Perhaps taking a page out of pro wrestling, there’s a good chance that Grimes staged her “technical difficulties” at Coachella as a kind of performance art.
Yes, you heard that right. Grimes Milli Vanilli’ed herself. (Self-Vanilli?) If true, this would make her officially the Vince McMahon of EDM, because nothing is true and everything is possible.
I was tipped off early on that the technical failure may not have been a technical failure at all since eyewitnesses had spotted exactly the same routine at a separate performance. That would explain a lot of what had previously been unexplainable – productions at this level typically don’t have glitches like this. The presence of an earlier incident would give even greater weight to that theory; if you have a technical team as backup, you surely wouldn’t let the same issue happen twice. It also seemed suspect that Grimes was so visibly performative about the errors and apologies and had a mic handy for an instrumental DJ set.
Via ENDO (who has advised one Paris Hilton on DJing), Pioneer DJ USA’s artist relations Lars Schlichting captured a day 2 Coachella video that’s a sort of aftermovie for the f***up. I’ll replace this with the official video which is rumored to drop overnight US time, assuming that becomes available as expected. Here’s the video:
And here’s a slightly longer (if lower-quality) video from Lars with the whole setup, via Instagram, reproduced here as I guess this counts as public interest (certainly for rekordbox users):
The production quality of this video does not suggest something hastily prepared in under 24 hours, even for a team with the resources Grimes has. (Costumes! Multiple shots and scenes! Complete narrative!) It seems like somehow Grimes had some high-concept idea about commenting on the relationship with machines by not being able to… DJ. (Well, I’m not saying I understand the idea, but that seems to be what occurred, based on the available evidence.)
One other giveaway that Endo points out, and also stuck out to me when I listened to Grimes’ discussion – 300 bpm? That’s actually outside the maximum analysis range for rekordbox. So it’s another potential indication that a lot of what she was saying onstage was fiction.
I mean, this must have been a weird day for Pioneer DJ / AlphaTheta generally. Hey, so the big story out of Coachella is going to be a famous artist saying on a mic onstage that our equipment/software doesn’t work properly! But, you know, no press is bad press, and a bunch of the world that never heard of “rekordbox” got a much-ballyhooed shout-out from Grimes.
Of course, without additional information, it remains possible that Grimes did whip together this “apology” video in time, even if that looks like the less likely explanation. (I guess whatever happened, now we’ll all be inspired to try to imagine some science fiction reason for why our most recent show was shite.)
But yeah, as performance art? I’ll let you be the judge of that.
It certainly fits the times.
