I May Never Pass This Way Again (Ray Buzzeo

And then I show upwards at Grimes's house on a Tuesday afternoon. Grimes's real proper name is Claire Boucher, and she answers to Grimes or Claire, or even better, c, as in the speed of lite. Simply always since she began dating the richest human in all of homo civilization, and especially since she had a child with him in May 2020—a boy they call X Æ A-12, which she pronounces "10 A.I. Archangel," or X for brusque—she'south had to learn to make peace with much of the world erasing her identity as 1 of the past decade's most fearless, adventurous solo artists and coming to know her, first and foremost, as Elon Musk'southward girlfriend.

For a person who has spent her entire 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 7-minute mash-upwards 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 sometime World Series of Poker star and trained astrophysicist, whom Grimes met through Musk and barbarous madly in friendship with afterward a marathon conversation nearly artificial intelligence. "I detect it and so refreshing and exhilarating, but obviously it causes her trouble."

Once upon a time, this was part of Grimes'due south charm, but now an errant remark could follow her kid for life, or crater Tesla'due south stock, or tip off people virtually where she lives. Doxers and stalkers and paparazzi are nada new for her—she'south a female person popular star in 2022—but these are people trying to outmaneuver the guy who runs Tesla and SpaceX (and founded the Ho-hum Company and Neuralink). They track his private jet and post its location on Twitter. They swarm his factories with drones. One time they find him, they observe her soon plenty, and then they find X.

"Nosotros movement and move and motility," she'll tell me subsequently, "because people keep finding where we live."

Grimes opens the front door wearing a double-layered cream and blackness shirt, made by a Korean designer friend'south characterization, with the word algorithm stitched in cherry-red on the collar and cuffs. She invites me in with a cheerful hello, then apologizes for the spartan conditions. She's simply but moved into this firm, which belongs to friends. X is with his father until tomorrow, and then the house is dim and silent.

We settle into a cozy nook off the entryway, the one room she'due south had fourth dimension 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 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 floor is an enormous Death Note rug, based on a gory 2006–2007 Japanese anime TV series nearly a teenager who can dictate the time and manner of anyone's death by writing information technology down in a volume. (It's on Netflix.) Death Note is the chief inspiration for Grimes's contempo unmarried "Shinigami Eyes," likewise as the video costarring her pal Jennie from Blackpink. "I like making friends with demons," Grimes chants in her demon-baby singing voice. "You need special eyes to see '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 and then fast, in a unique Esperanto of academic theory, Silicon Valley 3.0 futurism, and guild-kid slang. At one betoken she hops up to show me her new tattoo, a series of milky-white slashes on her upper body meant to look like alien scars. Yet for someone who might be from another planet, she's remarkably down-to-globe. For someone who'due south so excited nearly A.I., she sure does love the company of people.

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

PHOTOGRAPHS By STEVEN KLEIN. STYLED By PATTI WILSON.

About 15 minutes after we sit down downwardly to discuss her new music, a "infinite opera" due this spring-ish tentatively chosen Book 1, I hear what sounds vaguely similar a lonely cry from an baby upstairs. I think I notice Grimes wince, but I say nothing and motion on. Could be anything.

Another few minutes pass. Just as I'thousand about to bring up one of Book one'south highlights, a presently-to-be-ubiquitous banger chosen "Sci-Fi" that she cowrote with The Weeknd and his longtime producer Illangelo, I hear information technology again. This fourth dimension it's multiple cries, and it'south unmistakable. I've got two kids. That'south a infant. And I can tell past the frozen wait on my host's face that she heard it too. So I brace myself to ask the strangest question of my career: Practice you have another infant in your life, Grimes?

Her body clenches and she looks away.

"I'1000 non at liberty to speak on these things," she begins, then all in a tumble she says: "Any is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and 10 is just out in that location. 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 similar that. But, yeah, I don't know."

She'due south rattled, and I'm mortified by even accidentally making a woman—a new female parent, no less—feel exposed and vulnerable. I propose we interruption 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 surreptitious baby with the earth's wealthiest man hiding upstairs. Specially when she invited me here. Information technology'south a calming period that breaks with a sitcom punch line: full-blown infant screams upstairs, followed past the vocalism of a woman pleading SHH. Now nosotros both start laughing.

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

Grimes but shakes her head. "She's a piddling colicky likewise." 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 nativity of their second child together! It's a daughter!

Yous probably have some questions.

When Grimes was pregnant with 10 in 2020, she had a clear sense of the boy he'd turn out to be. "I only had a vibe," she says. "I was like, 'I feel like he's going to exist a peaceful behemothic.' " She was right.

Grimes, meanwhile, used to get called "waifish" so oft in profiles that she railed against it in a viral 2013 Tumblr mail service. The last month of her pregnancy with 10, she couldn't walk. "He was pressing on my nerves, so I kept collapsing," she says. "I took a few steps and complanate. Information technology was kind of scary, considering you don't want to fall a lot when you're viii months pregnant. So I would just crawl to the bathroom and crawl back or whatsoever." At one betoken during the pregnancy, she thought she was dying. "Like, I hemorrhaged. It was scary." She and Musk wanted more kids, simply she feared serious complications.

Last autumn, though, Musk appeared to confirm rumors that they'd carve up. "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 X and working on Volume one. Around the time of her daughter's birth in December, though, she relocated full fourth dimension to Austin, and that's where I'm meeting her—on a sleepy neighborhood cul-de-sac xv minutes from downtown, less than an hour past individual jet from Starbase, and a short bulldoze from the Tesla factory.

Close followers of Grimes on social media may remember that she was definitely non pregnant during the latter months of 2021. She and Musk used a surrogate this fourth dimension, which in combination with the pandemic enabled them to keep their girl a hush-hush, correct up until Y shared the news just now on her own.

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

So, await—are Grimes and Musk still together?

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

"There'due south no real discussion for information technology," she begins. "I would probably refer to him as my fellow, but we're very fluid. We alive in separate houses. Nosotros're all-time friends. We see each other all the fourth dimension…. We simply have our own matter going on, and I don't expect other people to understand it." What matters, I offer, is that they're happy. So are they? "Yeah," she says. "This is the best it's e'er been.... We just need to be free." They plan to have more children too. "We've always wanted at least three or 4."

Grimes was a musical autodidact who went viral in 2010 with some of the very showtime songs she fabricated on GarageBand, then spent a decade creating every single note in a male-dominated industry, no thing how much unrequested help men kept offer. She connected with Musk through Twitter in 2018, which is how he discovered they'd made the same pun about a nighttime theory of A.I.-authorized torture called Roko's basilisk. (He tweeted "Rococo basilisk"; years earlier, she'd fabricated a music video featuring a graphic symbol called Rococo Basilisk.) While the earth was huddled indoors, Tesla took off like a BFR—that's an inside joke for the SpaceX junkies in the house—sending Musk's net worth into the stratosphere, and he seemed to delight in provoking his trolls. For Grimes, the dent to her reputation has been real. Overnight, a clamper 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 exist so far left that I went through a period of living without currency, living outside." This was during and later college at McGill University in Montreal. Once she and a fellow ran afoul of the police in Minnesota as they tried to sail a houseboat they'd built out of actual junk downward the Mississippi River. The police impounded the boat and sent them on their style. During her first shows as Grimes, she'd sleep in a tent when she couldn't afford a hotel. She'southward 34, now, though, with a job 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 being essentially a capitalist Democrat. A lot of people are understandably upset."

We're approaching hour three of talking, and beer three. Y is audio asleep upstairs.

"Simply at the aforementioned time…" I can physically observe her brain cells saying screw it. "Like, bro wouldn't even 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 issue, he suggested they replace his mattress with the one at her house. The mattresses are fine now. Still: "Bro does non alive like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the indicate where I was like, can we not alive in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, motion picture us, and there's no security, and I'thou eating peanut butter for viii days in a row?" She is well aware that many see Musk as some embodiment of luxurious excess, and Grimes is here to tell yous she fuckin' wishes.

This home in Austin could exist whatever house in any upscale neighborhood. It'south got a gorgeous view of the Colorado River in the back and a tiny puddle that she has no plans to use because she'due south non a big fan of sun. It's a nice house. It's no Versailles.

"I'm not super into amenities," she says. "But, um, I need nutrition and stuff."

Grimes often describes her music as "postal service-internet," because the unabridged history of audio is but a click away, from Ix Inch Nails to Hildegard von Bingen's twelfth-century chanting and Stravinsky to Mariah Carey'south daunting octaves, prepare for her to pluck, curve, shape, and morph. If you fall into the category of people who'd never heard of her until she met Musk, 2015's "Kill V. Maim," one of the biggest hits off her fourth album, Art Angels, is the perfect four-infinitesimal crash course. It'due south a pulsing, menacing dance-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 meg times on Spotify alone. Decades from at present, it'll still sound like a revolution.

Book ane remains a work in progress, just the xv songs Grimes has got so far represent her well-nigh audacious work withal, each song its own planet of sound—crisp California pop, club shakers, arena anthems, ethereal requiems, "fairycore." The album takes place in the distant future, at a stage of technological advancement when you tin upload your consciousness into a robotic trunk and substantially live forever as a Cymek, in the parlance of science-fiction aficionados. ("I feel like Jeff Bezos is gonna be a Cymek," says Grimes.) Her space opera'south antihero is a Cymek she calls "the dark 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 10,000.

Grimes is yet hammering out the plot, simply one key thread is a kind of cyberpunk spin on Swan Lake. In that location's a white swan (an exaggerated version of Grimes—the dark rex'southward dream girl, a faux courtesan who grows weary of being a muse) and in that location's a blackness 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 there it gets kind of complicated. "Despite all my rage / I am still just a doll in a muzzle," she sings, paying homage to Billy Corgan of the Nifty Pumpkins, heroes of her wilding teens.

Book 1 is Grimes's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, with a hint of Lemonade, and it was partly inspired past a theory of Musk's: that she's a simulation. "Nosotros keep having this conversation where E's like, 'Are you existent? Or are we living in my retention, and you're similar a synthesized companion that was created to exist my companion hither?' " If this sounds like he's asking her if she's a virtual pleasance bot, that's non (entirely) what he ways. Anyhow, she says, she's never felt entirely existent herself: "The degree to which I feel engineered to have been this, similar, perfect companion is crazy."

Does she mean the perfect companion for him specifically?

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

A conversation with Grimes 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, then checking with me to make certain I know what they mean because usually I practice not. If in that location's an airhead in this room, it'due south non her.

"Exercise you 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 resource deployment to aid others.)

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

"What about neuroplasticity?" Now I'm worried she just thinks I'm stupid.

Grimes was raised every bit a strict Catholic, which she struggled with, though she loved the spectacle of church. The Sometime Testament was like an ultraviolent blockbuster. Biblical manga. She spent twelvemonth ane of the pandemic taking intendance of X 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 eyes, in which she has get an unwitting participant. A love story about some epic stuff. The future of civilisation. False protopia. The dawn of creative A.I. Terraforming Mars. Here was a golden opportunity to pry open that Overton window, Grimes-style. "The idea of the female Herodotus," she says, "almost doesn't exist."

Grimes isn't but the narrator, though. She'due south besides a main character, and over the form of written history, her archetype—the lover, the siren, the mistress—hasn't been treated with much respect. Volume i alludes to Athena, Calypso, Persephone, the blackness swan, Anne Boleyn, courtesans, concubines, geishas. "These weren't just hot girls," she says. "They were the smartest girls, some of the well-nigh educated women of their time." They painted, sang, designed their ain clothing. They were the Grimeses of their solar day.

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

She quickly adds that she doesn't want this to become all near Musk. She says information technology often during our conversations, and she's referring to this article, but she could but equally 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 on social media and defend herself. Guess how that went.

"Information technology killed me at starting time," she says now. "I spent 10 years fucking producing, writing, engineering, every unmarried fucking matter on my ain. And I fucking proved myself." Her friends are yet furious on her behalf, more for the erasing than the antisocial. "Information technology frustrates me considering she's as vivid every bit him," says Boeree. "When I see her referred to every bit the pregnant other of some other person, it'southward similar, 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 "self-care regimen" on Instagram. ("I spend 2–4 hours in my deprivation tank, this allows me to 'astro-glide' to other dimensions—by, present, and futurity.") About one-half of the pop-culture milky way thought she was serious. Until the 24-hour interval 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 besides started to feel unexpectedly conflicted near her role in this theater. For i thing, she liked being Musk's girlfriend. She knows she's going to get slaughtered for proverb this, but: "Personally, I don't recall 'manic pixie dream girl' is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I empathize it's supposed to be a critique of sure things, merely then I challenge that critique." She began to reject what she calls "this misplaced thought of feminism of, similar, I need to be my ain thing, I need to be separate." She has kids with Musk. "Separate" is off the tabular array for practiced. "There is no manner to extricate myself," she says now. So she did what artists exercise: She turned her gold cage into source material.

According to her petty brother Mac, the Bouchers' childhood in Vancouver was like Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. Kids in nigh every house on the street. Secret clubs in the basement. Bikes. Vancouver is likewise a port urban center, though, with lots of crime 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 near correct," says Mac.

In other words, she was a hyper-smart, thrill-seeking, gender-exploring fourth dimension bomb whose hobbies included rejecting capitalism, partying too difficult, and dancing until sunrise, though Mac notes she was also an overachieving straight-A student, politically radical, and securely involved with what was and so called the Gay/Straight Alliance. She tried LSD for the first time when she was 13 and has lost multiple friends to opiate overdoses. She would pay for drugs past doing homework for Taiwanese loan sharks. Mac, who is two 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 about the houseboat. Yes, she did. "That was one of the first adult choices she made."

The Euphoria phase was less most defiance, Grimes says, and more about DNA, particularly that of her grandfather on her father's side, whom she describes as "crazy" and "jarringly unwoke." "My grandad is hard as fuck," she says. He grew upwards in poverty. "Super antiestablishment. Teach yourself. Don't rely on other people to teach yous anything." She says he taught her how to shoot guns when she was six. Grimes's parents divorced when she was around xi, and her female parent married a human with two sons, bringing her brother count to four. Her grandpa nursed her competitive fire. Y'all gonna let your brothers defeat you lot? Being outnumbered by the boys has never phased her since. She says he taught her to drive a standard transmission past instructing her to reverse the automobile to the edge of a cliff. If she lets the automobile roll backward, she says, recalling information technology 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 brutal tests of their mettle. Simply being the children of Grimes and Elon Musk will be enough of a avalanche, and the shields never seem to hold.

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

Grimes's grandfather is even so alive and nonetheless lives like a hermit in remote British Columbia. Once he gave her some professional person feedback: You really need to sex it up. Yous should exist more like Miley Cyrus. "He was like, 'Your career is going to be way better if you start showing more than skin,' " she recalls. "I was similar, 'Granddaddy.' "

Grimes's first record was a Dune-inspired concept album called Geidi Primes, a reference to the militaristic planet ruled in the contempo movie by 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," and then a nascent British music scene.) Her begetter read Frank Herbert'southward book to her when she was four. She loved it. At i 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 own adaptation of Dune, with the more problematic colonialist elements scrubbed out, only when she heard most Denis Villeneuve's ii-office blockbuster, she fangirled all once more and signed on to help with the rollout, originally scheduled for November 2020. ("I was basically an influencer.") And and so, she adds, she got canceled from Dune because of the Communist Manifesto matter. She was brokenhearted, but she understood. "There are things that are deeply not woke in the Dune universe," she says, then the studio had to exist 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 too young for information technology, that she knew almost by heart, that inspired her get-go anthology—this story was now her story. Specifically Lady Jessica's story. This goes by fast onscreen, just Jessica (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is not 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 than a duke'southward son. He's a chosen one, tasked with becoming a great leader. "When I see 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 likewise.

"I experience like there's very few people in the world who could have 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. "But I'yard also not really surprised? Because she somehow always gets into the most insane possible scenarios."

By 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 Fine art Angels, all while her longtime manager and closest daily confidant was dying of cancer. Her life, she says, has ever been "level-ten chaos." This was level 11. She'd been making everything by herself for a decade, and she was sick of information technology.

She needed to effigy out a new fashion to be an artist, which meant figuring out a new way to make money being an creative person. "I detest touring, and I hate selling merch," she told her new director, Daouda Leonard, during their commencement FaceTime call. He laughs at the retention. "If you lot know anything virtually being a manager in the music industry.…" At this point nigh managers would have hung up. Instead he said, "Absurd, you're going to tour in the metaverse and yous're gonna sell digital assets, digital goods. Okay. Trouble solved."

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

The NFT projection was and then lucrative that if it had happened two weeks earlier, Grimes says, she might not take signed her showtime major-characterization deal with Columbia Records. No shots at Columbia, she adds—they've been cracking—but she merely did it to pay for the ambitious videos she had in mind. The ane for "Shinigami Optics," a futuristic dance-pop phantasmagoria, was among the starting time 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 even so another betrayal by the Grimes purists, merely where they see a sellout, she sees creative liberation. You sign with a characterization—any characterization, of any size—for money, which you lot can either put into your pocket or plow back into the mission.

The foot traffic is heavier the adjacent afternoon when I return to Grimes's house, including piddling X. He arrives virtually 30 minutes after his mom and I have 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 later makes a bid for her laptop then he can watch My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki'due south archetype 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 X on his way for a playdate, I take in the view of the Colorado River from the living room. I look down and meet a nifty pile of moving picture books, and at the bottom, Time'south Person of the Year event with X's father on the cover. The room is dominated past a massive ruddy couch shaped like a giant Tootsie Roll, and information technology looks amazingly comfortable, but the kids have washed a number on it, possibly both numbers, so Grimes sits cross-legged on the floor instead, and nosotros hash out the Elephant of the Yr in the room.

"We live in this society right now where people await everyone to behave right, and talk right," she begins. "Yous accept these manifestations of genius, but then y'all want them to behave unremarkably—but the reason they're similar that is because they're so asunder from right behavior." Humans are cute 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'south talking almost Musk, but one time once more she could exist talking about herself. "They're both such deeply original thinkers," says Liv Boeree, whom Grimes drafted to costar every bit her blackness swan in the video for a Book 1 rail chosen "100% Tragedy." "The lines mistiness with them about whether it'south even art versus engineering or science, considering really we're talking most 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 cavern rescue a "pedo guy"; tweeting that "pronouns suck," which elicited a pained, now-deleted reply from Grimes; referring to Elizabeth Warren equally "Senator Karen"—has turned into a referendum on Grimes. "When you detest me / call back it fixes you lot to break me," she sings on Book 1. "I'll never fight yous back because / everything you lot detest is everything I dear."

Grimes can become far more wound upward on Musk'south behalf than her own, but 1 thing that actually pisses her off is how many people think 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 take to respond to every scandalous thing he says? You don't think he drives her crazy too sometimes? Take you ever been in a human relationship?

Once again, she doesn't want this to go all about Musk, but…she wishes his progressive haters would testify some respect for the piece of work, for actually accomplishing their goals. He'due south done more than than any other private citizen to wean the planet off fossil fuels. He helped protect internet service in Ukraine past making his Starlink satellite terminals available. And Grimes is baffled that and then many people view his Mars ambition as some billionaire's boondoggle, rather than the essence of being human and perchance, just perchance, the key to our survival.

"The Mars project is difficult," she says. "There's no income for it. There'southward no mode for it to make money." You can't brand coin, after all, without customers. "It'southward for the benefit of humanity, and information technology's dangerous and information technology's expensive, and people are like, He'southward hoarding money! No, he'due south spending everything on R&D." She knows she can sound too admiring, and she knows it'll get 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 return home from Austin, I settle into a new morning routine: Wake up, check my phone, and read the texts that Grimes sent the night before at around 2 a.m. She's every bit nocturnal every bit e'er.

"I would literally die for a time machine but particularly for like pre civ type stuff," she writes during an exchange virtually the primeval known tattoos. "Like man it must have been HARD. The aesthetics of that time r just similar adjacent level similar haha they had insanely expert way." She sends a photo she plant online. "Similar this girl looks like she's dressed in Yeezy." She gives me fun assignments, then checks to encounter if I've washed them. ("Did u read the omegas brusk story at the beginning of life 3.0 past Max tegmark yet?" I did. Mind-blown emoji.)

Ane morning I wake to a text almost Musk. "Hahaha e says he'll practice an interview with you surprisingly."

A calendar week after, shortly before midnight on a Friday, Grimes calls from Musk'south Tesla and puts them on speakerphone. It's date night. They've got a sitter for Ten and Y, and they're going to the movies—an early on cut of dailies by a director friend. Nosotros've got 12 minutes to talk. Musk is in the driver's seat letting the car exercise the driving, and Grimes is refreshing his retentivity virtually the chorus to "Player of Games," which dropped in Dec and is more than or less about him: "If I loved him any less I'd make him stay / simply he has to be the all-time player of games."

"I wouldn't say I have to be the best role player of games," Musk says. He thinks the guy in the vocal sounds "somewhat overwrought." Grimes concedes a bit of dramatic license, but "it rhymes well." He does like strategy games an awful lot, though, and she asks for permission to share that he has the top score on a popular civilization-building game chosen The Boxing of Polytopia, which Musk describes as a "much more complex version of chess." He'southward even bested Polytopia's creator, Felix Ekenstam. "I literally trounce him at his own game," Musk says. (He's also lost a bunch to Ekenstam as well.)

Grimes and Musk concur that living separately is wise. They're just besides different on the bones stuff. He likes things "reasonably neat." She likes to be able to run across everything she owns, all at in one case. He likes quality design, make clean aesthetics. She likes Decease Annotation rugs from Etsy.

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

"That was yours."

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

Every bit the Tesla beeps and begins to park itself, Musk sums upwards his position: "I but don't similar things to be messy and anime."

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

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

"It wasn't new information," Musk says in the car, lightly protesting when I bring this up. "I've been saying since before she was pregnant that I was going to Mars." Certain, she replies, but "I didn't know you were going, similar, this soon." She is nevertheless trying to convince Musk to stick effectually longer, merely either way she came out of information technology with a killer song for her space opera.

"Player of Games" isn't most their breakdown. Information technology's most going into space (sort of). For most parents, even 20 years from now would be too soon. Non for Grimes. "The thing is, I fuckin' live and die by the mission. I believe in the mission." She'd used that phrase often—"the mission"—and gradually I realized it was a name. Capital letter 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 "prepare to die with the red dirt of Mars below my anxiety." Now she talks every bit though information technology'southward a fait accompli. "I volition probably go when I'grand, like, 65 or then," she tells me, the same fashion you might say information technology's e'er been your dream to visit the Galapagos. Hard to achieve, probably out of your price range, but doable in theory.

She tells me she's worried she came off ranty and cynical the previous mean solar day, when in reality she'southward closer to a pure idealist. This extends to A.I., she says. Why is everyone and then gloomy about our cybernetic future? What if A.I. likes humanity? What if information technology winds up existence all of our creative all-time and none of our vehement worst? What would that await similar? I suggest later via text that her proverbial glass is 60 per centum full, and she replies: "Im glass xc% full."

Martian travel, she argues, "is only some other Overton window conversation." Airplanes take existed for just over a century. The space programme was fighting for survival a decade ago. And still Michael Strahan—an ex-NFL star turned morning-show fixture—went to space terminal December. She snorts at the idea, though, of Mars as space tourism for the 0.1 percent: "There'due south non gonna be any makeup or Postmates. Information technology'southward definitely gonna suck. And definitely early death for certain." Either way, she'due south volunteering. "I'd rather die trying to do something impossible and maybe declining," she says, "than merely continue releasing cute pop songs."

In the meantime, Grimes gets to turn the whole experience into fine 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. At present their domestic life is more like the Incredibles. Her office with X, she says, is "handling his creative stuff." She'southward ready to showtime him on Ableton Alive, the digital audio software, and she's taken him to his first rave, though he left at 11:30 p.m.

Grimes has grown semi-comfortable with Musk treating X similar his little captain of industry, but 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 kickoff concert, Grimes opening for Florence + the Machine at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The adjacent dark, before the show, the FBI warned Grimes that a stalker known to them was believed to have bought a ticket and could be in the audition. This was just days after Christina Grimmie, a singer who rose to fame on The Voice, was murdered after a show by a deranged fan. Grimes played half her set up that nighttime through panic attacks, so walked off.

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

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

Y's face may exist off-limits to the exterior world, but since engagement night with Musk, Grimes has been mulling whether to share her daughter's full name. She knows it'll surface eventually, and also she's proud of it. "It's fire," she texts on Lord's day night. Spiral it, she decides. She'll exercise it her way.

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

Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform one quintillion floating-point operations per second). Night, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fear information technology only truly information technology's the absence of photons. Dark affair is the cute mystery of our universe." She texts me a vocalism 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, non our relative earth time." 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 get tired of it—Grimes got tired of Claire a long time ago—and if she ever decides to modify information technology, her mother volition exist start in line to help her choose a new ane. She's already got dozens of ideas. She might even alter it herself earlier this article comes out. In addition to Y, she and Musk occasionally call her Sailor Mars, a nod to the Sailor Moon manga series. Exa Dark Sideræl was really something of a compromise, and she worries it's a trivial boring.

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

Nosotros speak in one case more than past phone on the eve of Lunar New Year and hash out Mars again. I apologize to her for the cheesiness of what I'm nearly to inquire: When you imagine your time to come life on Mars, is Elon at that place? Is he with you lot? Are you doing it together?

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

Mars would yet be a brutal place to live, it'd still suck, but at least E and c would exist together, smashing that Overton window to bits. And if X and Y want to bring together their parents, they would take 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 planet, tens of millions of miles abroad. Grimes tin meet it in her mind'due south eye now, them together on Mars, i big happy thermonuclear family. Mayhap information technology really is all but a simulation, just information technology still makes her smile.

TAILORS: LUCY FALCK AND ALEXANDER KOUTNY. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY THAT I 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

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