started managing her and signed her to a small indie label arbetus records around this time grimes experimented with making music while on speed and actually made tracks 2 and 3 from her debut album gadey primes while on an all night speed binge stating it made me lose inhibitions about singing and being weird in 2009 she created a myspace account for her music this is where the grimes names come from as on myspace you could choose to tag yourself with free genres in claire seeing the then popular uk genre grime and not knowing what it was chose grime for all of her options and also for her username stage name where she released leafy which experienced moderate success then in january and october 2010 respectively she released gadi primes inspired by the world of the doom comics and hal faxer inspired by a trip she went on to halifax respectively on arbeitus records the cover art for both albums created by grimes only which both experienced viral hype on hipster music blogs such as pitchfork which were then the gatekeepers of up-and-coming independent artists though at this time she still wasn't very confident in her abilities issuing a press release with both albums that stated she had no musical training following these two releases she left university in early 2011 to focus on her music in april 2011 grimes released a collaborative ep with fellow montreal musician dion who she met at a concert at labs some fairs from which she released the video single vanessa her first ever music video that experienced even more viral success than any of her previous releases finally on january 31st 2012 grimes released her breakthrough project visions which catapulted her to mainstream success created during a three-week speed binge where she blacked out all the windows hardly slept didn't speak to anyone and hardly ate the project was the first time grimes had explicitly addressed any of her personal experiences in songs such as her violent sexual assault in oblivion and was seen by her as the best music she had created yet to quote the albums like the caphasis of everything shitty that's ever happened to me in my life she made the album's most successful single oblivion while in literal tears grimes wanted to create a work that was happier and more upbeat than her previous project even though the lyrical content was a lot darker inspired by the feeling you get when you listen to a really good beyonce song the album was universally praised by critics sold more copies than all of her previous works combined and completed claire boucher's transformation into grimes did you find any part of her story shocking how much did you know of grime's story before has this changed the way you see her now let me know in the comments down below and before i go i'd really appreciate it if you could subscribe to the channel and like the video thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: POPICANA

Views: 626,633

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Id: b1nz0IhWPRs

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021