Imagining the Anthropocene through Miss Anthropocene

In February 2020, billboards declaring ‘Global Warming is Good’ were put up the world over as part of the promotional efforts for the concept album Miss Anthropocene by Canadian musician, Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes. Designed by concept artist Ryder Ripps, their aim was to revitalize the narrative on climate change by blurring the boundaries between art and advertising, and transforming the city into a gallery. Aside from decorating the streets with the provocative declaration, the album also centres around the villainous titular character described by Grimes as an ‘anthropomorphic Goddess of [C]limate Change’. Moreover, the album’s title also puns upon a personification of the “Anthropocene” — a term relating to the transformation of humans into ‘geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth’ — with “misanthrope”. By transforming the anxieties surrounding climate change into a tangible and perceptible — albeit fictional — life-force and emphasizing its capacity for destruction, Grimes situates within the album’s soundscape an updated evocation of Greek epics where abstract concepts like war are personified.

Creativity aside, Grimes’ attempt at revolutionizing how climate change is imagined is also significant in light of contemporary debates emphasizing the need to develop new vocabularies and methods to respond to the planet’s current ecological crises. Particularly, Miss Anthropocene echoes the importance of reading human activity simultaneously across multiple levels and scales as expressed by works such as Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable among others. Evincing this is the way the album can be read alongside Ghosh’s argument on the limitations of realist fiction in framing how we imagine and understand climate change, the centrality of Asia to it and how the two impacts upon its politics.

Prefacing this, it is important to note how Miss Anthropocene relies on music’s ability to develop both a sense of place and ethics through the unique sensorial perspectives it offers as an art form to address the inadequacies raised by Ghosh. Crucial here is Holly Watkins’ thesis on musical ecologies which explores ‘music’s many modes of being in place’ and ‘how music constitutes a virtual environment related in subtle or overt ways to actual environments’. To support this, Watkins cites Daniel Grimley’s observation of how music creates ‘the sense of being within a particular time and space’ within ‘a more broadly environmental discourse’. Therefore, by acknowledging both geographical and temporal factors, the actuality of the mental dimension of soundscapes becomes realized and the psychical potential of music within the framework of musical ecologies is thereby activated. Furthermore, Watkins’ theory is also supported by the ecology of perception, which according to Eric Clarke, interprets sounds through ‘the relationship between a perceiver and its environment’ without distinguishing between sound, musical material, and meaning, such that each may be experienced as immediately as the next. Accordingly, even silence can be understood as a form of meaningful sounds. Encapsulating this ‘synergy between landscapes[, both] earthly and musical’ where ‘music both shapes and is shaped by local environments’ in an extreme manner is John Cage’s “4’33”” where performers gather on stage to perform by sitting in silence such that the only sounds emanating are the sounds of the audience and the room. Grimes’ album that focuses unabashedly on world-building is hence a perfectly apt platform where an all-encompassing, multi-sensorial discussion on the climate crisis may be succinctly launched.

Due to music’s capacity to communicate so intimately and thoroughly, Miss Anthropocene’s attempt at harnessing its potential for articulating ethical concerns to generate discourse on the environmental crises is significant. According to Kathleen Higgins, music’s impact on ethics is supported by several key features that enables emotional identification with music and the tendency to envision music as active. Of note is its ability to facilitate awareness of the ‘share[d] sensory modalities of access to the external world’ through hearing since sound resonates across its perceiving bodies synchronously and sends signals to the brain at a faster rate than the visual system. Additionally, the vibrational patterns generated within an environment also leads to the passive synchronization of activities based on the rhythms heard. By sharing music, a sense of community may thus be forged through the sharing of the subjective and objective aspects of time and space within detailed sequences of perceptions where a spatial dimension of experience for mutual exploration may be created. Therein, the very systems used to mentally model the features of the environment in preparation for action with the external world may thus be triggered.

Music’s capacity to create social harmony had been commonly observed across cultures but its influence is not always benign as it can also further conflict and enmity. Evincing this is the demonizing of rock, metal, jazz and rap music within the popular American imagination where they had been referred to as ‘devil’s music’, instigator of ‘extreme rebellion, extreme violence’ and ‘destabli[s]er of society’ among others. Within this backdrop, I argue that Grimes subverts such socially divisive perceptions of music by bringing together within a cohesive work of art a ‘[p]op star [d]emonology’ to embody and depict the different aspects of human extinction through each song within Miss Anthropocene. Furthering this notion is the clash of genres within her album and often, a song itself, which disrupts the common use of music as a form of self-identification. Following from the intersections of cultures and forms within Miss Anthropocene, I shall examine how the album contributes to the debate on the sustainability of human action within the ecosystem and reinvigorates the way climate change is imagined given music’s ability to effect social change.

“4ÆM” is particularly useful for interrogating Ghosh’s claim that the challenges posed by climate change to the contemporary writer is intimately linked to the ‘grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination’ which he discusses in the chapter “Stories”. This is because the song engages with a variety of genres and forms, across mediums and cultures to convey its ecological message. Referred to by Grimes as a ‘cyberpunk interpretation’ of epic historical Bollywood romance Bajirao Mastani, the film’s inspiration on the song is observable through the interpolation of a sample taken from “Diwani Mastani”. Herein, Grimes challenges the ‘narrative imagination’ of climate change through music by synthesizing South Asian motifs such as the vocal runs structured around Indian ragas with a drum and bass backdrop reminiscent of 1990s rave music. By abstracting the leitmotifs associated with Indian music and depicting cultures collapsing into one another, Grimes demonstrates how environmental concerns may be discussed by musically evoking what may be expected from a world ravaged by climate change.

Sonic aspects aside, “4ÆM” also exceeds the limits of realist fiction by discussing ecological devastation through poetics, echoing Ghosh’s belief in poetry’s ‘intimate relationship with climatic events’. Despite its abstract, fragmentary and highly repetitive lyrics, its attempt at re-imagining climate change is nonetheless perceptible. Of note is its introduction which is later repeated as a bridge. By professing to Aphrodite how she ‘wrote [her] constellation/ [i]nto the [s]ky’, Grimes dives into Greek mythology and references Pisces. Therein, Grimes artfully hints at climate change since Pisces relates to the two fishes that Aphrodite and Eros ride on to escape from the Greek god Typhon which the typhoons are named after.

Similarly, as Bajirao Mastani climaxes with Bajirao and Mastani succumbing to what appears to be a magical storm through their simultaneous departure from the mortal world amidst it and their reunion in the afterlife thereafter, the “Diwani Mastani” sample that follows and the repetition of ‘s-s-saa’ therein evokes the sounds of torrential rain and expands upon the anxieties surrounding climate change through hints of extreme weather too. Furthermore, the film can also be read as an allegory on the religious tensions between the Hindus and the Muslims as its central conflict concerns Bajirao’s taking of Mastani — who is of a different faith — as his second wife. Grimes’ references to Aphrodite thereby nuances its notion of conflicting theologies by furthering the film’s ideas and evoking yet another model of divinity. Through the image of ‘[s]uns at night’ which follows, the notion of opposing realms clashing within the film is further emphasized though the cosmological upheaval depicted. Accordingly, “4ÆM” demonstrates music’s capacity to succinctly encapsulate broad ideas canvased across the film’s 2.5 hours runtime within its 4.5 minutes parameters while also advancing its own concerns.

Beyond the lyrical allusions to climate change, “4ÆM” and its engagement with epics of various origins also mirrors Ghosh’s assertion that realist fiction is ‘constructed out of discontinuities’ and hence limited in its capacity to discuss climatic events. Particularly, Ghosh claims that novels create ‘worlds that become real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness’ whereas epics tend to ‘bring multiple universes into conjunction’ and are ‘transportable outside their context’, enabling them to engage with the ‘inconceivably large’ unlike the novels that ‘shuns it’. Moreover, he also asserts the ‘earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are nothing if not inconceivably vast’. Accordingly, aside from discussing climate change by way of epics, Grimes’ abstraction of musical elements that seem ethnically-charged further chimes with Ghosh’s thesis through an avoidance of geographical fixity.

As Grimes had also claimed that “4ÆM” is the musical depiction of the ‘Goddess of Simulations’ in a now deleted Instagram post, the mythic can also be said to have been deployed as a gateway for her ecological message to move onto the gaming platform. Evincing this is the song’s tie in with the video game Cyberpunk 2077 which Grimes also appears in as Lizzy Wizzy, a ‘cyborg-esque pop megastar’, alongside celebrities like Keanu Reeves, thereby forming yet another constellation of stars through which her narrative on climate change is written. Through the networks of narratives created, Grimes shows consistency with Ghosh’s thesis and suggests that the discourse on climate change cannot be confined within the limits of a singular work and must necessarily create entanglements with other forms of thinking and perceiving the world so as to sufficiently re-imagine the ecological crisis.

Such a method of re-thinking climate change which looks towards drawing connections between works chimes with Donna Haraway’s ‘tentacular thinking’ approach where she discusses climate change under the framework she refers to as the ‘Chthulucene’ as ‘everything is connected to something’. Herein, music is useful for bringing together the various ways by which the ecological discourse is articulated. Evincing this is Isabella van Elferen argument that musical metaphors, songs and soundtracks had often been used ‘to sketch the atmosphere of fantastic landscapes, to highlight crucial events and to characterize alien languages and habits’ whether through literature, film or video games. Her citation of music’s ability to signify qualities ‘whose description words alone are not enough’ thereby echoes with Ghosh’s argument on the difficulties with imagining climate change through realist fiction.

Beyond the fantastic, music’s usefulness is also practical given Sara Adhitya’s argument for the use of music as a ‘temporal and corporeal’ art form in urban design and planning through its capacity to ‘compose urban rhythms better suited to the rhythms of people’. Particularly, its dependence on time as its subject and material allows it to ‘structure time in socially and culturally meaningful ways’ and ‘reactivate the rhythms of a place’. In this light, Miss Anthropocene and its scoring of a devastated post-apocalyptic landscape when regarded as a ‘virtual environment’ can likewise ‘inform ecomusicological studies of how music negotiates the conceptual and material nexus where nature and culture meet’. Grimes’ synthesis of music, epic narratives, Bollywood cinema and video games within “4ÆM” as a response to climate change and the great derangement thereby demonstrates the potential of furthering the discourse on climate change through a musical ecology.