Back in April, CHVRCHES frontwoman Lauren Mayberry issued a rather disturbing Instagram post. The post in question was a screenshot of a disgusting and threatening message she’d received on social media from an unidentified fan.
Mayberry accompanied the post with a defiant written response, which followed on from an impassioned op-ed she wrote for The Guardian back in 2013. In the piece, she described the misogyny and sexually abusive comments she’s had to endure simply by being the face of a popular band.
Now, Canadian electronic songstress Grimes has spoken out about the physical danger that many female musicians face, which she dishearteningly describes as simply part of the job when you’re a popular female performer.
“I get threats constantly — all female musicians do,” Grimes, real name Claire Elise Boucher, recently told Fader magazine. “People want to, like, rape and kill you. It’s, like, part of the job.” As a result, Boucher explains, she must surround her stage with bodyguards.
The 27-year-old describes a particularly frightening experience in which a “random guy” appeared in her dressing room and “just grabbed me and started making out with me, and I was like, ‘Ah!’ and pushed him off. Then he went, ‘Ha! I kiss raped you’ and left.”
“Shit like that happens quasi-frequently,” Boucher says. As far as she’s concerned, it’s another symptom of an industry that, from top to bottom, doesn’t view females as legitimate artists or views them as being less competent than their male counterparts.
Boucher says that despite the fact that she’s a DIY artist, who engineers and produces her own albums in addition to writing her own songs, “Going into studios, there’s all these engineers there, and they don’t let you touch the equipment.”
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“I was like, ‘Well, can I just edit my vocals?’ And they’d be like ‘No, just tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.’ And then a male producer would come in, and he’d be allowed to do it. It was so sexist. I was, like, aghast.”
“I’m a producer and I spend all day looking at fucking graphs and EQs and doing really technical work.” Boucher had previously claimed in an interview with Hunger TV in 2013 that when she goes into music equipment stores, male retail assistants won’t take her seriously.
“I didn’t experience a lot of sexism in my life until I entered the music industry,” she told Hunger TV. “People just assume I’m an airhead.”
In her interview with Fader, Boucher says that her new album will feature several diss tracks including one aimed at “male producers”, adding, “It’s about a guy who acts like he knows everything and then comes back crawling on his knees, which has happened to me so many times.”
