Like Oh Oh Saturday Dream Baby Look at Me

And so I show up at Grimes'southward firm on a Tuesday afternoon. Grimes's real proper noun is Claire Boucher, and she answers to Grimes or Claire, or fifty-fifty better, c, every bit in the speed of calorie-free. Only always since she began dating the richest man in all of man civilisation, and especially since she had a child with him in May 2020—a boy they call X Æ A-12, which she pronounces "X A.I. Archangel," or 10 for short—she's had to learn to make peace with much of the world erasing her identity as one of the past decade's well-nigh 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 art out of the combustions, her new being has required some adjusting. Discretion does not come naturally to her. Concluding year, someone posted a seven-infinitesimal mash-up on YouTube titled "Grimes oversharing in interviews compilation." "She has no filter—what is in her mind comes out her mouth," says Liv Boeree, a erstwhile World Series of Poker star and trained astrophysicist, whom Grimes met through Musk and barbarous madly in friendship with after a marathon chat about artificial intelligence. "I notice it so refreshing and exhilarating, but obviously it causes her problem."

In one case upon a time, this was part of Grimes's charm, but at present an errant remark could follow her kid for life, or crater Tesla's stock, or tip off people most where she lives. Doxers and stalkers and paparazzi are nothing new for her—she's a female pop star in 2022—simply these are people trying to outmaneuver the guy who runs Tesla and SpaceX (and founded the Boring Company and Neuralink). They runway his private jet and postal service its location on Twitter. They swarm his factories with drones. In one case they find him, they notice her soon enough, and then they observe Ten.

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

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

We settle into a cozy nook off the entryway, the one room she's had time to Grimes up with some anime-inspired decor she purchased during a wee-hours Ambien-fueled spree on Etsy. For the side by side four hours, as she and I dissever a 6-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 Death Annotation carpeting, based on a gory 2006–2007 Japanese anime Idiot box series well-nigh a teenager who tin can dictate the time and manner of anyone'due south death past writing it down in a book. (It'southward on Netflix.) Death Note is the chief inspiration for Grimes's recent single "Shinigami Eyes," equally well as the video costarring her pal Jennie from Blackpink. "I like making friends with demons," Grimes chants in her demon-baby singing vocalization. "You need special optics to see 'em."

Grimes is an invigorating hang. Time flies around her in nonlinear way. Art and ideas are her power source, and her energy is infectious. She speaks and so fast, in a unique Esperanto of academic theory, Silicon Valley 3.0 futurism, and club-kid slang. At ane indicate she hops up to show me her new tattoo, a series of milky-white slashes on her upper torso meant to look like alien scars. All the same for someone who might be from another planet, she's remarkably down-to-earth. For someone who'south and so excited virtually A.I., she sure does dearest the company of people.

Clothing by Louis Vuitton; sleeve by Urstadt.Swan; rings by Egonlab. Throughout: hair past Garren; makeup by Kabuki; manicure by Mei Kawajiri; prepare pattern by Stefan Beckman.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN KLEIN. STYLED BY PATTI WILSON.

About 15 minutes after we sit to discuss her new music, a "infinite opera" due this jump-ish tentatively called Volume 1, I hear what sounds vaguely like a lone cry from an babe upstairs. I think I notice Grimes wince, but I say cypher and move on. Could be annihilation.

Another few minutes pass. Just as I'm about to bring up 1 of Volume 1's highlights, a soonhoped-for-ubiquitous banger called "Sci-Fi" that she cowrote with The Weeknd and his longtime producer Illangelo, I hear it again. This time information technology'due south multiple cries, and it'southward unmistakable. I've got two kids. That's a infant. And I can tell by the frozen look on my host's face that she heard information technology too. And then I brace myself to inquire the strangest question of my career: Practise y'all have another babe in your life, Grimes?

Her body clenches and she looks away.

"I'grand not at liberty to speak on these things," she begins, and so all in a tumble she says: "Any is going on with family stuff, I merely feel similar kids need to stay out of it, and 10 is just out in that location. I mean, I recall E is really seeing him every bit a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… Ten is out there. His state of affairs is like that. Only, yeah, I don't know."

She'due south rattled, and I'm mortified by fifty-fifty accidentally making a woman—a new female parent, no less—feel exposed and vulnerable. I suggest we pause for a moment to discuss the surreal professional ethics at play, which are that I can't pretend I don't know she's got a clandestine babe with the earth's wealthiest man hiding upstairs. Especially when she invited me here. It's a calming period that breaks with a sitcom punch line: full-blown infant screams upstairs, followed by the phonation of a woman pleading SHH. Now we both start laughing.

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

Grimes just shakes her head. "She'south a footling colicky too." She laughs over 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 second child together! It's a girl!

Y'all probably accept some questions.

When Grimes was meaning with 10 in 2020, she had a clear sense of the boy he'd turn out to be. "I just had a vibe," she says. "I was similar, 'I experience like he's going to be a peaceful giant.' " She was right.

Grimes, meanwhile, used to get called "waifish" so often in profiles that she railed against it in a viral 2013 Tumblr post. The last 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, because you don't want to fall a lot when you're eight months significant. And then I would just clamber to the bath and clamber dorsum or whatsoever." At ane point during the pregnancy, she thought she was dying. "Like, I hemorrhaged. It was scary." She and Musk wanted more kids, but she feared serious complications.

Final fall, though, Musk appeared to confirm rumors that they'd split up. "Grimes and I are, I'd say, probably semi-separated," he told Time, which named him its 2021 Person of the Twelvemonth. He chalked this up to busy careers in distant cities. He was spending more time in Texas, where SpaceX operates its Starbase complex 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'south birth in Dec, though, she relocated total time to Austin, and that'southward where I'thou meeting her—on a sleepy neighborhood cul-de-sac 15 minutes from downtown, less than an hour by private jet from Starbase, and a short bulldoze from the Tesla factory.

Close followers of Grimes on social media may recall that she was definitely not meaning 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 daughter a undercover, right upwardly until Y shared the news just now on her ain.

That'due south what they call her, by the way: Y. She'due south got a total name, simply this doesn't seem like the moment to inquire for it. If today's excitement turns out to be how the world learns that Ten has a little sis, well, at least Grimes did it her way.

So, wait—are Grimes and Musk still together?

Aye. No. What do y'all mean by "together"?

"There'southward no real word for it," she begins. "I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, simply nosotros're very fluid. Nosotros live in separate houses. We're all-time friends. We see each other all the time…. Nosotros merely have our own thing going on, and I don't expect other people to empathise it." What matters, I offer, is that they're happy. So are they? "Yep," she says. "This is the best information technology's ever been.... Nosotros but need to exist costless." They programme to have more children besides. "We've always wanted at least 3 or four."

Grimes was a musical autodidact who went viral in 2010 with some of the very first songs she made on GarageBand, so spent a decade creating every unmarried annotation in a male-dominated industry, no matter how much unrequested assistance men kept offering. She continued with Musk through Twitter in 2018, which is how he discovered they'd made the same pun about a dark theory of A.I.-authorized torture called Roko's basilisk. (He tweeted "Rococo basilisk"; years earlier, she'd made a music video featuring a character called Rococo Basilisk.) While the world was huddled indoors, Tesla took off like a BFR—that's an inside joke for the SpaceX junkies in the business firm—sending Musk's internet worth into the stratosphere, and he seemed to delight 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 actually trapped betwixt ii worlds," Grimes tells me. "I used to exist then far left that I went through a period of living without currency, living exterior." This was during and after college at McGill University in Montreal. Once she and a young man ran afoul of the police in Minnesota as they tried to sail a houseboat they'd built out of bodily junk down the Mississippi River. The police impounded the boat and sent them on their style. During her showtime shows as Grimes, she'd sleep in a tent when she couldn't afford a hotel. She's 34, now, though, with a chore and 2 kids. "I mean, when people say I'm a class traitor that is not…an inaccurate description," she admits. "I was deeply from the far left and I converted to beingness essentially a capitalist Democrat. A lot of people are understandably upset."

Nosotros're approaching hr three of talking, and beer 3. Y is sound comatose upstairs.

"But at the same time…" I tin physically observe her brain cells saying spiral it. "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 pigsty in it. When she raised the result, he suggested they supervene upon his mattress with the one at her house. The mattresses are fine now. Notwithstanding: "Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times beneath the poverty line. To the signal where I was like, can we not alive in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film usa, and at that place'southward no security, and I'thousand eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?" She is well aware that many see Musk as some apotheosis of luxurious excess, and Grimes is here to tell y'all she fuckin' wishes.

This home in Austin could be any house in any upscale neighborhood. It's got a gorgeous view of the Colorado River in the back and a tiny pool that she has no plans to utilise considering she's not a big fan of sun. Information technology's a nice house. It'southward no Versailles.

"I'thousand not super into amenities," she says. "Just, um, I need diet and stuff."

Grimes oftentimes describes her music every bit "post-internet," because the entire history of sound is just a click away, from Ix Inch Nails to Hildegard von Bingen's twelfth-century chanting and Stravinsky to Mariah Carey'due south daunting octaves, ready for her to pluck, bend, shape, and morph. If yous fall into the category of people who'd never heard of her until she met Musk, 2015'southward "Kill 5. Maim," i of the biggest hits off her fourth album, Fine art Angels, is the perfect four-minute crash course. It's a pulsing, menacing trip the light fantastic toe-punk rager, told from the perspective of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part 2, but in the Grimes remix, he's a genderfluid vampire wrestling with a moral conundrum. Just your garden-variety pop disquisition on the nature of man and the inexorable pull toward brutality and anarchy. "Kill Five. Maim" has been streamed 72 million times on Spotify alone. Decades from now, it'll still sound like a revolution.

Book 1 remains a work in progress, only the 15 songs Grimes has got so far represent her most adventurous work yet, each song its own planet of sound—crisp California pop, society shakers, arena anthems, ethereal requiems, "fairycore." The album takes place in the distant future, at a stage of technological advancement when you tin can upload your consciousness into a robotic body and essentially live forever as a Cymek, in the parlance of science-fiction aficionados. ("I experience like Jeff Bezos is gonna be a Cymek," says Grimes.) Her space opera's antihero is a Cymek she calls "the night king," the world's greatest engineer, whom Grimes featured in the video for her recent single "Player of Games." By the time our story begins, he's pushing 10,000.

Grimes is yet hammering out the plot, but one key thread is a kind of cyberpunk spin on Swan Lake. In that location'south a white swan (an exaggerated version of Grimes—the dark male monarch'due south dream daughter, a simulated courtesan who grows weary of existence a muse) and there'southward a black swan (an A.I. menace who wreaks havoc in the simulation), except in Grimes's feminist reboot, the swans ditch the Cymek, fall in honey, and fight for each other instead. From there it gets kind of complicated. "Despite all my rage / I am still just a doll in a muzzle," she sings, paying homage to Baton Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, heroes of her wilding teens.

Book ane is Grimes's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, with a hint of Lemonade, and it was partly inspired by a theory of Musk'due south: that she's a simulation. "We keep having this chat where E'southward similar, 'Are you real? Or are we living in my memory, and you're like a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?' " If this sounds similar he'south request her if she's a virtual pleasance bot, that's non (entirely) what he ways. Anyway, she says, she'due south never felt entirely real herself: "The degree to which I feel engineered to have been this, like, perfect companion is crazy."

Does she hateful the perfect companion for him specifically?

"Yeah. Even just studying astrophysics and neuroscience. And it's really annoying because people think I'm an airhead who went to art school." (She really wanted to, just information technology was too expensive.)

A chat with Grimes tin can be like staring at a Tokyo subway map when you don't speak Japanese. She's always using scientific terms and alluding to heady concepts, and then checking with me to make certain I know what they hateful considering commonly I practice non. If there's an airhead in this room, information technology's not her.

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

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

"The Overton window?" I thought so, simply I looked it upward while she was in the bathroom and I was wrong. (The spectrum of accepted soapbox and achievable ideas.)

"What most neuroplasticity?" Now I'g worried she just thinks I'yard 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 ane of the pandemic taking care of X and plunging down a rabbit hole of Homer, Herodotus, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Icelandic sagas. An idea began to course: a space opera nigh the galaxy-altering events unfolding earlier her eyes, in which she has become an unwitting participant. A beloved story about some epic stuff. The future of culture. Simulated protopia. The dawn of artistic A.I. Terraforming Mars. Hither was a golden opportunity to pry open that Overton window, Grimes-style. "The thought of the female Herodotus," she says, "nigh doesn't exist."

Grimes isn't just the narrator, though. She's also a principal graphic symbol, and over the course 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 blackness 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 fourth dimension." They painted, sang, designed their own clothing. They were the Grimeses of their day.

And and so they got written into history every bit some rich guy'south sidepiece. "I ate my cake / I lost my caput / Villain of the internet," Grimes sings on a Law-inflected rails from Book ane chosen "Marie Antoinette 2077." "I'm super inspired by the fashion women get pulled into orbits in this style," she tells me. "There'due south this weird dismissal of them. These are some of the virtually interesting characters in history to me, and they're then demeaned…. I experience similar the most radical thing I could do right now is only become Marie Antoinette." She considers it for a second. "Infamy is kind of fun."

She chop-chop adds that she doesn't desire this to become all about Musk. She says it often during our conversations, and she's referring to this article, but she could just every bit easily be referring to her life. The civilization took sides on Grimes from the moment the couple appeared at the Met gala in 2018; their incongruous outfits, her looking similar 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. Approximate how that went.

"It killed me at first," she says at present. "I spent 10 years fucking producing, writing, engineering, every unmarried fucking thing on my own. And I fucking proved myself." Her friends are notwithstanding furious on her behalf, more for the erasing than the hating. "It frustrates me because she'southward equally brilliant equally him," says Boeree. "When I run into her referred to equally the significant other of another person, it's like, Oh, come on."

Over the years, Grimes has slyly rebelled. She let the paparazzi take hold of her in a Dune-inspired bodysuit and leggings while ostentatiously reading The Communist Manifesto. She lampooned her cyber-nymph persona by posting her "self-care 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.") Well-nigh half of the pop-civilization galaxy 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 nigh her role in this theater. For i thing, she liked being Musk'southward girlfriend. She knows she's going to get slaughtered for saying this, but: "Personally, I don't think 'manic pixie dream girl' is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I understand it's supposed to exist a critique of certain things, but then I claiming 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. "Divide" is off the table for good. "At that place is no way to extricate myself," she says at present. So she did what artists do: She turned her gilded cage into source fabric.

According to her little blood brother Mac, the Bouchers' childhood in Vancouver was like Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. Kids in about every house on the street. Clandestine clubs in the basement. Bikes. Vancouver is also a port city, though, with lots of crime and pretty much every drug that enters Canada. By high schoolhouse, 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 virtually right," says Mac.

In other words, she was a hyper-smart, thrill-seeking, gender-exploring fourth dimension bomb whose hobbies included rejecting commercialism, partying besides hard, and dancing until sunrise, though Mac notes she was too an overachieving directly-A pupil, politically radical, and deeply involved with what was then called the Gay/Direct Alliance. She tried LSD for the start 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 1 of the kickoff adult choices she made."

The Euphoria phase was less near disobedience, Grimes says, and more than about Dna, peculiarly that of her grandfather on her father's side, whom she describes as "crazy" and "jarringly unwoke." "My grandpa is hard every bit fuck," she says. He grew upward in poverty. "Super antiestablishment. Teach yourself. Don't rely on other people to teach yous annihilation." She says he taught her how to shoot guns when she was six. Grimes'south parents divorced when she was around 11, and her female parent married a man with two sons, bringing her brother count to 4. Her grandpa nursed her competitive fire. You gonna permit your brothers defeat you? Existence outnumbered by the boys has never phased her since. She says he taught her to bulldoze a standard transmission by instructing her to opposite the car to the border of a cliff. If she lets the car ringlet backward, 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 accept to thrust 10 and Y into savage tests of their mettle. Simply being the children of Grimes and Elon Musk volition be enough of a barrage, and the shields never seem to hold.

"It'southward going to exist difficult for them," she says, "in a different fashion."

Grimes's grandfather is still alive and nonetheless lives similar a hermit in remote British Columbia. Once he gave her some professional feedback: Y'all really need to sex it upwardly. Y'all should be more like Miley Cyrus. "He was like, 'Your career is going to be manner better if y'all start showing more pare,' " she recalls. "I was like, 'Gramps.' "

Grimes'south first record was a Dune-inspired concept album called Geidi Primes, a reference to the militaristic planet ruled in the recent movie past an enormous Stellan Skarsgård. (She dubbed herself Grimes considering MySpace allowed her to associate herself with 3 musical genres, and she liked the name "grime," then a nascent British music scene.) Her male parent read Frank Herbert's book to her when she was four. She loved information technology. At one Met gala, she cornered Sting, who starred in David Lynch's much-derided adaptation, and freaked him out with a heavy dose of Dune fangirling.

For years Grimes harbored a dream of directing her ain adaptation of Dune, with the more problematic colonialist elements scrubbed out, but when she heard about Denis Villeneuve's ii-role blockbuster, she fangirled all over again and signed on to help with the rollout, originally scheduled for November 2020. ("I was basically an influencer.") And and then, she adds, she got canceled from Dune because of the Communist Manifesto thing. She was crestfallen, only she understood. "There are things that are deeply non woke in the Dune universe," she says, so the studio had to be extra-cautious, and she was far from indispensable.

When she finally saw the flick, she realized to her astonishment that this story she'd adored since she was far also young for it, that she knew almost by heart, that inspired her first album—this story was at present her story. Specifically Lady Jessica'due south story. This goes by fast onscreen, but Jessica (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is not a wife merely a concubine. Grimes saw herself in Jessica, and she saw X in Jessica'south son, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). Paul is more than than a duke's son. He's a chosen one, tasked with becoming a slap-up leader. "When I see X," she says, "similar, I just know X is going to have 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 optics out the whole movie."

She knows this might sound cool. Grandiose. She wishes information technology felt that way to her too.

"I feel like there'southward very few people in the earth who could take similar sentiments about their son than Claire with X," Mac says when I relay this to him. I ask if it's surreal to watch his sister live this life. "Yes," he says, laughing. "Simply I'k also non really surprised? Because she somehow always gets into the most insane possible scenarios."

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

She needed to figure out a new way to be an creative person, which meant figuring out a new fashion to make coin being an artist. "I hate touring, and I hate selling merch," she told her new manager, Daouda Leonard, during their offset FaceTime telephone call. He laughs at the memory. "If you know annihilation near existence a director in the music manufacture.…" At this point most managers would have hung up. Instead he said, "Cool, you're going to tour in the metaverse and you're gonna sell digital assets, digital goods. Okay. Problem solved."

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

The NFT project was so lucrative that if information technology had happened two weeks earlier, Grimes says, she might not have signed her starting time major-characterization deal with Columbia Records. No shots at Columbia, she adds—they've been corking—but she only did it to pay for the ambitious videos she had in mind. The one for "Shinigami Eyes," a futuristic dance-popular phantasmagoria, was among the start music videos filmed on an extended reality (xR) stage similar to what was used to make The Mandalorian.

Of course, signing with a major label was considered yet another betrayal by the Grimes purists, only where they see a sellout, she sees creative liberation. You sign with a label—any label, of any size—for money, which you tin either put into your pocket or plow dorsum into the mission.

The foot traffic is heavier the next afternoon when I return to Grimes's business firm, including little X. He arrives virtually 30 minutes after his mom and I take settled back into the anime nook, and as he charges through the door she leaps to her feet with a delighted yelp. He says a friendly howdy to me and later makes a bid for her laptop so he can watch My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki'southward archetype with the giant Catbus.

In solidarity with all the new moms out there, Grimes is wearing the same outfit as yesterday. She hasn't touched her makeup. Respect. While she gets X on his style for a playdate, I take in the view of the Colorado River from the living room. I look downwardly and see a neat pile of picture show books, and at the bottom, Time'due south Person of the Year upshot with 10's father on the cover. The room is dominated by a massive cerise couch shaped like a giant Tootsie Gyre, and it looks amazingly comfy, but the kids take done a number on it, perchance both numbers, and so Grimes sits cantankerous-legged on the floor instead, and we discuss the Elephant of the Year in the room.

"We live in this social club correct now where people expect everyone to conduct right, and talk correct," she begins. "You lot accept these manifestations of genius, only then you want them to behave usually—but the reason they're like that is because they're then asunder from right beliefs." Humans are beautiful and toxic in equal supply, she says. "Like, nosotros fuck upwards. We're all gonna practice bad things in our life. We're all gonna practice stupid things." She'due south talking about Musk, but once again she could be talking nigh herself. "They're both such deeply original thinkers," says Liv Boeree, whom Grimes drafted to costar as her blackness swan in the video for a Book 1 rails chosen "100% Tragedy." "The lines blur with them about whether it'due south fifty-fifty fine art versus applied science or science, considering actually we're talking about creating something that does non be."

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, at present-deleted reply from Grimes; referring to Elizabeth Warren as "Senator Karen"—has turned into a referendum on Grimes. "When you hate me / call up it fixes you to break me," she sings on Volume 1. "I'll never fight you back because / everything you detest is everything I love."

Grimes can get far more than wound upward on Musk's behalf than her ain, but ane thing that really pisses her off is how many people retrieve that she surrendered her bureau to him. They took her silence for complicity, rather than how she viewed her silence, which was not submitting to their sexist horseshit. Why should she take to respond to every scandalous thing he says? You don't think he drives her crazy too sometimes? Have you ever been in a relationship?

Again, she doesn't want this to become all about Musk, but…she wishes his progressive haters would testify some respect for the work, for really accomplishing their goals. He's done more than any other private denizen 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 so many people view his Mars appetite as some billionaire'south boondoggle, rather than the essence of being human and peradventure, merely maybe, the key to our survival.

"The Mars project is hard," she says. "There'southward no income for information technology. At that place's no way for it to make money." You lot can't brand coin, afterward all, without customers. "It's for the do good of humanity, and information technology'due south unsafe and it's expensive, and people are like, He's hoarding money! No, he's spending everything on R&D." She knows she can sound too admiring, and she knows it'll become her mocked. Screw it.

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

In the days subsequently I render home from Austin, I settle into a new morning routine: Wake up, cheque my phone, and read the texts that Grimes sent the night before at around ii a.k. She's as nocturnal every bit ever.

"I would literally dice for a time machine but specially for like pre civ type stuff," she writes during an exchange about the primeval known tattoos. "Like man it must have been Hard. The aesthetics of that time r just like next level like haha they had insanely expert style." She sends a photo she found online. "Similar this girl looks similar she's dressed in Yeezy." She gives me fun assignments, then checks to see if I've done them. ("Did u read the omegas short story at the kickoff of life 3.0 by Max tegmark yet?" I did. Mind-blown emoji.)

One forenoon I wake to a text about Musk. "Hahaha e says he'll do an interview with y'all surprisingly."

A week later, shortly earlier midnight on a Fri, Grimes calls from Musk'due south Tesla and puts them on speakerphone. It's appointment night. They've got a sitter for X and Y, and they're going to the movies—an early cut of dailies by a director friend. We've got 12 minutes to talk. Musk is in the driver'south seat letting the auto do the driving, and Grimes is refreshing his memory about the chorus to "Player of Games," which dropped in December and is more than or less near him: "If I loved him any less I'd brand him stay / but he has to be the best role player of games."

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

Grimes and Musk agree that living separately is wise. They're but too different on the bones stuff. He likes things "reasonably smashing." She likes to be able to see everything she owns, all at once. He likes quality design, clean aesthetics. She likes Death Notation rugs from Etsy.

"Y'all did have that cool vintage Japanese Metropolis poster for a scrap," Grimes points out.

"That was yours."

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

As the Tesla beeps and begins to park itself, Musk sums up his position: "I only don't like things to exist messy and anime."

When "Player of Games" offset dropped, Grimes's fans assumed it was nearly her rumored carve up from Musk, when in fact they were welcoming their second child and spending the holidays together equally a family. The idea for the song came to her during a chat with friends two years ago while she was three or four months pregnant with X, when Musk casually mentioned that he planned to depart for Mars in x years. She froze.

"I was like, 'Uhhh….' " She remembers laughing nervously. "I said, 'Could we brand information technology 20?' "

"It wasn't new information," Musk says in the auto, lightly protesting when I bring this upward. "I've been saying since before she was pregnant that I was going to Mars." Sure, she replies, but "I didn't know you were going, like, this soon." She is nonetheless trying to convince Musk to stick around longer, only either manner she came out of it with a killer song for her space opera.

"Player of Games" isn't about their breakup. It's about going into infinite (sort of). For most parents, fifty-fifty twenty years from now would be too soon. Not for Grimes. "The thing is, I fuckin' live and dice by the mission. I believe in the mission." She'd used that phrase ofttimes—"the mission"—and gradually I realized it was a proper substantive. Uppercase Chiliad. When I asked what she meant by information technology, 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 ruddy dirt of Mars beneath my feet." Now she talks every bit though it's a fait accompli. "I will probably get when I'm, like, 65 or then," she tells me, the aforementioned mode you might say it's always been your dream to visit the Galapagos. Hard to reach, probably out of your price range, but achievable in theory.

She tells me she'southward worried she came off ranty and cynical the previous day, when in reality she'due south closer to a pure idealist. This extends to A.I., she says. Why is everyone so gloomy about our cybernetic time to come? What if A.I. likes humanity? What if information technology winds upwardly being all of our creative all-time and none of our violent worst? What would that expect like? I propose subsequently via text that her proverbial glass is sixty percent full, and she replies: "Im glass xc% full."

Martian travel, she argues, "is simply another Overton window chat." Airplanes have existed for just over a century. The infinite program was fighting for survival a decade ago. And all the same Michael Strahan—an ex-NFL star turned morning-show fixture—went to space concluding Dec. She snorts at the idea, though, of Mars equally space tourism for the 0.one percent: "There's not gonna be whatsoever makeup or Postmates. It's definitely gonna suck. And definitely early death for sure." Either fashion, she's volunteering. "I'd rather die trying to practice something incommunicable and maybe failing," she says, "than just go on releasing cute pop songs."

In the meantime, Grimes gets to turn the whole feel into art, and her kids go a digital-age version of Jedi preparation. When Musk and Grimes outset met, he was Tony Stark and she was his kooky Pepper Potts. Now their domestic life is more like the Incredibles. Her role with X, she says, is "handling his creative stuff." She'due south ready to start him on Ableton Live, the digital audio software, and she's taken him to his first rave, though he left at eleven:30 p.one thousand.

Grimes has grown semi-comfy with Musk treating X like his fiddling captain of manufacture, but she says things will be dissimilar with their daughter. Quick story: In 2016, when my ain daughter was six, I took her to her first concert, Grimes opening for Florence + the Machine at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The next night, before the evidence, the FBI warned Grimes that a stalker known to them was believed to accept bought a ticket and could exist in the audience. This was simply days after Christina Grimmie, a singer who rose to fame on The Voice, was murdered afterwards a prove by a deranged fan. Grimes played half her gear up that dark through panic attacks, so walked off.

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

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

Y's face may be off-limits to the outside world, only since date dark with Musk, Grimes has been mulling whether to share her girl'south full proper noun. She knows it'll surface somewhen, and as well she'southward proud of it. "It'south fire," she texts on Dominicus night. Spiral it, she decides. She'll do it her style.

"Her total name," she writes, "is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk."

Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform i quintillion floating-point operations per 2d). Dark, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fear information technology only truly information technology's the absenteeism of photons. Nighttime matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe." She texts me a voice memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl—"sigh-deer-ee-el"—which she calls "a more elven" spelling of sidereal, "the truthful time of the universe, star fourth dimension, deep space 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 band."

Grimes is prepared for Y to dislike her proper noun or get tired of it—Grimes got tired of Claire a long time ago—and if she ever decides to change information technology, her female parent will be starting time in line to assistance her choose a new one. She's already got dozens of ideas. She might even change it herself earlier this commodity comes out. In addition to Y, she and Musk occasionally call her Crewman Mars, a nod to the Crewman Moon manga serial. Exa Night Sideræl was actually something of a compromise, and she worries information technology's a footling slow.

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

Nosotros speak once more by telephone on the eve of Lunar New Year and discuss Mars once again. I apologize to her for the cheesiness of what I'm well-nigh to inquire: When you imagine your future life on Mars, is Elon there? Is he with you? Are y'all doing it together?

"Hopefully," she says, and then goes quiet for a few moments. She hasn't considered this before. "Wow. Wow. Considering, yeah, yous're correct, he'll probably become and then I'll come later. Wow."

Mars would still be a brutal identify to live, it'd still suck, but at least East and c would be together, smashing that Overton window to bits. And if X and Y want to join their parents, they would have 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 ruby-red planet, tens of millions of miles away. Grimes can run across it in her mind's centre now, them together on Mars, one large happy thermonuclear family unit. Maybe it actually is all just a simulation, but it yet makes her smile.

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

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