Courtesy of Stereogum.

First, let‰’s look at some accolades. Who likes the Velvet Underground? Rolling Stone and Andy Warhol, both of whom are mouthpieces that no one cares about except for dead white people and your dad. Who likes Grimes? Grimes is the future, as she has already pointed out by calling herself post-internet.

Grimes thrives and lives with an audience and a medium that is outside time and death itself. Printed word might as well already be obsolete and iPhoto can do anything that Warhol did, but better. Computers are our window into the outside world, a free journey into the lives of others and let‰’s think for a second, who has more .gifs and opportunities to be visited? It sure isn‰’t the Velvet Underground. The Internet is bringing the world together, which brings me to my next point.

The Velvet Underground won‰’t shut up about New York, and this isn‰’t even the New York that really matters to a populous. They‰’re not singing about the Empire State Building or Times Square, they‰’re singing about buying drugs from some rundown street corner in the middle of nowhere. This music cannot resonate with anyone who isn‰’t homeless, a heroin addict, or both.

Grimes doesn‰’t allow her music to be trapped in one rat-infested New York alley, in fact, she doesn‰’t allow it to be trapped by anything at all. Her influences and cultural ingredients span the world, mixing Western and Eastern tonality into a seamless blend of bliss. Even her vocals transcend language, so high-pitched that mere syllables are audible, a silhouette of communication itself.

Look even to the artwork, where Grimes provides us with an intricate, Japanese-inspired demon that struck terror into the hearts of a generation. On the other hand, the Velvet Underground has nothing to show but a dumb banana on a white background.

Take a good, hard look into your heart and you‰’ll see that one of these artists carry far more momentum than the other. One will work in uniting culture into a free society, and the other will be cast aside to museums as a reminder of the terrible art that drug addicts produce. Luckily, a few truly forward thinking publications like Pitchfork and thousands of Tumblr blogs have already seen the light. It‰’s up to you to heed these bastions of culture‰’s advice.