Never Forget When Grimes Built A Boat, Loaded It With Potatoes And Sailed Down The Mississippi
She also took along a bunch of live chickens - which were eventually seized by animal control.
The musician Grimes — AKA Claire Boucher — has recently made it her business to cover the press in stories about herself so ludicrous they only just sound true.
First, she got involved with technocrat oligarch Elon Musk. Then she threatened to change her name to c (italics included.) And, perhaps most preposterous of all, she created an Instagram account for her “young clone of herself”, which, she stressed, was not an Instagram account for her unborn baby.
Basically, she’s pivoted to the kinds of things that a 17-year-old who spends their whole life on 4Chan finds funny. Which you will either find deeply insufferable, or deeply funny, depending on how much capacity you have for that sort of thing.
But it’s worth remembering that none of this is new. In fact, Boucher has been pulling this shit since at least 2009, when she and a friend tried to sail down the Mississippi river on a houseboat.
The story is preserved in a 2012 profile of the musician posted to Pitchfork, which calls the houseboat incident “an amazing story that proves Claire Boucher is even more awesome than we knew.” Of course, it’s entirely up to you to decide if that’s true.
Basically, Boucher and a friend, William Gratz, constructed a massive houseboat by hand on a friend’s property, painting the thing in “”fantastical creatures” and filling it with live chicken and an ungodly amount of potatoes (about 10 kilos worth). They also renamed themselves “Veruschka and Zelda Xox”, for the occasion.
If all that is so cringey for you to read that you can’t take much more, then don’t worry, because the houseboat story gets about as far as the ship setting sail. See, just after Boucher and her friend launched off the banks of the Mississippi, their engine broke, and they spent the rest of their aborted trip floating aimlessly along before being stopped by the police. Their houseboat was impounded. Their chickens were seized by animal control.
“Even though it’s sad this happened, it’s still an adventure,” said Boucher at the time.
Yep. Grimes is going to Grimes.