Wikipedia, the world’s most authoritative information source run by people you’d spend all night avoiding at a party, has become caught up in an ongoing battle with Canadian musician Grimes, about quotes the artist has made about drug use being posted to the site.
The statements in question come from a 2012 CMJ interview about the production of Grimes’ then-recently released album Visions, in which the artist is quoted as saying, “I blacked out the windows and did tons of amphetamines and stayed up for three weeks and didn’t eat anything.” The quote was originally added to the “Career” section of Grimes’ Wikipedia page in October 2013, and has since been removed and re-added multiple times. In the same interview, Grimes also expresses her love for the Pokémon Jigglypuff, as well as super-intellectual lesbians—neither of which apparently met the online encyclopedia’s standards for notability.
The 26-year-old artist expressed her displeasure with the quotes’ presence on her Tumblr, saying:
“losing people to drugs and alcohol is the worst because they destroy any good memories you have of them before forcing you to deal with the empty space they leave behind. also whoever keeps putting the few quotes i said early in my career about drugs back into my wikipedia page is an asshole. I don’t want that to be part of my narrative, and if it has to be I want people to know that i hate hard drugs. All they’ve ever done is kill my friends and cause me to be unproductive. Editing a website that people take seriously and reference all the time so that it looks like i think amphetamines are cool is incredibly irresponsible, people might read that and think its a cool thing to emulate. I hope you know you are doing the world a disservice. I just watched another person I care deeply about basically turn into gollum and my heart is broken”
It’s a heartfelt statement that, nevertheless, seems to ignore the fact that the best way to control one’s own narrative is to not say objectionable things to the media in the first place.
Anyway, while Wikipedia’s horde of quasi-anonymous editors has so far resisted efforts to remove the quotes, they have added a note to the entry about Grimes’ displeasure with their presence. Presumably, they’ll then add a reference to this burst of media coverage of the controversy, then a reference to the coverage that that provokes, and then just a picture of Grimes being forced to slap herself in the face, captioned with “nyer nyer, stop hitting yourself [citation needed].”