Grimes has opened up about her “coolest hacker moment” in an interview with Vanity Fair. The incident occurred in 2012, when Grimes’ Claire Boucher was just 24 years old and promoting her breakthrough LP, Visions.
Released via esteemed indie label 4AD, Visions was one of the year’s most hyped releases, giving rise to two of Grimes’ most popular songs, ‘Genesis’ and ‘Oblivion’. Boucher’s rising fame was enough to prompt the satirical indie blog, Hipster Runoff, to run a hit piece on Grimes.
Speaking to Vanity Fair earlier this month, Grimes explained that Hipster Runoff published a photo of her kissing a female friend at a party and used it to mount a case that she’d “gone wild”.
“Back in the day, like before like the woke era, like I actually got cancelled for [that photo], which is so crazy,” Grimes said. “Like I was just at a party with my friends, someone took this photo and it got leaked to this website called Hipster Runoff and then he like ran this story.”
Hipster Runoff – which stopped adding new content in 2013 – was created and run by an anonymous writer known only as Carles.
“I was trying to be like all integrity and, you know, like start my career and it was like, ‘Grimes gone wild,’ or something,” Grimes told Vanity Fair. “And it was just this like super wack, like mean story and it was like this meme that was going all over the internet.”
Grimes had the last laugh, however. “My friend who worked for—I will not say which video game—had access to… OK, well I don’t want to get him in trouble, but anyway, we were actually able to DDoS Hipster Runoff and basically blackmail them,” she said. “We were like, ‘We’re not going to let you put your site back up until you take the story down.’ And he did in fact take the story down and it was like my coolest hacker moment.”
Watch the clip below.
