Pitchfork对Miss Anthropocene乐评的翻译

In 2011, Grimes was eager to say in an interview that she had “been studying pop stars.” Since emerging 10 years ago as a DIY ingénue out of Montreal’s freewheeling music scene, the artist born Claire Boucher has become known for her experimental production that often traded discernable lyrics for otherworldly and synthetic vocal textures. The words she sang didn’t figure into what made her music so fascinating—it was how she used her vocals to mimic whalesong or aliensong, a futurist reimagining of the transfixing voices of Enya and Mariah Carey, over irresistible melodies. Yes, Grimes always wanted to be a pop star, but on her own creative terms.

2011年在一次采访中，Grimes迫不及待地对外宣称她“正在研究流行歌手”。自10年前作为一名DIY少女歌手从无拘无束的蒙特利尔音乐圈中横空出世以来，这位本名为Claire Boucher的艺术家已经以她实验性的音乐制作为很多人所知了，她的作品中常常使用制作得出尘绝世的人声，而歌词唱的什么已经不是那么容易辨认了。让她音乐如此迷人的并不是她的词，而是她在让人难以抗拒的美妙旋律之上用自己的声音来营造鲸鱼和外星人歌声感觉的做法，可以算是对恩雅和Mariah Carey那种让人咋舌的声线的一种未来主义重构。是的，Grimes一直都想做一位流行歌手，不过是她自己定义中的流行歌手。

Miss Anthropocene is Grimes’ fifth album and her first as that bona fide pop star—the result of widespread acclaim for both 2012’s Visions and 2015’s addictive and upbeat Art Angels. With this new celebrity, accelerated by her relationship with tech billionaire Elon Musk, Grimes wants to talk about the climate crisis—although she doesn’t use that more accurate phrasing herself. “I wanted to make climate change fun,” she’s said in interviews and on her Instagram. Meaning, Grimes is using her preferred lenses of fantasy, villainy, and pop iconography to attempt to engage with reality.

《Miss Antropocene》是Grimes的第五张专辑，也是她作为真正流行歌手的第一张专辑——这要感谢2012年的《Visions》和2015年让人着迷和昂扬的《Art Angels》两张专辑给她带来了广泛的赞誉。凭借这份名声，再加上她和科技界的亿万富翁Elon Musk的恋情，她如今想要对气候危机展开探讨——虽然她自己并没有用这样明确的字眼。“我想让气候变化这个议题更有趣一点，”她在采访和自己的Instagram上如是说。这意味着Grimes在尝试用自己偏爱的幻想、邪气和流行符号的滤镜来审视现实。

The result is a record that’s more morose than her previous work, but no less camp. Art Angels was the result of a decade spent feverishly honing the tenets of songwriting, production, and engineering in order to show listeners who she was, and what she could do (be a pop star). Miss Anthropocene is the willful destruction of that self-conception. Grimes calls the sound “ethereal nu metal,” and the vibe is more honest to the pensive, sometimes cynical, public persona Grimes has shared in public over the last decade.

结果就是这样一张比前作更阴郁但却同样搞怪的专辑。《Art Angels》是她对自己的创作、制作和设计理念十年打磨之后的结晶，向听众展现了她是谁，她能做到什么（当然是做一名流行歌手）。《Miss Anthropocene》则是对之前自我观念的有意摧毁。Grimes称这种新的音乐为“仙音新金属”，这种感觉更忠于过去十年里Grimes向大家展示的深刻、时而不失愤世嫉俗的公众形象。

In November 2018, Grimes released “We Appreciate Power,” a collaboration with her best friend HANA, and a cunningly meta prelude to Miss Anthropocene. Though the propulsive, guitar-driven track didn’t end up on the album, it reveals the aesthetic cynicism behind it: a beckoning chant about capitulating to A.I. supremacy from the perspective of a girl group, the ultimate vessel for artifice and propaganda. Surprisingly—or not, given Grimes’ track record of being more outspoken on Twitter and Tumblr—the 10 tracks that make up Miss Anthropocene are lyrically more ambiguous about this ambitious theme. Instead, we’re left with a convoluted narrative about personifying climate change through a fictional cosmology of demons and villainesses giddily celebrating global warming as a force of good. In that sense, Miss Anthropocene reflects the creative state in which it was made: “negative, aggressive, and isolating.”

2018年11月，Grimes发行了《We Appreciate Power》这首和好朋友HANA合作的单曲，用这样一首狡黠的金属曲作为《Miss Anthropocene》的先导。虽然这首用吉他制造强劲推动感的曲子最终没有收录进专辑，但它让我们得以一窥专辑在美学上的愤世嫉俗之感：以女团这一穷各项花招、宣传煽动之能事的身份歌咏、呼唤我们臣服于A·I·的统治。让人感到惊讶的是——考虑到Grimes在Twitter和Tumblr上一向更为直言不讳，也许也并不奇怪——《Miss Anthropocene》十首歌曲的歌词对于这个野心勃勃的主题表现得更为含糊。反之，我们看到的是一个虚构的宇宙，这里恶魔和坏蛋欢快地将气候变暖作为一件幸事来庆祝，以此营造了一个将气候变化拟人化的迂回叙事。这样看，《Miss Anthropocene》反应了创作过程中的状态：“消极，到激进，再到孤立”。

When Grimes veers away from high concept toward examining intimate and relational forms of human erosion, Miss Anthropocene finds some clarity. “We don’t love our bodies anymore,” she intones over the droning wasteland of “Darkseid,” which also features metallic vocals by the Taiwanese-rapper 潘PAN (formerly Aristophanes). “So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth” introduces this conceit, weighed down by a simple drum pattern. It’s a lament about the ways in which women are domesticated via a patriarchal schema. “Specifically how when a dude cums inside you, you become in their thrall,” she said in an April 2019 interview, alluding to her relationship with Musk, who is now thought to be the father of her expected child. “Love can be this beautiful thing, but then love is the thing that’s fucking up my career. The biggest change … is losing my hardcore masculinity. I used to just be free of all this bullshit all the other girls were going through, and now I feel like I’m not.” (She’s more besotted, jubilant even, on the winsome closer “IDORU.”) And on “Delete Forever,” she shifts focus to addiction, vocals high and clear in the mix as she sings over a freakin’ banjo: “I can’t see above it, guess I fuckin’ love it.” It’s a sublime, mood-perfect vignette of self-destructive nihilism. Grimes wrote it the night Lil Peep died of an accidental overdose.

当Grimes不再讨论上述主题，而是开始审视人在亲密关系中被贬低这样的问题时，《Miss Anthropocene》反而变得清晰了。“我们不再喜欢我们的身体，”她在《Darkseid》嗡鸣的荒原之上缓缓念诵，这首歌里还有台湾说唱歌手潘Pan（也就是之前的Aristophanes）金属质感声线的加入。《So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth》将我们引入，然后简单的鼓击节奏开始营造压抑的感觉。这是对女人被父权制度驯服的哀悼。“具体解释下为什么一个男人射在你体内，你就被他奴役了，”她在2019年一次采访中说道，影射了她和Musk的关系，现在大家相信她即将出生的孩子就是Musk的。“爱可以很美，但也正是爱搅乱了我的事业。最大的改变是……我失去了我那份硬核的男子气概。我以前根本不需要管其他女生经历过的那些破事，但现在我觉得我做不到了。”（在活泼可爱的结束曲《IDORU》中她显得更加痴情，甚至是欢快雀跃的。）在《Delete Forever》中，她转而讨论起痴迷之情，她伴着班卓琴唱着，声线在混响中显得清晰嘹亮：“我看不清，我想我是特么爱上了这种感觉。”这是给自我毁灭的虚无主义一首情绪饱满的绝妙插曲。Grimes在Lil Peep意外死于用药过度的那晚写下了这首曲子。

Miss Anthropocene thrills when it reveals a refined, linear evolution of Grimes’ long-standing interest in rave nostalgia and alluring pop music from around the world. On “Violence,” a vocal trance banger co-produced by Deadmau5 affiliate i_o that’s destined for a RuPaul’s Drag Race lip-sync, Grimes gives one of her most dynamic performances. Through gauzy overdubs and steady four-on-the-floor drums, she flips between whimpering and a snarl to delineate perspectives of an abusive relationship. And “4ÆM,” which she teased two years ago as an “ethereal chav jam that’s like a cyberpunk interpretation of the [Bollywood historical fantasy blockbuster] Bajirao Mastani,” delivers on the mind-bogglingly referential impulse. It’s Hollywood futurism: an Orientalist fantasia colliding with a revved-up hook; the soundtrack to a John Wick fight scene.

Grimes对锐舞音乐的复古感觉和美妙的流行乐曲一向很感兴趣，《Miss Anthropocene》让我们欣喜地看到她在这方面一以贯之且不断精深的进化。《Violence》里，和Deadmau5合作制作、并拉来i-o参与的一段火树银花般的人声trance仿佛是为路保罗变装秀唇舞环节量身定做的，Grimes在这里面贡献了自己最具活力的演唱。辅以飘渺的附加音效和平稳的4/4拍鼓点，她的声音在哀泣和低声絮语之间切换，描绘了虐恋中的种种。她两年前曾抖机灵戏称自己的歌“仙音派即兴口水歌，像是赛博朋克版【宝莱坞史诗大片】《帝国双璧》”，而《4ÆM》这首歌曲则给人延续了这样让人错愕说法的感觉。它是好莱坞风格的未来主义：东方主义的幻想曲和高速盘旋的hook碰撞；可以作为《疾速追杀》动作场景的配乐。

So much about the actual music of Miss Anthropocene succeeds that the choice to bury it below a warped—and yes, misanthropic—concept about “The Environment” makes it hard to connect with who Grimes is as an artist today. Standing in the way of humans reckoning with climate emergency are multiple delusions: that wealth brings freedom, that boundless acquisition and unchecked growth remain tenable, and that political and economic institutions are inherently trustworthy actors. Grimes sounds like the pop star she’s worked very hard to become, but her imagination seems diminished—or, like many of her celebrity ilk, is cordoned off in a bubble floating above the rest of humanity. In 2020, revolutionary pop stardom might try to clarify, rather than obscure, the havoc that systems wreak when it comes to, say, gender roles and social compliance, technology and surveillance capitalism, nationalism and land exploitation, or whiteness and pathological denial.

说了如此之多《Miss Anthropocene》音乐本身是多么多么成功，就显得Grimes将音乐掩盖在扭曲的——而且也是厌世的——“环境”概念之下的做法让我们很难将其和Grimes如今的艺术家形象联系在一起。阻碍人类处理气候危机的是重重的错觉：认为财富必然带来自由，无止境的索取和不经反思的增长是没问题的，而政治和经济部门也一直都是可靠的。Grimes听起来已经很像她努力成为的流行歌手了，可是她的想象力似乎衰退了——或者说，和很多其他明星一样，她被困在了俯瞰众生的泡沫中。2020年，讨论性别角色和顺从社会、科技和对资本主义的监督、国家主义和土地开发或是白种人和病理性否认等方面的问题时，革命性的流行歌手们可能更倾向于阐明自己在系统崩坏带来的浩劫方面的立场，而不是晦涩地含糊其辞。

And that’s the obstacle, the slimy mouthfeel, standing in the way of Miss Anthropocene offering genuine catharsis: Grimes, the self-taught, self-possessed iconoclast, as insincere. In this very specific political moment rendering climate crisis as dystopian aesthetic is privileged and indulgent, and perhaps even more frustrating given Grimes’ stage wink of an album title. Who exactly is the subject of her misanthropy? Having achieved recognition and acclaim for what she can do with Visions and Art Angels, the question remains: Who is she now? And so, some footnotes from Grimes’ life feel useful here: childhood ballerina, daughter of a banker and former Crown prosecutor-turned-journalist, managed by Roc Nation (currently trying to sell the public on its profit-turning deal with the NFL), and in a relationship with a man whose real-time net worth literally jumped $4.1 billion to $44.2 billion between drafts of this review. Sometimes it is important to be reminded that celebrity is also a system, a way of distracting the powerless and nurturing ruling class values through notions of exceptionalism and vanity. Perhaps, before she was a pop star, Grimes might have made a statement with this album—but what the world needs now is less obfuscation, not more.

这正是阻碍《Miss Anthropocene》宣泄真实情感的障碍，它总给人假惺惺的感觉：即Grimes这样一个自学成才、固执己见、打破常规的人是不真诚的。在这样一个政治节点以敌托邦美学来阐释气候危机像是在纵容这一切，考虑到她在舞台上对专辑中一首曲目的表演，这甚至让人更加失望。她这个厌世的主体究竟是谁？凭借《Visions》和《Art Angels》她向人们展现了自己的才能，获得了认可和赞誉，但这个问题仍未得到解答：她现在是谁？所以，Grimes生活中的一些小事也许能给我们提供些有用的注脚：童年时跳过芭蕾，是一名银行家和一名（后转行做记者的）前皇家检察官后的女儿，她目前隶属于Roc Nation公司（该公司目前正向公众宣传其和NFL签下的利润颇丰的合作协议），并正和一名实时净资产在写作这篇评论的过程中就从41亿美元飙升到442亿美元的男人谈恋爱。有时候我们要想到名人们是一个体系，是一种让我们这些无权无势的人能够转移注意力，同时通过美国例外论和浮华的观念给人们灌输统治阶层价值观的方法。如果这张专辑发行于她成为流行歌手之前，Grimes也许能传达出些什么——但现在这个世界需要的是少一些而不是更多的对焦点的模糊处理。

（仅供参考，如有侵权可联系删除。原文地址：https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grimes-miss-anthropocene/）

另：如有翻译不妥之处，也欢迎给出宝贵意见。