Drive a Fuckin Car Girl of His Dreams Baby

And so I prove upwards at Grimes'south house on a Tuesday afternoon. Grimes's real name is Claire Boucher, and she answers to Grimes or Claire, or even better, c, equally in the speed of light. But ever since she began dating the richest man in all of human culture, and peculiarly since she had a child with him in May 2020—a male child they telephone call Ten Æ A-12, which she pronounces "X A.I. Archangel," or X for short—she's had to learn to make peace with much of the world erasing her identity as one of the past decade'southward most fearless, adventurous solo artists and coming to know her, first and foremost, as Elon Musk's girlfriend.

For a person who has spent her entire life flinging herself at the world and making fine art out of the combustions, her new beingness has required some adjusting. Discretion does not come naturally to her. Last year, someone posted a seven-infinitesimal brew-up on YouTube titled "Grimes oversharing in interviews compilation." "She has no filter—what is in her heed comes out her mouth," says Liv Boeree, a former Globe Series of Poker star and trained astrophysicist, whom Grimes met through Musk and fell madly in friendship with after a marathon chat near artificial intelligence. "I notice information technology and then refreshing and exhilarating, simply plainly it causes her trouble."

Once upon a time, this was part of Grimes's charm, but now an errant remark could follow her child for life, or crater Tesla's stock, or tip off people virtually where she lives. Doxers and stalkers and paparazzi are nothing new for her—she's a female pop star in 2022—but these are people trying to outmaneuver the guy who runs Tesla and SpaceX (and founded the Boring Company and Neuralink). They track his individual jet and mail service its location on Twitter. They swarm his factories with drones. In one case they find him, they discover her soon enough, and so they find X.

"We move and move and movement," she'll tell me later, "because people keep finding where we alive."

Grimes opens the forepart door wearing a double-layered cream and black shirt, made by a Korean designer friend's label, with the word algorithm stitched in scarlet on the neckband and cuffs. She invites me in with a cheerful hello, then apologizes for the spartan conditions. She's only just moved into this house, which belongs to friends. X is with his begetter until tomorrow, so the house is dim and silent.

We settle into a cozy nook off the entryway, the ane room she's had fourth dimension to Grimes upwards with some anime-inspired decor she purchased during a wee-hours Ambien-fueled spree on Etsy. For the next 4 hours, equally she and I split a six-pack of some local craft beer and get slowly buzzed because we're both lightweights, Princess Mononoke glowers at me from a thin blanket behind her on the couch. Covering the flooring is an enormous Expiry Note rug, based on a gory 2006–2007 Japanese anime Goggle box serial nearly a teenager who can dictate the fourth dimension and manner of anyone'south death by writing it downwardly in a volume. (It's on Netflix.) Expiry Note is the chief inspiration for Grimes's recent unmarried "Shinigami Eyes," besides equally the video costarring her pal Jennie from Blackpink. "I like making friends with demons," Grimes chants in her demon-infant singing vocalisation. "Y'all need special eyes to meet 'em."

Grimes is an invigorating hang. Time flies around her in nonlinear fashion. Art and ideas are her power source, and her energy is infectious. She speaks so fast, in a unique Esperanto of academic theory, Silicon Valley 3.0 futurism, and club-kid slang. At one bespeak she hops up to testify me her new tattoo, a series of milky-white slashes on her upper torso meant to look like conflicting scars. Yet for someone who might exist from another planet, she'south remarkably downwardly-to-globe. For someone who's and then excited about A.I., she sure does love the company of people.

Habiliment by Louis Vuitton; sleeve by Urstadt.Swan; rings by Egonlab. Throughout: hair by Garren; makeup by Kabuki; manicure by Mei Kawajiri; set up pattern by Stefan Beckman.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN KLEIN. STYLED Past PATTI WILSON.

About 15 minutes after we sit down to discuss her new music, a "infinite opera" due this spring-ish tentatively called Book 1, I hear what sounds vaguely like a solitary cry from an babe upstairs. I think I discover Grimes wince, but I say nothing and motility on. Could exist annihilation.

Another few minutes laissez passer. But as I'm about to bring up one of Book one's highlights, a presently-to-exist-ubiquitous banger called "Sci-Fi" that she cowrote with The Weeknd and his longtime producer Illangelo, I hear it once again. This time it's multiple cries, and it's unmistakable. I've got two kids. That's a babe. And I tin tell by the frozen look on my host's face that she heard it too. And then I brace myself to enquire the strangest question of my career: Do you have some other baby in your life, Grimes?

Her body clenches and she looks away.

"I'thou not at liberty to speak on these things," she begins, and and then all in a tumble she says: "Whatsoever is going on with family stuff, I simply feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is merely out at that place. I mean, I think E is actually seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… X is out there. His situation is like that. But, yes, I don't know."

She'due south rattled, and I'grand mortified by even accidentally making a woman—a new mother, no less—experience exposed and vulnerable. I suggest we pause for a moment to discuss the surreal professional ethics at play, which are that I tin can't pretend I don't know she'southward got a secret babe with the world's wealthiest human hiding upstairs. Especially when she invited me hither. It's a calming period that breaks with a sitcom punch line: full-diddled babe screams upstairs, followed by the voice of a woman pleading SHH. Now nosotros both start laughing.

Did she really think I wasn't going to hear a baby?

Grimes just shakes her head. "She's a petty colicky too." She laughs again and buries her face in her hands. "I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking."

Congratulations to Grimes and Elon Musk on the nascence of their 2d kid together! Information technology's a girl!

Y'all probably take some questions.

When Grimes was pregnant with X in 2020, she had a clear sense of the boy he'd plough out to be. "I just had a vibe," she says. "I was like, 'I feel like he's going to be a peaceful behemothic.' " She was right.

Grimes, meanwhile, used to get called "waifish" so often in profiles that she railed confronting it in a viral 2013 Tumblr post. The concluding month of her pregnancy with X, she couldn't walk. "He was pressing on my nerves, so I kept collapsing," she says. "I took a few steps and collapsed. It was kind of scary, considering you lot don't want to fall a lot when you're eight months meaning. And so I would just clamber to the bathroom and crawl back or whatever." At i signal during the pregnancy, she idea she was dying. "Like, I hemorrhaged. Information technology was scary." She and Musk wanted more kids, but she feared serious complications.

Final fall, though, Musk appeared to confirm rumors that they'd separate upward. "Grimes and I are, I'd say, probably semi-separated," he told Time, which named him its 2021 Person of the Year. He chalked this upwardly to busy careers in distant cities. He was spending more than fourth dimension in Texas, where SpaceX operates its Starbase circuitous and Tesla is opening a new Gigafactory. Grimes was bunkered in Los Angeles with X and working on Book 1. Around the time of her daughter's nascency in Dec, though, she relocated full time to Austin, and that's where I'm coming together her—on a sleepy neighborhood cul-de-sac fifteen minutes from downtown, less than an hour by private jet from Starbase, and a short drive from the Tesla manufactory.

Shut followers of Grimes on social media may recall that she was definitely not pregnant during the latter months of 2021. She and Musk used a surrogate this time, which in combination with the pandemic enabled them to keep their girl a secret, right up until Y shared the news simply at present on her own.

That's what they call her, by the style: Y. She'due south got a full name, only this doesn't seem like the moment to ask for it. If today's excitement turns out to be how the world learns that X has a little sister, well, at to the lowest degree Grimes did information technology her fashion.

And then, wait—are Grimes and Musk withal together?

Yes. No. What do you mean by "together"?

"There's no existent discussion for it," she begins. "I would probably refer to him as my young man, but nosotros're very fluid. We live in carve up houses. We're best friends. Nosotros see each other all the time…. We just accept our own thing going on, and I don't expect other people to empathize information technology." What matters, I offer, is that they're happy. And so are they? "Yeah," she says. "This is the best it's ever been.... We just need to be free." They plan to have more children too. "We've always wanted at to the lowest degree iii or four."

Grimes was a musical autodidact who went viral in 2010 with some of the very commencement songs she fabricated on GarageBand, then spent a decade creating every single note in a male-dominated industry, no affair how much unrequested assist men kept offering. She connected with Musk through Twitter in 2018, which is how he discovered they'd made the aforementioned pun about a night theory of A.I.-authorized torture chosen Roko'south basilisk. (He tweeted "Rococo basilisk"; years earlier, she'd made a music video featuring a character called Rococo Basilisk.) While the globe was huddled indoors, Tesla took off like a BFR—that's an inside joke for the SpaceX junkies in the house—sending Musk's internet worth into the stratosphere, and he seemed to please in provoking his trolls. For Grimes, the paring to her reputation has been existent. Overnight, a chunk of her core constituency—the internet—turned on her. She was no longer a revolutionary. She was Marie Antoinette.

"I feel really trapped between two worlds," Grimes tells me. "I used to be and then far left that I went through a period of living without currency, living exterior." This was during and after higher at McGill University in Montreal. One time she and a fellow ran afoul of the police in Minnesota as they tried to canvass a houseboat they'd built out of actual junk down the Mississippi River. The constabulary impounded the boat and sent them on their way. During her beginning shows every bit Grimes, she'd slumber in a tent when she couldn't afford a hotel. She's 34, now, though, with a job and two kids. "I mean, when people say I'one thousand a form traitor that is not…an inaccurate description," she admits. "I was securely from the far left and I converted to existence essentially a capitalist Democrat. A lot of people are understandably upset."

We're budgeted hr 3 of talking, and beer iii. Y is sound asleep upstairs.

"But at the same time…" I can physically observe her encephalon cells maxim screw information technology. "Like, bro wouldn't fifty-fifty get a new mattress." This was back when they were both living in Los Angeles. Her side of the mattress had a hole in information technology. When she raised the issue, he suggested they replace his mattress with the ane at her house. The mattresses are fine now. Yet: "Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the signal where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, similar, pic us, and there's no security, and I'm eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?" She is well enlightened that many see Musk equally some apotheosis of luxurious excess, and Grimes is hither to tell you she fuckin' wishes.

This abode in Austin could be any house in any upscale neighborhood. It'southward got a gorgeous view of the Colorado River in the back and a tiny puddle that she has no plans to apply considering she'south not a large fan of sun. It's a squeamish house. It's no Versailles.

"I'1000 non super into amenities," she says. "But, um, I demand nutrition and stuff."

Grimes often describes her music every bit "mail service-cyberspace," because the entire history of sound is just a click away, from Ix Inch Nails to Hildegard von Bingen'southward 12th-century chanting and Stravinsky to Mariah Carey's daunting octaves, set up for her to pluck, bend, shape, and morph. If you autumn into the category of people who'd never heard of her until she met Musk, 2015's "Impale V. Maim," one of the biggest hits off her quaternary anthology, Art Angels, is the perfect four-minute crash course. It's a pulsing, menacing dance-punk rager, told from the perspective of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Role II, only in the Grimes remix, he's a genderfluid vampire wrestling with a moral puzzler. Just your garden-variety pop disquisition on the nature of man and the inexorable pull toward brutality and anarchy. "Impale V. Maim" has been streamed 72 meg times on Spotify alone. Decades from now, it'll still sound like a revolution.

Book 1 remains a work in progress, merely the 15 songs Grimes has got and then far represent her nearly adventurous work even so, each song its ain planet of sound—well-baked California pop, club shakers, arena anthems, ethereal requiems, "fairycore." The album takes place in the distant future, at a stage of technological advocacy when you tin upload your consciousness into a robotic body and substantially live forever every bit a Cymek, in the parlance of science-fiction aficionados. ("I feel like Jeff Bezos is gonna be a Cymek," says Grimes.) Her infinite opera'southward antihero is a Cymek she calls "the dark male monarch," the globe'southward greatest engineer, whom Grimes featured in the video for her contempo single "Player of Games." Past the fourth dimension our story begins, he's pushing 10,000.

Grimes is still hammering out the plot, but i key thread is a kind of cyberpunk spin on Swan Lake. There'south a white swan (an exaggerated version of Grimes—the night male monarch's dream daughter, a simulated courtesan who grows weary of being a muse) and there's a black swan (an A.I. menace who wreaks havoc in the simulation), except in Grimes's feminist reboot, the swans ditch the Cymek, autumn in love, and fight for each other instead. From at that place it gets kind of complicated. "Despite all my rage / I am still just a doll in a cage," she sings, paying homage to Billy Corgan of the Peachy Pumpkins, heroes of her wilding teens.

Volume i is Grimes'southward Mellon Collie and the Space Sadness, with a hint of Lemonade, and it was partly inspired past a theory of Musk'due south: that she'due south a simulation. "We keep having this conversation where E's similar, 'Are you real? Or are we living in my memory, and you're similar a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?' " If this sounds similar he's request her if she'south a virtual pleasure bot, that's not (entirely) what he means. Anyway, she says, she's never felt entirely real herself: "The caste to which I experience engineered to have been this, like, perfect companion is crazy."

Does she hateful the perfect companion for him specifically?

"Yes. Fifty-fifty just studying astrophysics and neuroscience. And information technology's really abrasive considering people recollect I'chiliad an airhead who went to art schoolhouse." (She actually wanted to, simply it was likewise expensive.)

A conversation with Grimes tin can be similar staring at a Tokyo subway map when you don't speak Japanese. She's always using scientific terms and alluding to heady concepts, then checking with me to make sure I know what they mean because usually I practise not. If there's an airhead in this room, it'southward not her.

"Do y'all know what a protopia is?" No. (A state of gradual progress toward utopia.)

"Effective altruism?" I mean, I know what those words mean. (Using data analysis to maximize resources deployment to help others.)

"The Overton window?" I idea so, but I looked it up while she was in the bathroom and I was wrong. (The spectrum of accepted discourse and doable ideas.)

"What about neuroplasticity?" At present I'thou worried she just thinks I'chiliad stupid.

Grimes was raised as a strict Catholic, which she struggled with, though she loved the spectacle of church. The Old Testament was like an ultraviolent blockbuster. Biblical manga. She spent year one of the pandemic taking care of X and plunging down a rabbit hole of Homer, Herodotus, the Anglo-Saxon Relate, the Icelandic sagas. An thought began to course: a infinite opera about the milky way-altering events unfolding before her eyes, in which she has become an unwitting participant. A beloved story about some epic stuff. The future of civilization. Simulated protopia. The dawn of creative A.I. Terraforming Mars. Here was a golden opportunity to pry open that Overton window, Grimes-fashion. "The idea of the female Herodotus," she says, "almost doesn't exist."

Grimes isn't only the narrator, though. She's also a principal grapheme, and over the form of written history, her archetype—the lover, the siren, the mistress—hasn't been treated with much respect. Book 1 alludes to Athena, Calypso, Persephone, the black swan, Anne Boleyn, courtesans, concubines, geishas. "These weren't merely hot girls," she says. "They were the smartest girls, some of the most educated women of their time." They painted, sang, designed their own clothing. They were the Grimeses of their 24-hour interval.

Then they got written into history equally some rich guy's sidepiece. "I ate my cake / I lost my head / Villain of the internet," Grimes sings on a Law-inflected track from Book 1 called "Marie Antoinette 2077." "I'm super inspired by the way women get pulled into orbits in this manner," she tells me. "At that place'due south this weird dismissal of them. These are some of the nigh interesting characters in history to me, and they're and then demeaned…. I feel like the most radical thing I could do right now is just get Marie Antoinette." She considers it for a 2nd. "Infamy is kind of fun."

She quickly adds that she doesn't want this to become all about Musk. She says information technology often during our conversations, and she's referring to this article, simply she could just as hands be referring to her life. The culture took sides on Grimes from the moment the couple appeared at the Met gala in 2018; their incongruous outfits, her looking like an interstellar Elvira, him wearing a prim white jacket, became an instant mismatch meme. Her Instagram mentions turned into a cesspool. She'd go along social media and defend herself. Judge how that went.

"It killed me at first," she says now. "I spent 10 years fucking producing, writing, applied science, every single fucking thing on my own. And I fucking proved myself." Her friends are still furious on her behalf, more for the erasing than the hating. "Information technology frustrates me considering she'southward as brilliant equally him," says Boeree. "When I see her referred to equally the significant other of another person, it'southward like, Oh, come up on."

Over the years, Grimes has slyly rebelled. She allow the paparazzi catch her in a Dune-inspired bodysuit and leggings while ostentatiously reading The Communist Manifesto. She lampooned her cyber-nymph persona by posting her "self-intendance regimen" on Instagram. ("I spend 2–4 hours in my deprivation tank, this allows me to 'astro-glide' to other dimensions—past, present, and future.") About half of the popular-culture milky way thought she was serious. Until the day she dies on Mars, legitimate media outlets will be reporting that she had experimental surgery to remove blue light from her visual spectrum.

In other words, rebellion didn't work.

Grimes also started to feel unexpectedly conflicted about her role in this theater. For one thing, she liked being Musk'southward girlfriend. She knows she'due south going to go slaughtered for maxim this, merely: "Personally, I don't remember 'manic pixie dream daughter' is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I understand it's supposed to be a critique of sure things, but then I challenge that critique." She began to reject what she calls "this misplaced idea of feminism of, like, I need to be my own thing, I need to be separate." She has kids with Musk. "Split" is off the table for adept. "There is no way to extricate myself," she says now. And then she did what artists do: She turned her gold muzzle into source material.

According to her little brother Mac, the Bouchers' childhood in Vancouver was like Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. Kids in near every house on the street. Secret clubs in the basement. Bikes. Vancouver is also a port urban center, though, with lots of criminal offence and pretty much every drug that enters Canada. By high school, they had more or less graduated from Stranger Things to Euphoria.

"I was like a mix of Jules and Rue," Grimes says, referring to the Euphoria characters played by Hunter Schafer and Zendaya, respectively. "That sounds about correct," says Mac.

In other words, she was a hyper-smart, thrill-seeking, gender-exploring time bomb whose hobbies included rejecting capitalism, partying too hard, and dancing until sunrise, though Mac notes she was besides an overachieving directly-A student, politically radical, and deeply involved with what was and then called the Gay/Straight Alliance. She tried LSD for the offset time when she was 13 and has lost multiple friends to opiate overdoses. She would pay for drugs by doing homework for Taiwanese loan sharks. Mac, who is two years younger, got involved in sports instead, and he sounds almost amazed that he was the younger sibling. She was always doing what he calls "dumb Claire shit." He asks if she told me about the houseboat. Yes, she did. "That was one of the first developed choices she made."

The Euphoria phase was less about defiance, Grimes says, and more about DNA, particularly that of her grandfather on her father's side, whom she describes every bit "crazy" and "jarringly unwoke." "My granddaddy is hard as fuck," she says. He grew up in poverty. "Super antiestablishment. Teach yourself. Don't rely on other people to teach you anything." She says he taught her how to shoot guns when she was half-dozen. Grimes's parents divorced when she was effectually 11, and her mother married a human with two sons, bringing her brother count to four. Her grandpa nursed her competitive fire. You gonna allow your brothers defeat you? Being outnumbered past the boys has never phased her since. She says he taught her to drive a standard transmission by instructing her to reverse the car to the edge of a cliff. If she lets the auto ringlet astern, she says, recalling it now, "we're literally going to die."

She won't be forcing teenage X to pop a clutch or die trying. He'll be in a self-driving Tesla, presumably. And anyway, she won't have to thrust X and Y into brutal tests of their mettle. Just being the children of Grimes and Elon Musk will be enough of a barrage, and the shields never seem to hold.

"It's going to be hard for them," she says, "in a different way."

Grimes's grandfather is all the same live and nonetheless lives like a hermit in remote British Columbia. Once he gave her some professional feedback: Yous actually need to sex it up. You should be more like Miley Cyrus. "He was like, 'Your career is going to be mode meliorate if you start showing more skin,' " she recalls. "I was like, 'Gramps.' "

Grimes's outset record was a Dune-inspired concept album called Geidi Primes, a reference to the militaristic planet ruled in the recent movie by an enormous Stellan Skarsgård. (She dubbed herself Grimes because MySpace allowed her to associate herself with three musical genres, and she liked the proper noun "crud," then a nascent British music scene.) Her father read Frank Herbert'due south book to her when she was 4. She loved it. At one Met gala, she cornered Sting, who starred in David Lynch's much-derided accommodation, and freaked him out with a heavy dose of Dune fangirling.

For years Grimes harbored a dream of directing her own adaptation of Dune, with the more problematic colonialist elements scrubbed out, but when she heard most Denis Villeneuve's two-part blockbuster, she fangirled all over once more and signed on to assist with the rollout, originally scheduled for November 2020. ("I was basically an influencer.") And so, she adds, she got canceled from Dune because of the Communist Manifesto thing. She was crestfallen, just she understood. "There are things that are deeply not woke in the Dune universe," she says, and then the studio had to be extra-cautious, and she was far from indispensable.

When she finally saw the movie, she realized to her astonishment that this story she'd adored since she was far too young for it, that she knew almost by heart, that inspired her first album—this story was now her story. Specifically Lady Jessica's story. This goes by fast onscreen, but Jessica (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is non a wife but a concubine. Grimes saw herself in Jessica, and she saw X in Jessica's son, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). Paul is more a duke's son. He's a chosen i, tasked with becoming a great leader. "When I run across Ten," she says, "similar, I just know 10 is going to take to go through all this really fucked-up shit that sort of mirrors Paul-blazon stuff." Watching it wrecked her. "I was just crying my eyes out the whole picture."

She knows this might sound absurd. Grandiose. She wishes it felt that way to her too.

"I feel like at that place's very few people in the earth who could have like sentiments almost their son than Claire with X," Mac says when I relay this to him. I inquire if it's surreal to watch his sister live this life. "Aye," he says, laughing. "Only I'chiliad also not really surprised? Because she somehow e'er gets into the virtually insane possible scenarios."

Past the summer of 2019, Grimes was in the early days of her romance with Musk and getting canceled online for it, and she was also finishing Miss Anthropocene, her long (long) awaited follow-up to Art Angels, all while her longtime managing director and closest daily confidant was dying of cancer. Her life, she says, has always been "level-x anarchy." This was level 11. She'd been making everything by herself for a decade, and she was ill of information technology.

She needed to effigy out a new way to exist an artist, which meant figuring out a new way to make money beingness an artist. "I hate touring, and I detest selling merch," she told her new manager, Daouda Leonard, during their first FaceTime call. He laughs at the retentiveness. "If you know anything about being a manager in the music manufacture.…" At this point near managers would take hung up. Instead he said, "Cool, you're going to tour in the metaverse and you're gonna sell digital assets, digital appurtenances. Okay. Problem solved."

They got to piece of work creating an avatar of her body, dubbed WarNymph, and in February 2021 Grimes became amongst the first musicians to sell an NFT collection of digital artwork, some with accompanying music. Mac's idea. She generated $6 meg from that ane driblet—more than than she's ever made from any of her albums. They engineered a deepfake of her phonation that she plans to release with other IP inside metaverse experiences and gaming platforms similar The Sandbox, a sort of open up-source creative experiment. Look at fan fic, she says. So much inventive stuff is happening there if you know where to look. She has like plans for an A.I. girl group she'due south designing named NPC, which is gamer speak for "nonplayer character." She puts the A.I. girl group out into the world, you go make something with it.

The NFT project was so lucrative that if it had happened two weeks earlier, Grimes says, she might not have signed her first major-label deal with Columbia Records. No shots at Columbia, she adds—they've been peachy—but she only did information technology to pay for the ambitious videos she had in listen. The one for "Shinigami Eyes," a futuristic trip the light fantastic toe-pop phantasmagoria, was among the first music videos filmed on an extended reality (xR) stage like to what was used to make The Mandalorian.

Of course, signing with a major label was considered yet some other expose by the Grimes purists, merely where they encounter a sellout, she sees creative liberation. You sign with a characterization—any characterization, of whatsoever size—for coin, which you can either put into your pocket or plow back into the mission.

The foot traffic is heavier the next afternoon when I return to Grimes's house, including little X. He arrives about 30 minutes after his mom and I take settled dorsum into the anime nook, and equally he charges through the door she leaps to her feet with a delighted yelp. He says a friendly hi to me and afterwards makes a bid for her laptop so he can watch My Neighbour Totoro, Miyazaki's classic with the giant Catbus.

In solidarity with all the new moms out in that location, Grimes is wearing the same outfit as yesterday. She hasn't touched her makeup. Respect. While she gets Ten on his fashion for a playdate, I have in the view of the Colorado River from the living room. I look down and see a neat pile of moving picture books, and at the bottom, Time's Person of the Year outcome with 10'south begetter on the cover. The room is dominated by a massive red couch shaped like a behemothic Tootsie Roll, and information technology looks amazingly comfortable, but the kids have washed a number on it, perhaps both numbers, so Grimes sits cross-legged on the floor instead, and we discuss the Elephant of the Year in the room.

"Nosotros alive in this society right now where people wait everyone to behave right, and talk correct," she begins. "You take these manifestations of genius, merely then you desire them to bear normally—but the reason they're similar that is because they're so asunder from correct behavior." Humans are beautiful and toxic in equal supply, she says. "Like, we fuck up. We're all gonna do bad things in our life. We're all gonna do stupid things." She's talking about Musk, but in one case again she could be talking about herself. "They're both such deeply original thinkers," says Liv Boeree, whom Grimes drafted to costar every bit her black swan in the video for a Volume i track called "100% Tragedy." "The lines mistiness with them about whether it's even fine art versus engineering or science, because really we're talking well-nigh creating something that does not exist."

From the moment they stepped out at the Met gala, every PR mess Musk created—calling an explorer who helped in the Thailand cave rescue a "pedo guy"; tweeting that "pronouns suck," which elicited a pained, now-deleted reply from Grimes; referring to Elizabeth Warren as "Senator Karen"—has turned into a plebiscite on Grimes. "When you lot hate me / think it fixes you to intermission me," she sings on Book 1. "I'll never fight you back because / everything you hate is everything I love."

Grimes tin can get far more wound upwards on Musk'due south behalf than her own, but one matter that actually pisses her off is how many people remember that she surrendered her agency to him. They took her silence for complicity, rather than how she viewed her silence, which was non submitting to their sexist horseshit. Why should she have to respond to every scandalous thing he says? You don't recall he drives her crazy too sometimes? Have you ever been in a relationship?

Over again, she doesn't want this to become all virtually Musk, but…she wishes his progressive haters would show some respect for the work, for actually accomplishing their goals. He's done more than any other individual citizen to wean the planet off fossil fuels. He helped protect internet service in Ukraine by making his Starlink satellite terminals available. And Grimes is baffled that and then many people view his Mars ambition every bit some billionaire's boondoggle, rather than the essence of being human and peradventure, just maybe, the central to our survival.

"The Mars project is hard," she says. "There's no income for it. There'south no mode for it to make money." You can't make coin, after all, without customers. "It's for the benefit of humanity, and it's dangerous and information technology'due south expensive, and people are similar, He's hoarding money! No, he's spending everything on R&D." She knows she can sound too admiring, and she knows information technology'll get her mocked. Screw it.

"Bro might say a lot of stupid shit," she says finally, "but he does the right thing."

In the days after I return abode from Austin, I settle into a new forenoon routine: Wake upwardly, check my phone, and read the texts that Grimes sent the nighttime before at effectually 2 a.m. She's equally nocturnal as ever.

"I would literally die for a time car but particularly for like pre civ type stuff," she writes during an commutation about the earliest known tattoos. "Like man information technology must have been HARD. The aesthetics of that time r just like adjacent level like haha they had insanely proficient fashion." She sends a photo she found online. "Like this girl looks similar she's dressed in Yeezy." She gives me fun assignments, and so checks to meet if I've done them. ("Did u read the omegas brusque story at the beginning of life 3.0 by Max tegmark notwithstanding?" I did. Mind-blown emoji.)

Ane morn I wake to a text about Musk. "Hahaha east says he'll do an interview with you surprisingly."

A week afterwards, shortly earlier midnight on a Friday, Grimes calls from Musk's Tesla and puts them on speakerphone. It's date nighttime. They've got a sitter for 10 and Y, and they're going to the movies—an early cutting of dailies by a manager friend. We've got 12 minutes to talk. Musk is in the commuter'south seat letting the car do the driving, and Grimes is refreshing his memory about the chorus to "Player of Games," which dropped in December and is more or less about him: "If I loved him any less I'd make him stay / but he has to exist the best player of games."

"I wouldn't say I take to be the best histrion of games," Musk says. He thinks the guy in the song sounds "somewhat overwrought." Grimes concedes a bit of dramatic license, but "it rhymes well." He does similar strategy games an awful lot, though, and she asks for permission to share that he has the elevation score on a pop civilization-building game called The Boxing of Polytopia, which Musk describes as a "much more than complex version of chess." He's even bested Polytopia'south creator, Felix Ekenstam. "I literally beat him at his own game," Musk says. (He'south also lost a agglomeration to Ekenstam too.)

Grimes and Musk agree that living separately is wise. They're simply also different on the bones stuff. He likes things "reasonably neat." She likes to be able to see everything she owns, all at in one case. He likes quality pattern, clean aesthetics. She likes Death Note rugs from Etsy.

"You did have that cool vintage Japanese Urban center poster for a bit," Grimes points out.

"That was yours."

"Oh yeah," she says. "Truthful."

Equally the Tesla beeps and begins to park itself, Musk sums up his position: "I simply don't similar things to be messy and anime."

When "Actor of Games" first dropped, Grimes's fans assumed information technology was most her rumored split from Musk, when in fact they were welcoming their 2d child and spending the holidays together as a family. The idea for the song came to her during a conversation with friends 2 years ago while she was three or four months significant with 10, when Musk casually mentioned that he planned to depart for Mars in 10 years. She froze.

"I was like, 'Uhhh….' " She remembers laughing nervously. "I said, 'Could we make it twenty?' "

"It wasn't new information," Musk says in the motorcar, lightly protesting when I bring this up. "I've been saying since earlier she was significant that I was going to Mars." Sure, she replies, simply "I didn't know yous were going, similar, this presently." She is still trying to convince Musk to stick around longer, merely either way she came out of information technology with a killer song for her space opera.

"Thespian of Games" isn't about their breakup. It's about going into space (sort of). For most parents, even 20 years from now would be too shortly. Not for Grimes. "The matter is, I fuckin' live and die by the mission. I believe in the mission." She'd used that phrase oftentimes—"the mission"—and gradually I realized information technology was a proper noun. Uppercase M. When I asked what she meant by it, she replied without hesitation: "Sustainable energy, multiplanetary species. The preservation of consciousness." Last March, Grimes wrote on Instagram that she was "ready to die with the red clay of Mars beneath my feet." Now she talks as though information technology'southward a fait accompli. "I volition probably go when I'grand, similar, 65 or so," she tells me, the same way you might say information technology's e'er been your dream to visit the Galapagos. Hard to reach, probably out of your cost range, simply achievable in theory.

She tells me she's worried she came off ranty and cynical the previous day, when in reality she's closer to a pure idealist. This extends to A.I., she says. Why is everyone and so gloomy most our cybernetic hereafter? What if A.I. likes humanity? What if it winds up being all of our creative best and none of our vehement worst? What would that look like? I suggest afterward via text that her proverbial glass is 60 percent total, and she replies: "Im glass 90% full."

Martian travel, she argues, "is just another Overton window conversation." Airplanes have existed for just over a century. The space program was fighting for survival a decade ago. And yet Michael Strahan—an ex-NFL star turned morning-bear witness fixture—went to infinite last December. She snorts at the idea, though, of Mars as space tourism for the 0.1 percent: "There'due south non gonna exist any makeup or Postmates. It'south definitely gonna suck. And definitely early death for sure." Either way, she's volunteering. "I'd rather dice trying to exercise something incommunicable and perchance failing," she says, "than just keep releasing cute pop songs."

In the meantime, Grimes gets to plow the whole feel into art, and her kids get a digital-age version of Jedi grooming. When Musk and Grimes first met, he was Tony Stark and she was his kooky Pepper Potts. Now their domestic life is more similar the Incredibles. Her part with X, she says, is "treatment his creative stuff." She's set up to start him on Ableton Live, the digital sound software, and she'south taken him to his first rave, though he left at 11:30 p.k.

Grimes has grown semi-comfy with Musk treating Ten like his piddling captain of manufacture, just she says things will be different with their daughter. Quick story: In 2016, when my own daughter was six, I took her to her starting time concert, Grimes opening for Florence + the Machine at the Barclays Eye in Brooklyn. The next night, before the prove, the FBI warned Grimes that a stalker known to them was believed to have bought a ticket and could be in the audience. This was merely days subsequently Christina Grimmie, a singer who rose to fame on The Vocalization, was murdered afterward a show by a deranged fan. Grimes played one-half her set that night through panic attacks, then walked off.

Suffice to say the public won't be seeing much of her daughter.

"The all-time situation here," she says, "is me training the girl and him"—Musk— "grooming the male child."

Y's face may be off-limits to the outside world, just since date night with Musk, Grimes has been mulling whether to share her daughter's full name. She knows information technology'll surface eventually, and also she's proud of information technology. "It's fire," she texts on Dominicus night. Screw it, she decides. She'll do it her way.

"Her full name," she writes, "is Exa Night Sideræl Musk."

Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the power to perform 1 quintillion floating-betoken operations per 2nd). Nighttime, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fear information technology only truly information technology'south the absence of photons. Dark matter is the cute mystery of our universe." She texts me a voice memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl—"sigh-deer-ee-el"—which she calls "a more than elven" spelling of sidereal, "the true time of the universe, star time, deep infinite time, not our relative earth time." It's also a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings character, the powerful Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the ring."

Grimes is prepared for Y to dislike her name or get tired of it—Grimes got tired of Claire a long time ago—and if she ever decides to alter it, her mother will be offset in line to assistance her choose a new ane. She'south already got dozens of ideas. She might even change it herself before this article comes out. In addition to Y, she and Musk occasionally telephone call her Sailor Mars, a nod to the Sailor Moon manga series. Exa Dark Sideræl was actually something of a compromise, and she worries it'due south a niggling tedious.

"I was fighting for Odysseus Musk," she writes. "A daughter named Odysseus is my dream."

We speak in one case more by phone on the eve of Lunar New year's day and discuss Mars over again. I apologize to her for the cheesiness of what I'm about to ask: When you lot imagine your future life on Mars, is Elon at that place? Is he with you? Are you doing it together?

"Hopefully," she says, and so goes serenity for a few moments. She hasn't considered this before. "Wow. Wow. Because, yeah, you lot're right, he'll probably go and then I'll come later. Wow."

Mars would still be a brutal identify to live, information technology'd still suck, but at least E and c would be together, cracking that Overton window to bits. And if 10 and Y want to join their parents, they would accept a free ticket waiting for them. The rocket ships would depart in synchrony with the narrow window every two years when Earth's orbit is the shortest distance from the carmine planet, tens of millions of miles away. Grimes can encounter it in her mind's eye now, them together on Mars, ane big happy thermonuclear family. Mayhap it really is all just a simulation, simply information technology withal makes her smile.

TAILORS: LUCY FALCK AND ALEXANDER KOUTNY. PRODUCED ON LOCATION Past THAT ONE Production. FOR DETAILS, Get TO VF.COM/CREDITS.

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Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/grimes-cover-story-on-music-and-mars

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