As a critic and the founding editor of art and literary conceptual tabloid On The Rag, I receive dozens of asinine PR slop emails a week. I ignore most of them—and suspect all are written by AI—but when a pithy text message pops up from controversial publicist Mitchell Jackson, a canny operator who reps clients as disparate as Adam Friedland, Clavicular, and Candace Owens, I take note.
OFF RECORD — Grimes is releasing first single from first album in seven years, PSY OPERA, on Friday. In coordination, she’s doing a surprise DJ Set/performance at the gay bar Singers in Bushwick on Saturday.
My initial thought: Why on earth would I trek all the way to Singers—a charming, if somewhat random gay bar out in Bed-Stuy—far from the beating heart of downtown? Why, of all the bars where a rockstar could throw a secret party, would she throw one there? Why not at Chinatown’s Gosh, or in the smoky basement of that Albanian Ridgewood dive AMMA Cafe, or at some Dimes Square hellhole?
And also, who honestly cares about Grimes at this point? The album she’s promoting will be her first in seven years, and a lot has happened in that time. The electronic visionary is far more infamous now for co-parenting with cartoonish tech villain Elon Musk than for making music. But to paraphrase Trotsky, You may not be interested in Grimes, but Grimes is interested in you. No sooner do I plan on staying in on Saturday night than my beloved editors at CULTURED reach out to see if I’ll write about the Grimes show. The rest, as they say, is history.
I arrive at Singers around 9 p.m. and take in a line of a couple hundred tattooed and vaping Gen-Z Bushwick types snaking halfway down an otherwise sleepy block of Kosciuszko Street. I almost dutifully take my place at its tail, but thankfully come to my senses and find Mitchell at the front, being badgered by a woman who keeps insisting she’s “a VIP.” It’s depressing to watch adults pretend that their Instagram follower counts mean anything to anyone, especially in our era of AI fever dreams and relentless political authoritarianism. But I suppose you can’t begrudge a hustler leveraging their meager internet clout while they still can. Or maybe there’s something about the allure of Grimes, the fanatical devotion she inspires in her fans, that I’ve totally underestimated. In any case, Mitchell bats her away and barks at his team to let me right in.
I’ve only been to Singers once in my life, and from the amount of men who groped me and the number of straight women who assured me that every gay man there would die to fuck me that night, it reminded me somewhat of LA’s Akbar: an iconic meat market, but also very much open to the larger queer community and quite welcoming of fag hags.
Tonight, either my looks are fading or Singers is more mixed than usual, because not a single man bothers to hit on me. I stand around awkwardly looking for a familiar face, which I find in Simon Golovcsenko, an artist who turned up at the last On The Rag launch party in September. We catch up and I take their pic because they’re hot and wearing an Usher T-shirt. The only other person I know is Mitchell, who is now at the bar talking to a tall frat bro with braces. As I approach, I hear the frat bro remark, “The CEO of Polymarket is totally autistic.” Like any great flack, Mitchell is something of a people curator, with a unique sensitivity to context. Just like how tossing the odd Polymarket bro into a queer bar adds a certain spice, similarly, throwing a Grimes’s show at Singers alters how the spectacle will be received. The entire premise may be somewhat puzzling, but as with any Mitchell Jackson production, it’s sure to be entertaining.
I wander out to the dimly lit back patio, which is already packed, and strike up a conversation with Sunny Kim, a 23-year-old tattoo artist. I ask him if he’s a Grimes fan, and he seems baffled. “Why did I come to Singers?” Sunny muses, dragging on a cigarette. “It’s a gay bar. I’m just here for the skin-on-skin contact and the eye candy.”
Even if Grimes’s original audience has aged out of the club scene somewhat, there’s something newly apt about her bedroom origins, her overnight rise, and her haunting blend of anime, techno-futurism, and fantasy. She was remarkably prescient: our reality now looks alarmingly like the screen-soaked AI dreamworld she conjured more than a decade ago.
I introduce myself to a man standing beside me, who tells me we met over the summer at a mutual’s b-day party at TJ Byrnes. In Danny Keane, I meet someone who genuinely loves Grimes, so much so that he braved the hordes out front. “I showed up and stood in line,” Danny tells me. “She’s getting so insane and detached from reality that she’s gonna become cool again.” The back patio grows even more packed. Crammed in on the other side of me is KJ Rothweiler, who co-hosts the former meme-account turned podcast Ion Pack. I’ve never listened to it, but of course I know its lore. “I saw Grimes DJ 10 years ago at 285 Kent,” KJ says, and mentions that before podcasting he too used to work as a lowly DJ. “She’s fun because she doesn’t give a shit about the art of DJing. She’s a troll.”
Suddenly, I’m blinded by flashlights as security guards barge through, carving a path for Grimes. Even in the dark she possesses that ineffable, starlike magic: elven with her signature long white-blond hair, prancing by in a whimsical, vaguely Asian-coded outfit. She flashes me a peace sign that I manage to catch on camera.
Behind Grimes trail members of her team, and trailing them are photographer Taryn Segal and writer Mackenzie Thomas, both of whom I know from hosting readings around the downtown literary scene. Journalism is, at its core, a rough-and-tumble trade, one that rewards moxie and charging into spaces, even when you’re not invited. So as Taryn and Mackenzie zip by, I fall in behind them as if I’m part of Grimes’s team, weaving my way right to the front of the patio as Grimes grabs the mic to much applause and says, “I suppose we’ll have a DJ set now!”
She then proceeds to dance, jump, and headbang for an hour. I’m surprised it’s mostly—save for two new singles—not her own music, but perhaps I’m showing my age. Whatever it is, the crowd eats it up. Meanwhile, Taryn and Mackenzie swing around the stage like a pair of circus acrobats. Taryn hopping atop monitors to snap pics, Mackenzie crawling beneath the decks, only to pop up on the other side dancing and taking videos. It all feels euphoric, Grimes this ecstatic cult leader preaching to a blissed out flock of congregants. Finally, as a parting love letter to the crowd, Grimes cues up her last song of the night, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s sultry “Je t’aime moi non plus,” and flees with her entourage.
In the greenroom, a small house that shares a thin alleyway with Singers, Mackenzie and Taryn sit around a table covered with Thai takeout. Others mingle and drink mezcal. It’s quiet and mellow compared to the sweaty chaos we all just participated in. Grimes sits on the couch giving an interview to a journalist who looks like he just stepped out of the Abbey in West Hollywood. Finally, Mitchell waves me over and I sit down beside Grimes. “You have 10 minutes,” he says.
Grimes and I start chatting, and I’m surprised to find how little she cares about music. “I’m reading The Importance of Being Earnest,” she says. “I’m getting so obsessed with the decadence and aesthetic movement right now.” She’s also reading Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and loves Robert Frost. She tells me her favorite poets include Lana Del Rey, Phoebe Bridgers, and a poet I’ve just published in On The Rag, the shitposter Woah Vicky. “I feel like we’re almost at the end of this Renaissance era of sound design—it’s starting to get stale. I’m over it.” She adds, “But great writing is the one thing that can shine through.”
We’re in the moment of celebrity book clubs and influencers LARPing as intellectuals. But whether you like her work or not, Grimes is undeniably an artist. She confesses that she recently finished a novel. “It’s a nightmare, it’s horrible,” she admits, sounding fatalistic, which is to say like every other novelist I know. “But I wrote it.”
It’s unclear if Grimes’s ability to spark that intoxicating intimacy between artist and audience can carry through in novel form as powerfully as onstage, but regardless her enchantment with the literary arts charms me. Writing—and performances like the one tonight—possess a directness, one largely unpolluted by gallerists, producers, tech, social media hype, or even publicists. Mitchell keeps glancing at his phone, and I sense it’s time to wrap things up.
“People misunderstand me,” Grimes says, in closing. “They think I’m for the genocide of human beings. Super intelligence is better than nothing, but I’d rather humans, you know?”
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