The music that Grimes’ Claire Boucher makes is not the kind you would associate with, say, a motorbike competition or a football game. The indie-pop-electronic artist layers her high-pitched, ethereal voice over airy, ’80s-inspired synth beats to evoke something dreamlike, dancey, and not completely of this world. But sports arenas (very much rooted in this world) are where she and director Emily Kai Bock filmed the video for the song “Oblivion,” off Grimes’ third album, Visions. To the confusion of many spectators and athletes, Boucher and Bock just kind of showed up to the events and filmed the oddity: a petite Canadian girl with pink, blond, and green hair singing and dancing in the middle of male-dominated sports venues. But there was a method to their madness: they wanted the video to relate a sense of female empowerment without trying to belabor the message.
In a Pitchfork interview, Boucher says this about the video:
Art gives me an outlet where I can be aggressive in a world where I usually can’t be, and part of it was asserting this abstract female power in these male-dominated arenas — the video is somewhat about objectifying men. Not in a disrespectful way, though.
See for yourself:
