Oblivion by Grimes Song Info
“Oblivion“ is the third track off Grimes' third studio album “Visions“. In 2019, it was named the second best song of the 2010s by Pitchfork. “The song is about being violently assaulted and it made me crazy for a few years. I got really paranoid walking around at night and started feeling really unsafe. The song is more about empowering myself physically amongst a masculine power, and the hate of feeling powerless, making light of masculine physical power, making it jovial and non-threatening. I took a typically violent cultural situation and made it pop and happy.” - April 2012 interview (c) Throughout, imagery depicting a ‘dark night’ evokes both the actual event of the assault and her process of coping with the trauma. Video explanation “I was interested in the Japanese archetype of a female protagonist who is very small and very cute and very physically powerful. You don’t see that archetype in America. But in Japanese culture, there are female characters who can embody this girl uniform and still cut someone’s head off with a sword. “Oblivion” embodies that kind of archetype, going into this masculine world that is associated with sexual assault, but presented as something really welcoming and nice. The song’s sort of about being — I was assaulted and I had a really hard time engaging in any types of relationship with men, because I was just so terrified of men for a while.” - December 2012 interview (Spin.com) (c) Being her first since signing with 4AD, the album was recorded entirely on Apple's GarageBand in Grimes' apartment over a three-week period. It was named by Pitchfork as the second best track of the decade. In 2018, NPR ranked this as the #18 greatest song by a female or nonbinary artist in the 21st century, saying: "Claire Boucher’s third album as Grimes was like a Big Bang at the foundations of pop — fuel for the fire that has continued burning down the borders between the mainstream and underground, between genres in general. Visions fused traditional pop and new jack swing structures with the pointedly nontraditional forms of IDM, noise and punk. The voraciously curious spirit of post-punk was alive in Grimes as a pop language. She took the independence and oddity of bedroom pop and rendered it big screen. That ‘Oblivion,’ her signature song, was about street harassment only foreshadowed a new era in which conversations about such topics are normalized. Grimes wrote it about being assaulted: ‘I took one of the most shattering experiences of my life,’ she said, ‘and turned it into something I can build a career on and that allows me to travel the world.’ With the resilient ambience of this powerful pop song, Grimes exploded possibilities for herself, and us."
