A wildly original indie experimentalist and a group of Korean-pop idols get together for the first time and find common ground and mutual admiration
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Winter: I’ve been curious about where you get your inspiration.
Grimes: I don’t even know. I kind of just kind of jam. Like you guys, I’m interested in the interplay between technology and music. [You’re] in this pop-idol context, but there is all this high-concept subtext. I like the euphoric gratification of pop visuals and pop music, but I also like throwing in weird things like how you guys deal with metaverse and identity.
Like in your song “Girls.” There’s some crazy lyrics there. This is going to be a bad translation, but, “Metaverse exists, now parallel world, all meanings have being part of my heart. We use sympathetic words and share body temperatures, and in the end, we only pursue the value of goodwill.” I was like, “Beautiful!”
Ningning: Wow! Giselle’s part from “Girls.”
Giselle: Wow, that’s so crazy how you translated that so well.
Grimes: Oh, I didn’t translate. I mean, the internet translated it.
Giselle: But that is so cool. I didn’t think about it in English at all, so to actually hear in English … it makes sense to me now.
Grimes: And this one I like more: “The algorithms have been distorted by bad desires. They use existence as the weapon and swallow with destruction. Evil was started at that moment.” I was just sort of reading translations of your lyrics preparing for this, and I was like, “This is not normal pop lyrics.”