We Can Get It Popping Baby I Can Keep a Secret

So I show upward at Grimes'due south firm on a Tuesday afternoon. Grimes's existent name is Claire Boucher, and she answers to Grimes or Claire, or even better, c, as in the speed of light. But e'er since she began dating the richest man in all of human civilization, and especially since she had a child with him in May 2020—a boy they telephone call X Æ A-12, which she pronounces "X A.I. Archangel," or X for brusque—she'southward had to learn to brand 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 unabridged life flinging herself at the world and making art out of the combustions, her new existence has required some adjusting. Discretion does not come naturally to her. Concluding year, someone posted a seven-minute mash-upwardly 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 former World Series of Poker star and trained astrophysicist, whom Grimes met through Musk and fell madly in friendship with after a marathon conversation most artificial intelligence. "I find it so refreshing and exhilarating, merely obviously it causes her trouble."

In one case upon a time, this was part of Grimes's charm, but now an errant remark could follow her child for life, or crater Tesla'due south stock, or tip off people virtually where she lives. Doxers and stalkers and paparazzi are nix 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 track his private jet and postal service its location on Twitter. They swarm his factories with drones. Once they find him, they observe her soon enough, and and so they find X.

"Nosotros motility and move and move," she'll tell me later, "because people go along finding where we live."

Grimes opens the front door wearing a double-layered cream and black shirt, fabricated by a Korean designer friend'south label, with the discussion algorithm stitched in ruddy on the collar and cuffs. She invites me in with a cheerful hullo, then apologizes for the spartan weather condition. She'southward 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 1 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 next four hours, as she and I split up 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 backside her on the couch. Roofing the floor is an enormous Decease Annotation rug, based on a gory 2006–2007 Japanese anime Tv set series about a teenager who tin can dictate the time and fashion of anyone's death by writing it downwardly in a book. (Information technology's on Netflix.) Death Note is the chief inspiration for Grimes'due south recent single "Shinigami Eyes," besides as the video costarring her pal Jennie from Blackpink. "I like making friends with demons," Grimes chants in her demon-baby singing voice. "You lot need special eyes to run across 'em."

Grimes is an invigorating hang. Time flies around her in nonlinear fashion. Fine art and ideas are her ability source, and her energy is infectious. She speaks and then fast, in a unique Esperanto of academic theory, Silicon Valley 3.0 futurism, and social club-kid slang. At one signal she hops up to show 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 be from another planet, she's remarkably down-to-earth. For someone who'southward and then excited nearly A.I., she certain does honey the visitor of people.

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

PHOTOGRAPHS By STEVEN KLEIN. STYLED BY PATTI WILSON.

About 15 minutes after we sit down to discuss her new music, a "space opera" due this leap-ish tentatively called Book 1, I hear what sounds vaguely similar a lone weep from an infant upstairs. I recollect I discover Grimes wince, only I say nil and motility on. Could exist anything.

Some other few minutes pass. Only equally I'thousand about to bring upwards one of Volume 1'southward highlights, a soonhoped-for-ubiquitous banger chosen "Sci-Fi" that she cowrote with The Weeknd and his longtime producer Illangelo, I hear it again. This time information technology's multiple cries, and it'south unmistakable. I've got two kids. That'southward a baby. And I can tell by the frozen await on my host's confront that she heard it too. So I brace myself to enquire the strangest question of my career: Practise you have another baby in your life, Grimes?

Her body clenches and she looks abroad.

"I'm not at liberty to speak on these things," she begins, and then all in a tumble she says: "Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just experience like kids demand to stay out of information technology, and Ten is but out there. I mean, I retrieve E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… X is out at that place. His situation is like that. But, yeah, I don't know."

She's rattled, and I'one thousand mortified by even accidentally making a woman—a new mother, no less—feel exposed and vulnerable. I propose we intermission 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 secret baby with the world'due south wealthiest man hiding upstairs. Peculiarly when she invited me hither. Information technology's a calming flow that breaks with a sitcom dial line: full-blown infant screams upstairs, followed by the voice of a woman pleading SHH. Now nosotros both first laughing.

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

Grimes but shakes her head. "She'south a little colicky besides." She laughs once more 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 nascency of their second child together! It's a daughter!

You probably have some questions.

When Grimes was pregnant with X in 2020, she had a clear sense of the male child he'd plow out to be. "I simply had a vibe," she says. "I was like, 'I feel like he'southward going to be a peaceful behemothic.' " She was right.

Grimes, meanwhile, used to get called "waifish" then oft in profiles that she railed against it in a viral 2013 Tumblr post. The final calendar month of her pregnancy with X, she couldn't walk. "He was pressing on my fretfulness, so I kept collapsing," she says. "I took a few steps and collapsed. It was kind of scary, because yous don't want to fall a lot when you're eight months significant. So I would but crawl to the bath and crawl back or whatever." At 1 point during the pregnancy, she thought she was dying. "Like, I hemorrhaged. It was scary." She and Musk wanted more kids, only she feared serious complications.

Last autumn, though, Musk appeared to confirm rumors that they'd dissever 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 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 10 and working on Book one. Around the fourth dimension of her girl'southward birth in December, though, she relocated total time to Austin, and that's where I'k meeting her—on a sleepy neighborhood cul-de-sac 15 minutes from downtown, less than an 60 minutes by private jet from Starbase, and a short drive from the Tesla manufactory.

Close followers of Grimes on social media may recollect 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 proceed their daughter a underground, right up until Y shared the news but at present on her own.

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

And so, look—are Grimes and Musk withal together?

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

"In that location'southward no real give-and-take for it," she begins. "I would probably refer to him equally my fellow, but nosotros're very fluid. We live in carve up houses. Nosotros're all-time friends. We see each other all the time…. We just take our own matter going on, and I don't expect other people to empathise it." What matters, I offering, is that they're happy. And so are they? "Yeah," she says. "This is the all-time it's always been.... We but need to be free." They plan to have more children also. "We've always wanted at least iii or four."

Grimes was a musical autodidact who went viral in 2010 with some of the very start songs she fabricated on GarageBand, and so spent a decade creating every single note in a male-dominated manufacture, no thing how much unrequested help men kept offering. She connected 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'southward 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 within joke for the SpaceX junkies in the business firm—sending Musk'southward net worth into the stratosphere, and he seemed to delight in provoking his trolls. For Grimes, the dent to her reputation has been existent. Overnight, a chunk of her cadre constituency—the net—turned on her. She was no longer a revolutionary. She was Marie Antoinette.

"I experience actually trapped between two worlds," Grimes tells me. "I used to exist and then far left that I went through a menses of living without currency, living outside." This was during and afterwards college at McGill University in Montreal. Once she and a boyfriend ran afoul of the police force in Minnesota as they tried to canvas a houseboat they'd congenital out of actual junk downwards the Mississippi River. The police impounded the boat and sent them on their way. During her commencement shows as Grimes, she'd slumber in a tent when she couldn't afford a hotel. She'due south 34, now, though, with a job and two kids. "I mean, when people say I'm a class traitor that is not…an inaccurate clarification," she admits. "I was deeply from the far left and I converted to being essentially a capitalist Democrat. A lot of people are understandably upset."

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

"Just at the same time…" I tin physically observe her brain cells saying screw 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 hole in it. When she raised the event, he suggested they replace his mattress with the one at her house. The mattresses are fine now. Still: "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, like, motion-picture show us, and there's no security, and I'm eating peanut butter for viii days in a row?" She is well aware that many encounter Musk as some embodiment of luxurious excess, and Grimes is here to tell you she fuckin' wishes.

This home in Austin could be any firm in whatever 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 use because she's not a big fan of sun. It'due south a overnice business firm. Information technology's no Versailles.

"I'm non super into civilities," she says. "Simply, um, I need nutrition and stuff."

Grimes often describes her music as "post-internet," because the entire history of sound is simply a click away, from Nine 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 you fall into the category of people who'd never heard of her until she met Musk, 2015's "Impale Five. Maim," one of the biggest hits off her fourth album, 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 II, only in the Grimes remix, he's a genderfluid vampire wrestling with a moral conundrum. Just your garden-variety pop disquisition on the nature of human being and the inexorable pull toward brutality and chaos. "Impale V. Maim" has been streamed 72 1000000 times on Spotify alone. Decades from now, it'll nevertheless sound like a revolution.

Book ane remains a work in progress, but the 15 songs Grimes has got and so far represent her most audacious work yet, each song its ain planet of sound—crisp California pop, order shakers, arena anthems, ethereal requiems, "fairycore." The anthology takes identify in the distant time to come, at a stage of technological advancement when you tin can upload your consciousness into a robotic body and substantially 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'south antihero is a Cymek she calls "the night king," the globe'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 x,000.

Grimes is still hammering out the plot, but 1 key thread is a kind of cyberpunk spin on Swan Lake. There's a white swan (an exaggerated version of Grimes—the dark male monarch's dream daughter, a simulated courtesan who grows weary of beingness a muse) and there's a black swan (an A.I. menace who wreaks havoc in the simulation), except in Grimes'southward feminist reboot, the swans ditch the Cymek, fall in beloved, and fight for each other instead. From in that location it gets kind of complicated. "Despite all my rage / I am however just a doll in a cage," she sings, paying homage to Billy Corgan of the Corking 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 continue having this conversation where East'due south like, 'Are you real? Or are we living in my retentiveness, and you're like a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?' " If this sounds like he's request her if she's a virtual pleasance bot, that's not (entirely) what he ways. Anyway, she says, she's never felt entirely real herself: "The caste to which I feel engineered to have been this, like, perfect companion is crazy."

Does she mean the perfect companion for him specifically?

"Yes. Even only studying astrophysics and neuroscience. And it's actually annoying because people think I'm an airhead who went to fine art school." (She really wanted to, simply information technology was likewise expensive.)

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

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

"Constructive altruism?" I mean, I know what those words mean. (Using information analysis to maximize resource deployment to assist others.)

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

"What near neuroplasticity?" Now I'm worried she simply thinks I'm stupid.

Grimes was raised every bit a strict Catholic, which she struggled with, though she loved the spectacle of church. The Onetime Testament was similar an ultraviolent blockbuster. Biblical manga. She spent year i of the pandemic taking intendance of Ten and plunging downwards a rabbit hole of Homer, Herodotus, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Icelandic sagas. An idea began to form: a space opera about the galaxy-altering events unfolding before her optics, in which she has become an unwitting participant. A beloved story almost some epic stuff. The future of civilization. False protopia. The dawn of creative A.I. Terraforming Mars. Here was a golden opportunity to pry open that Overton window, Grimes-way. "The thought of the female Herodotus," she says, "almost doesn't exist."

Grimes isn't just the narrator, though. She'southward also a master character, and over the course of written history, her archetype—the lover, the siren, the mistress—hasn't been treated with much respect. Book ane alludes to Athena, Calypso, Persephone, the black swan, Anne Boleyn, courtesans, concubines, geishas. "These weren't just hot girls," she says. "They were the smartest girls, some of the most educated women of their time." They painted, sang, designed their ain vesture. They were the Grimeses of their day.

And and then they got written into history as some rich guy's sidepiece. "I ate my cake / I lost my head / Villain of the cyberspace," Grimes sings on a Constabulary-inflected rail from Book i called "Marie Antoinette 2077." "I'm super inspired by the fashion women get pulled into orbits in this manner," she tells me. "At that place's this weird dismissal of them. These are some of the most interesting characters in history to me, and they're so demeaned…. I feel like the nigh radical thing I could practise correct now is just get Marie Antoinette." She considers it for a second. "Infamy is kind of fun."

She quickly adds that she doesn't desire this to become all almost Musk. She says it often during our conversations, and she'southward referring to this article, but she could just equally 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 similar an interstellar Elvira, him wearing a prim white jacket, became an instant mismatch meme. Her Instagram mentions turned into a cesspool. She'd get on social media and defend herself. Guess how that went.

"Information technology killed me at offset," she says now. "I spent x years fucking producing, writing, engineering, every unmarried fucking thing on my own. And I fucking proved myself." Her friends are all the same furious on her behalf, more for the erasing than the hating. "It frustrates me because she's as brilliant as him," says Boeree. "When I see her referred to equally the significant other of some other person, it'south like, Oh, come on."

Over the years, Grimes has slyly rebelled. She let 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 "cocky-care regimen" on Instagram. ("I spend 2–iv hours in my impecuniousness tank, this allows me to 'astro-glide' to other dimensions—by, present, and future.") Well-nigh half of the popular-culture galaxy thought she was serious. Until the day she dies on Mars, legitimate media outlets volition 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 almost her role in this theater. For i thing, she liked beingness Musk's girlfriend. She knows she'south going to go slaughtered for maxim this, just: "Personally, I don't call back 'manic pixie dream daughter' is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I sympathise information technology's supposed to be a critique of certain things, simply and so I claiming that critique." She began to reject what she calls "this misplaced idea of feminism of, like, I demand to be my own thing, I need to exist separate." She has kids with Musk. "Split up" is off the table for good. "There is no way to extricate myself," she says now. So she did what artists do: She turned her gilded cage into source material.

According to her piffling brother Mac, the Bouchers' babyhood in Vancouver was like Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. Kids in nearly every house on the street. Undercover clubs in the basement. Bikes. Vancouver is also a port metropolis, though, with lots of crime and pretty much every drug that enters Canada. By loftier 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 right," says Mac.

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

The Euphoria phase was less virtually defiance, Grimes says, and more about Deoxyribonucleic acid, particularly that of her grandfather on her father'due south side, whom she describes every bit "crazy" and "jarringly unwoke." "My granddad is difficult as fuck," she says. He grew up in poverty. "Super antiestablishment. Teach yourself. Don't rely on other people to teach y'all anything." She says he taught her how to shoot guns when she was six. Grimes's parents divorced when she was around 11, and her mother married a man with two sons, bringing her brother count to four. Her granddaddy nursed her competitive fire. You gonna let your brothers defeat you? Being outnumbered by the boys has never phased her since. She says he taught her to drive a standard transmission past instructing her to opposite the car to the edge of a cliff. If she lets the car roll backward, she says, recalling it now, "we're literally going to die."

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

"It'due south going to be hard for them," she says, "in a different mode."

Grimes's granddaddy is still alive and all the same lives like a hermit in remote British Columbia. Once he gave her some professional person feedback: You lot really demand to sex information technology upwardly. You should exist more similar Miley Cyrus. "He was like, 'Your career is going to exist manner better if you start showing more than skin,' " she recalls. "I was like, 'Grandpa.' "

Grimes's offset tape 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 because MySpace allowed her to associate herself with 3 musical genres, and she liked the name "grime," then a nascent British music scene.) Her father read Frank Herbert'southward 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 nigh Denis Villeneuve'southward two-role blockbuster, she fangirled all again and signed on to help with the rollout, originally scheduled for November 2020. ("I was basically an influencer.") And so, she adds, she got canceled from Dune considering of the Communist Manifesto thing. She was crestfallen, but she understood. "At that place are things that are deeply not 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 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 centre, that inspired her first anthology—this story was now her story. Specifically Lady Jessica'south story. This goes by fast onscreen, but Jessica (played past Rebecca Ferguson) is not a wife simply a concubine. Grimes saw herself in Jessica, and she saw X in Jessica's son, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). Paul is more than a knuckles'south son. He'due south a chosen one, tasked with becoming a not bad leader. "When I run into X," she says, "like, I just know X is going to have to go through all this really fucked-up shit that sort of mirrors Paul-type stuff." Watching it wrecked her. "I was just crying my eyes out the whole movie."

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

"I feel like there'due south very few people in the globe who could have like 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. "Aye," he says, laughing. "Just I'chiliad besides non actually surprised? Because she somehow always gets into the near insane possible scenarios."

By the summertime of 2019, Grimes was in the early days of her romance with Musk and getting canceled online for it, and she was likewise 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-10 anarchy." This was level eleven. She'd been making everything past herself for a decade, and she was sick of it.

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

They got to piece of work creating an avatar of her body, dubbed WarNymph, and in February 2021 Grimes became among the first musicians to sell an NFT collection of digital artwork, some with accompanying music. Mac'due south idea. She generated $six million from that ane drop—more than than she's ever fabricated from any of her albums. They engineered a deepfake of her vocalism that she plans to release with other IP within 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 in that location if you know where to expect. She has similar plans for an A.I. girl group she'southward designing named NPC, which is gamer speak for "nonplayer graphic symbol." She puts the A.I. girl group out into the earth, you lot go make something with information technology.

The NFT project was then lucrative that if it had happened two weeks earlier, Grimes says, she might not accept signed her starting time major-label deal with Columbia Records. No shots at Columbia, she adds—they've been not bad—but she only did it to pay for the ambitious videos she had in mind. The ane for "Shinigami Eyes," a futuristic dance-pop phantasmagoria, was amongst the first music videos filmed on an extended reality (xR) stage similar to what was used to brand The Mandalorian.

Of class, signing with a major characterization was considered notwithstanding another betrayal by the Grimes purists, merely where they see a sellout, she sees artistic liberation. You lot sign with a characterization—any characterization, of any size—for coin, which you lot 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 house, including little Ten. He arrives about 30 minutes afterward his mom and I accept settled dorsum into the anime nook, and as he charges through the door she leaps to her feet with a delighted yelp. He says a friendly hi to me and later makes a bid for her laptop so he can watch My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki'southward classic with the giant Catbus.

In solidarity with all the new moms out there, Grimes is wearing the same outfit every bit yesterday. She hasn't touched her makeup. Respect. While she gets 10 on his way for a playdate, I take in the view of the Colorado River from the living room. I await down and see a neat pile of picture books, and at the bottom, Time's Person of the Yr issue with 10'south father on the cover. The room is dominated past a massive red couch shaped like a giant Tootsie Coil, and information technology looks amazingly comfortable, merely the kids take done 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.

"We alive in this order right now where people expect anybody to behave right, and talk right," she begins. "You have these manifestations of genius, merely then you want them to bear normally—just the reason they're like that is because they're so disconnected from correct beliefs." Humans are beautiful and toxic in equal supply, she says. "Like, we fuck upwards. Nosotros're all gonna do bad things in our life. We're all gonna practise stupid things." She'due south talking about Musk, but once once again she could exist talking about herself. "They're both such deeply original thinkers," says Liv Boeree, whom Grimes drafted to costar as her black swan in the video for a Book i rails called "100% Tragedy." "The lines blur with them about whether it'due south even art versus engineering or scientific discipline, considering really we're talking about creating something that does not 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, now-deleted reply from Grimes; referring to Elizabeth Warren as "Senator Karen"—has turned into a referendum on Grimes. "When you hate me / think it fixes you to pause me," she sings on Book 1. "I'll never fight you back considering / everything you detest is everything I honey."

Grimes can become far more than wound up on Musk's behalf than her own, but one thing that really pisses her off is how many people recollect that she surrendered her agency 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 have to reply to every scandalous thing he says? You don't retrieve he drives her crazy too sometimes? Accept you e'er been in a relationship?

Again, she doesn't want this to get all about Musk, only…she wishes his progressive haters would testify some respect for the work, for actually accomplishing their goals. He's washed more than any other private citizen to wean the planet off fossil fuels. He helped protect cyberspace service in Ukraine past making his Starlink satellite terminals available. And Grimes is baffled that then many people view his Mars appetite as some billionaire's boondoggle, rather than the essence of being homo and possibly, just perchance, the central to our survival.

"The Mars project is difficult," she says. "There's no income for it. There'southward no way for information technology to brand money." Yous tin't make money, after all, without customers. "It's for the benefit of humanity, and it's unsafe and information technology'southward expensive, and people are similar, He'south hoarding coin! No, he'south spending everything on R&D." She knows she tin can sound too admiring, and she knows it'll go her mocked. Spiral it.

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

In the days later on I return home from Austin, I settle into a new morning routine: Wake upwards, check my phone, and read the texts that Grimes sent the night before at around 2 a.m. She's as nocturnal as ever.

"I would literally dice for a time automobile simply especially for like pre civ type stuff," she writes during an exchange about the earliest known tattoos. "Like man it must have been HARD. The aesthetics of that time r just like adjacent level like haha they had insanely practiced 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 brusk story at the offset of life three.0 by Max tegmark yet?" I did. Mind-blown emoji.)

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

A week later, before long before midnight on a Fri, Grimes calls from Musk's 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 on cut of dailies by a manager friend. We've got 12 minutes to talk. Musk is in the commuter'southward seat letting the machine do the driving, and Grimes is refreshing his retention about the chorus to "Player of Games," which dropped in Dec and is more or less almost him: "If I loved him any less I'd make him stay / but he has to be the best thespian of games."

"I wouldn't say I have to exist the best role player of games," Musk says. He thinks the guy in the song sounds "somewhat overwrought." Grimes concedes a bit of dramatic license, only "it rhymes well." He does like strategy games an awful lot, though, and she asks for permission to share that he has the height 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 fifty-fifty bested Polytopia'south creator, Felix Ekenstam. "I literally beat him at his ain game," Musk says. (He'due south as well lost a bunch to Ekenstam too.)

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

"You lot did have that cool vintage Japanese Metropolis poster for a chip," 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 merely don't like things to be messy and anime."

When "Player of Games" get-go dropped, Grimes's fans assumed it was about her rumored split from Musk, when in fact they were welcoming their 2nd kid and spending the holidays together equally a family. The idea for the song came to her during a chat with friends two years agone while she was 3 or iv months pregnant with 10, when Musk casually mentioned that he planned to depart for Mars in 10 years. She froze.

"I was similar, 'Uhhh….' " She remembers laughing nervously. "I said, 'Could we make it 20?' "

"It wasn't new data," Musk says in the car, lightly protesting when I bring this up. "I've been saying since earlier she was meaning that I was going to Mars." Sure, she replies, but "I didn't know you were going, similar, this soon." She is still trying to convince Musk to stick around longer, but either way she came out of it with a killer song for her space opera.

"Player of Games" isn't about their breakup. It'due south almost going into space (sort of). For near parents, even xx years from now would be too shortly. Not for Grimes. "The affair is, I fuckin' alive and dice by the mission. I believe in the mission." She'd used that phrase often—"the mission"—and gradually I realized it was a proper name. Uppercase 1000. When I asked what she meant by it, she replied without hesitation: "Sustainable energy, multiplanetary species. The preservation of consciousness." Concluding March, Grimes wrote on Instagram that she was "set to dice with the red dirt of Mars beneath my anxiety." At present she talks as though it's a fait accompli. "I will probably go when I'yard, like, 65 or so," she tells me, the same way you might say information technology'south always been your dream to visit the Galapagos. Hard to reach, probably out of your price range, but doable in theory.

She tells me she'south 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 so gloomy almost our cybernetic future? What if A.I. likes humanity? What if it winds up being all of our creative best and none of our violent worst? What would that look similar? I suggest after via text that her proverbial drinking glass is 60 percent full, and she replies: "Im drinking glass ninety% total."

Martian travel, she argues, "is merely some other Overton window conversation." Airplanes have existed for just over a century. The space program was fighting for survival a decade ago. And notwithstanding Michael Strahan—an ex-NFL star turned morning time-show fixture—went to space terminal December. She snorts at the thought, though, of Mars as space tourism for the 0.1 percentage: "In that location'due south not gonna be whatsoever makeup or Postmates. It's definitely gonna suck. And definitely early on death for sure." Either fashion, she's volunteering. "I'd rather die trying to do something impossible and maybe failing," she says, "than just keep releasing cute popular songs."

In the concurrently, Grimes gets to plough the whole experience into art, and her kids get a digital-age version of Jedi training. When Musk and Grimes first met, he was Tony Stark and she was his kooky Pepper Potts. Now their domestic life is more like the Incredibles. Her office with X, she says, is "handling his creative stuff." She's ready to start him on Ableton Live, the digital audio software, and she'south taken him to his first rave, though he left at 11:30 p.m.

Grimes has grown semi-comfortable with Musk treating 10 similar his little captain of manufacture, only she says things will be different with their daughter. Quick story: In 2016, when my own daughter was half dozen, I took her to her first concert, Grimes opening for Florence + the Machine at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The side by side nighttime, before the bear witness, the FBI warned Grimes that a stalker known to them was believed to accept bought a ticket and could be in the audience. This was just days after Christina Grimmie, a singer who rose to fame on The Voice, was murdered after a bear witness by a deranged fan. Grimes played one-half her set that dark through panic attacks, then walked off.

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

"The best situation here," she says, "is me training the daughter and him"—Musk— "training the boy."

Y's face may be off-limits to the exterior world, but since appointment night with Musk, Grimes has been mulling whether to share her daughter'south full name. She knows information technology'll surface eventually, and likewise she'due south proud of it. "It's burn," she texts on Sun nighttime. Screw it, she decides. She'll do information technology her mode.

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

Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per 2d). Dark, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fear it but truly it'south the absence of photons. Night thing 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 elven" spelling of sidereal, "the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth fourth dimension." It's also a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings character, the powerful Galadriel, who "chooses to forsake the band."

Grimes is prepared for Y to dislike her name or go tired of information technology—Grimes got tired of Claire a long time ago—and if she ever decides to change it, her mother will be start in line to assistance her choose a new 1. She'south already got dozens of ideas. She might fifty-fifty change it herself before this article comes out. In addition to Y, she and Musk occasionally call her Sailor Mars, a nod to the Sailor Moon manga serial. Exa Dark Sideræl was really something of a compromise, and she worries it's a little irksome.

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

We speak once more by telephone on the eve of Lunar New Year and discuss Mars again. I apologize to her for the cheesiness of what I'm virtually to ask: When you imagine your hereafter life on Mars, is Elon there? Is he with you? Are you doing it together?

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

Mars would still be a roughshod identify to alive, it'd yet suck, just at to the lowest degree E and c would exist together, cracking that Overton window to $.25. And if X and Y want to bring together 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'due south orbit is the shortest distance from the ruby-red planet, tens of millions of miles away. Grimes can see it in her mind's eye now, them together on Mars, one big happy thermonuclear family. Maybe it really is all just a simulation, but it still 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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