He Comes on Her Face and F**** Her Again

So I show upwards at Grimes'south house on a Tuesday afternoon. Grimes's real name is Claire Boucher, and she answers to Grimes or Claire, or even better, c, as in the speed of calorie-free. But ever since she began dating the richest human being in all of human civilization, and especially since she had a kid with him in May 2020—a boy they call X Æ A-12, which she pronounces "X A.I. Archangel," or X for brusk—she's had to learn to brand peace with much of the globe erasing her identity every bit one of the past decade'southward most fearless, audacious solo artists and coming to know her, get-go and foremost, as Elon Musk'southward 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 up naturally to her. Last twelvemonth, someone posted a seven-infinitesimal mash-upwards on YouTube titled "Grimes oversharing in interviews compilation." "She has no filter—what is in her listen comes out her oral cavity," says Liv Boeree, a quondam World Series of Poker star and trained astrophysicist, whom Grimes met through Musk and fell madly in friendship with after a marathon chat about artificial intelligence. "I find it so refreshing and exhilarating, only patently it causes her trouble."

Once upon a time, this was part of Grimes'south charm, but now an errant remark could follow her child for life, or crater Tesla'south stock, or tip off people about where she lives. Doxers and stalkers and paparazzi are null new for her—she'south a female person popular star in 2022—only 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 mail service its location on Twitter. They swarm his factories with drones. Once they detect him, they find her shortly plenty, and so they find Ten.

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

Grimes opens the forepart door wearing a double-layered cream and black shirt, made by a Korean designer friend's label, with the give-and-take algorithm stitched in ruby on the neckband and cuffs. She invites me in with a cheerful hi, and so apologizes for the spartan weather condition. She's only just moved into this house, which belongs to friends. X is with his male parent until tomorrow, so the firm is dim and silent.

Nosotros settle into a cozy nook off the entryway, the 1 room she'due south had fourth dimension to Grimes upward 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 dissever a six-pack of some local craft beer and become slowly buzzed because we're both lightweights, Princess Mononoke glowers at me from a sparse blanket backside her on the couch. Roofing the floor is an enormous Expiry Note carpet, based on a gory 2006–2007 Japanese anime TV serial about a teenager who can dictate the time and style of anyone'due south decease by writing it down in a book. (Information technology's on Netflix.) Death Note is the main inspiration for Grimes's contempo single "Shinigami Optics," equally well every bit the video costarring her pal Jennie from Blackpink. "I like making friends with demons," Grimes chants in her demon-baby singing vocalization. "Y'all need special eyes to see 'em."

Grimes is an invigorating hang. Fourth dimension flies effectually her in nonlinear mode. Art and ideas are her power source, and her free energy is infectious. She speaks and so fast, in a unique Esperanto of academic theory, Silicon Valley 3.0 futurism, and club-child slang. At i indicate she hops upwardly to prove me her new tattoo, a series of milky-white slashes on her upper torso meant to look like alien scars. Yet for someone who might exist from another planet, she's remarkably down-to-earth. For someone who'southward so excited about A.I., she sure does honey the company of people.

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

PHOTOGRAPHS Past STEVEN KLEIN. STYLED BY PATTI WILSON.

About 15 minutes subsequently we sit downwards to discuss her new music, a "infinite opera" due this spring-ish tentatively chosen Volume 1, I hear what sounds vaguely like a lone cry from an baby upstairs. I think I notice Grimes wince, but I say nothing and motility on. Could be anything.

Another few minutes laissez passer. Merely equally I'grand most to bring up one of Volume i's highlights, a soon-to-exist-ubiquitous banger called "Sci-Fi" that she cowrote with The Weeknd and his longtime producer Illangelo, I hear it again. This fourth dimension it's multiple cries, and it'due south unmistakable. I've got ii kids. That's a baby. And I can tell by the frozen await on my host's face that she heard it too. And so I caryatid myself to ask the strangest question of my career: Exercise you accept some other baby in your life, Grimes?

Her body clenches and she looks away.

"I'1000 not at liberty to speak on these things," she begins, and and so all in a tumble she says: "Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there. I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… X is out there. His state of affairs is like that. But, yeah, I don't know."

She's rattled, and I'm mortified by even accidentally making a woman—a new mother, 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 tin't pretend I don't know she'due south got a secret baby with the globe'due south wealthiest homo hiding upstairs. Especially when she invited me here. It's a calming period that breaks with a sitcom punch line: full-blown babe screams upstairs, followed past the vocalism of a woman pleading SHH. At present we both showtime laughing.

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

Grimes simply shakes her head. "She'due south a little colicky too." She laughs again and buries her face in her hands. "I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking."

Congratulations to Grimes and Elon Musk on the nascence of their second child together! It'southward a girl!

You probably have some questions.

When Grimes was significant with Ten in 2020, she had a clear sense of the male child he'd turn out to be. "I just had a vibe," she says. "I was like, 'I feel like he'southward going to be a peaceful giant.' " She was right.

Grimes, meanwhile, used to get chosen "waifish" so often in profiles that she railed against it in a viral 2013 Tumblr postal service. The terminal month of her pregnancy with Ten, 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 y'all're eight months meaning. So I would but crawl to the bathroom and crawl back or whatsoever." At one point during the pregnancy, she thought she was dying. "Similar, I hemorrhaged. It was scary." She and Musk wanted more kids, but she feared serious complications.

Last autumn, though, Musk appeared to ostend rumors that they'd split up upwardly. "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 upward to decorated 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 1. Around the time of her daughter's birth in December, though, she relocated full time to Austin, and that's where I'one thousand 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 mill.

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 hole-and-corner, right up until Y shared the news just now on her own.

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

Then, wait—are Grimes and Musk still together?

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

"In that location's no real word for it," she begins. "I would probably refer to him every bit my boyfriend, simply we're very fluid. We alive in carve up houses. We're best friends. Nosotros encounter each other all the time…. Nosotros just have our own thing going on, and I don't expect other people to understand it." What matters, I offering, is that they're happy. So are they? "Yep," she says. "This is the best it's ever been.... We just need to exist free." They plan to have more children as well. "We've ever wanted at least three or four."

Grimes was a musical autodidact who went viral in 2010 with some of the very showtime songs she made on GarageBand, so spent a decade creating every single note in a male-dominated industry, no matter how much unrequested assistance men kept offering. She connected with Musk through Twitter in 2018, which is how he discovered they'd fabricated the same pun nearly 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 graphic symbol called Rococo Basilisk.) While the earth was huddled indoors, Tesla took off like a BFR—that'southward an inside joke for the SpaceX junkies in the house—sending Musk's internet worth into the stratosphere, and he seemed to please in provoking his trolls. For Grimes, the dent to her reputation has been real. Overnight, a chunk of her core constituency—the cyberspace—turned on her. She was no longer a revolutionary. She was Marie Antoinette.

"I experience really trapped between ii 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 Academy in Montreal. One time she and a boyfriend ran afoul of the police in Minnesota as they tried to sheet a houseboat they'd congenital out of actual junk down the Mississippi River. The law impounded the boat and sent them on their way. During her first shows equally Grimes, she'd sleep in a tent when she couldn't beget a hotel. She'southward 34, now, though, with a chore and 2 kids. "I mean, when people say I'thousand a class traitor that is non…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 iii. Y is sound asleep upstairs.

"But at the same time…" I can physically discover her encephalon cells maxim 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 pigsty in it. When she raised the upshot, he suggested they supersede his mattress with the i at her house. The mattresses are fine at present. Withal: "Bro does non live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times beneath the poverty line. To the bespeak where I was like, tin can we not live in a very insecure $twoscore,000 house? Where the neighbors, similar, film u.s.a., and there's no security, and I'm eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?" She is well aware that many see 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 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 because she's not a big fan of sun. It'due south a nice house. It's no Versailles.

"I'g not super into civilities," she says. "Merely, um, I need diet and stuff."

Grimes oftentimes describes her music as "post-internet," because the entire history of sound is simply a click abroad, from 9 Inch Nails to Hildegard von Bingen's twelfth-century chanting and Stravinsky to Mariah Carey'southward 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's "Kill V. Maim," one of the biggest hits off her 4th album, Fine art Angels, is the perfect four-minute crash class. It'south a pulsing, menacing trip the light fantastic-punk rager, told from the perspective of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Office 2, only in the Grimes remix, he'south a genderfluid vampire wrestling with a moral conundrum. Simply your garden-variety popular 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 nevertheless sound similar a revolution.

Book one remains a piece of work in progress, but the xv songs Grimes has got so far represent her most audacious piece of work yet, each song its own planet of sound—crisp California popular, social club shakers, arena anthems, ethereal requiems, "fairycore." The album takes place in the distant future, at a stage of technological advancement when you can upload your consciousness into a robotic trunk and essentially 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 infinite opera's antihero is a Cymek she calls "the dark male monarch," the world'south greatest engineer, whom Grimes featured in the video for her recent single "Player of Games." By the time our story begins, he'due south pushing 10,000.

Grimes is even so hammering out the plot, but one primal thread is a kind of cyberpunk spin on Swan Lake. There's a white swan (an exaggerated version of Grimes—the dark king's dream daughter, a simulated courtesan who grows weary of existence a muse) and there's a black swan (an A.I. menace who wreaks havoc in the simulation), except in Grimes'due south feminist reboot, the swans ditch the Cymek, fall in honey, and fight for each other instead. From there information technology gets kind of complicated. "Despite all my rage / I am still merely a doll in a cage," she sings, paying homage to Billy Corgan of the Smashing 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 by a theory of Musk'southward: that she's a simulation. "We go on having this conversation where East'due south like, 'Are yous real? Or are we living in my retention, and you're similar a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?' " If this sounds like he'southward asking her if she'due south a virtual pleasance bot, that's not (entirely) what he means. Anyway, she says, she'south never felt entirely real herself: "The degree 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 merely studying astrophysics and neuroscience. And it'southward really abrasive because people call back I'g an airhead who went to art schoolhouse." (She actually wanted to, but it was too expensive.)

A chat with Grimes can be like staring at a Tokyo subway map when you don't speak Japanese. She'south always using scientific terms and alluding to heady concepts, then checking with me to brand sure I know what they hateful because ordinarily I practise not. If at that place's an airhead in this room, it's not her.

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

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

"The Overton window?" I thought so, but 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 but thinks I'chiliad stupid.

Grimes was raised as a strict Catholic, which she struggled with, though she loved the spectacle of church building. The Sometime Attestation was like an ultraviolent blockbuster. Biblical manga. She spent year ane of the pandemic taking care of X and plunging downwardly a rabbit hole of Homer, Herodotus, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Icelandic sagas. An idea began to form: a space opera near 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 culture. False protopia. The dawn of artistic 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 be."

Grimes isn't just the narrator, though. She's also a principal character, 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 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 own vesture. 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 Police-inflected track from Volume 1 chosen "Marie Antoinette 2077." "I'm super inspired past the way women get pulled into orbits in this manner," she tells me. "There's this weird dismissal of them. These are some of the nearly interesting characters in history to me, and they're and so demeaned…. I experience like the most radical thing I could exercise right now is just become Marie Antoinette." She considers it for a second. "Infamy is kind of fun."

She quickly adds that she doesn't want this to become all near Musk. She says it often during our conversations, and she'due south referring to this commodity, but she could just every bit easily be referring to her life. The culture took sides on Grimes from the moment the couple appeared at the Met gala in 2018; their incongruous outfits, her looking like an interstellar Elvira, him wearing a prim white jacket, became an instant mismatch meme. Her Instagram mentions turned into a cesspool. She'd go on social media and defend herself. Guess how that went.

"It killed me at first," she says now. "I spent x years fucking producing, writing, engineering, every unmarried fucking matter on my own. And I fucking proved myself." Her friends are still furious on her behalf, more for the erasing than the hating. "It frustrates me because she'due south equally bright as him," says Boeree. "When I see her referred to equally the significant other of another person, information technology'southward similar, Oh, come up 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 ii–4 hours in my deprivation tank, this allows me to 'astro-glide' to other dimensions—by, present, and future.") Near one-half of the pop-culture galaxy thought she was serious. Until the solar day she dies on Mars, legitimate media outlets will exist reporting that she had experimental surgery to remove bluish light from her visual spectrum.

In other words, rebellion didn't work.

Grimes likewise started to feel unexpectedly conflicted about her function in this theater. For i thing, she liked being Musk's girlfriend. She knows she's going to go slaughtered for saying this, but: "Personally, I don't remember 'manic pixie dream girl' is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I understand it's supposed to be a critique of sure things, only so I challenge that critique." She began to reject what she calls "this misplaced thought of feminism of, like, I need to exist my own thing, I need to exist separate." She has kids with Musk. "Dissever" is off the tabular array for good. "There is no style to extricate myself," she says now. So she did what artists do: She turned her gilt muzzle into source material.

Co-ordinate to her picayune brother Mac, the Bouchers' childhood in Vancouver was similar Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. Kids in nearly every business firm on the street. Secret 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 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 past Hunter Schafer and Zendaya, respectively. "That sounds about right," says Mac.

In other words, she was a hyper-smart, thrill-seeking, gender-exploring fourth dimension bomb whose hobbies included rejecting capitalism, partying besides 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 thirteen and has lost multiple friends to opiate overdoses. She would pay for drugs by doing homework for Taiwanese loan sharks. Mac, who is 2 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 almost the houseboat. Aye, she did. "That was one of the commencement adult choices she made."

The Euphoria phase was less nearly defiance, Grimes says, and more than about DNA, particularly that of her grandfather on her father'due south side, whom she describes as "crazy" and "jarringly unwoke." "My grandpa is hard as fuck," she says. He grew up in poverty. "Super antiestablishment. Teach yourself. Don't rely on other people to teach you anything." She says he taught her how to shoot guns when she was six. Grimes's parents divorced when she was around xi, and her mother married a homo with ii sons, bringing her brother count to 4. Her grandpa nursed her competitive burn down. Yous gonna allow your brothers defeat you? Being outnumbered by the boys has never phased her since. She says he taught her to drive a standard transmission by instructing her to reverse the car to the edge of a cliff. If she lets the car roll astern, she says, recalling it now, "we're literally going to die."

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

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

Grimes's grandad is withal alive and nevertheless lives similar a hermit in remote British Columbia. One time he gave her some professional feedback: You lot really need to sex it upward. You should be more like Miley Cyrus. "He was like, 'Your career is going to exist way improve if you offset showing more than pare,' " she recalls. "I was like, 'Grandpa.' "

Grimes's commencement record was a Dune-inspired concept album called Geidi Primes, a reference to the militaristic planet ruled in the recent movie by an enormous Stellan Skarsgård. (She dubbed herself Grimes because MySpace immune her to acquaintance herself with three 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 4. She loved it. At 1 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 than problematic colonialist elements scrubbed out, merely when she heard about Denis Villeneuve's two-part blockbuster, she fangirled all over once more 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, just she understood. "There are things that are securely 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 information technology, that she knew almost past heart, that inspired her outset album—this story was now her story. Specifically Lady Jessica'south story. This goes by fast onscreen, simply Jessica (played past Rebecca Ferguson) is non a wife only 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's son. He'south a chosen one, tasked with becoming a dandy leader. "When I see Ten," she says, "similar, I but 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 absurd. Grandiose. She wishes it felt that way to her likewise.

"I feel 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 inquire if it's surreal to watch his sister live this life. "Yes," he says, laughing. "Merely I'm also not really surprised? Considering she somehow always gets into the nearly insane possible scenarios."

By the summertime of 2019, Grimes was in the early days of her romance with Musk and getting canceled online for information technology, and she was also finishing Miss Anthropocene, her long (long) awaited follow-up to Art Angels, all while her longtime director and closest daily confidant was dying of cancer. Her life, she says, has always been "level-10 chaos." This was level 11. She'd been making everything by herself for a decade, and she was ill of information technology.

She needed to figure out a new way to exist an artist, which meant figuring out a new way to make coin being an creative person. "I detest touring, and I hate selling merch," she told her new manager, Daouda Leonard, during their first FaceTime call. He laughs at the memory. "If you know annihilation about being a manager in the music manufacture.…" At this point nigh managers would have hung upwardly. 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 torso, dubbed WarNymph, and in February 2021 Grimes became amidst the first musicians to sell an NFT collection of digital artwork, some with accompanying music. Mac'due south thought. She generated $six million from that one driblet—more she's e'er made from whatever 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-source creative experiment. Look at fan fic, she says. So much inventive stuff is happening there if you 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 earth, you go make something with information technology.

The NFT project was so lucrative that if it had happened two weeks earlier, Grimes says, she might non accept signed her first major-label bargain with Columbia Records. No shots at Columbia, she adds—they've been peachy—but she only did information technology to pay for the ambitious videos she had in mind. The one for "Shinigami Eyes," a futuristic trip the light fantastic-pop phantasmagoria, was among the showtime music videos filmed on an extended reality (xR) stage similar to what was used to make The Mandalorian.

Of class, signing with a major label was considered withal another betrayal by the Grimes purists, but where they see a sellout, she sees creative liberation. You lot sign with a characterization—whatever characterization, of any size—for money, which you can either put into your pocket or turn back into the mission.

The foot traffic is heavier the adjacent afternoon when I return to Grimes'south house, including little X. He arrives well-nigh 30 minutes after his mom and I have 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 then he can watch My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki'due south classic with the behemothic 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 X on his way for a playdate, I take in the view of the Colorado River from the living room. I look down and see a neat pile of picture show books, and at the bottom, Time'southward Person of the Yr effect with X's father on the cover. The room is dominated by a massive red couch shaped similar a giant Tootsie Roll, and it looks amazingly comfortable, but the kids have done a number on information technology, possibly 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 lodge right now where people await anybody to bear correct, and talk right," she begins. "Yous accept these manifestations of genius, but then you want them to comport normally—only the reason they're like that is because they're so disconnected from correct behavior." Humans are beautiful and toxic in equal supply, she says. "Like, we fuck up. We're all gonna practise bad things in our life. We're all gonna practice stupid things." She'south talking well-nigh Musk, only once once again she could be talking about herself. "They're both such deeply original thinkers," says Liv Boeree, whom Grimes drafted to costar every bit her black swan in the video for a Book one rails called "100% Tragedy." "The lines mistiness with them almost whether information technology's even art versus applied science or science, because really nosotros're talking about creating something that does not exist."

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

Grimes can get far more than wound up on Musk's behalf than her own, just one thing that actually pisses her off is how many people call up 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 have to respond to every scandalous thing he says? You don't think he drives her crazy as well sometimes? Have yous e'er been in a relationship?

Again, she doesn't want this to become all about Musk, but…she wishes his progressive haters would bear witness some respect for the piece of work, for actually accomplishing their goals. He's washed more than than whatsoever other private citizen to wean the planet off fossil fuels. He helped protect internet service in Ukraine by making his Starlink satellite terminals bachelor. And Grimes is baffled that so many people view his Mars appetite as some billionaire'due south boondoggle, rather than the essence of existence human and perchance, only mayhap, the key to our survival.

"The Mars project is difficult," she says. "At that place's no income for information technology. In that location's no way for it to make coin." Y'all can't make money, after all, without customers. "It'south for the benefit of humanity, and it'southward dangerous and information technology'due south expensive, and people are like, He's hoarding money! No, he's spending everything on R&D." She knows she can audio too admiring, and she knows it'll go her mocked. Screw it.

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

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 earlier at around ii a.yard. She's as nocturnal as e'er.

"I would literally die for a time machine merely particularly 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 similar next level like haha they had insanely good 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 brusque story at the beginning of life 3.0 by Max tegmark all the same?" I did. Heed-diddled emoji.)

1 morning I wake to a text most Musk. "Hahaha e says he'll practise an interview with you surprisingly."

A week later, shortly before midnight on a Friday, Grimes calls from Musk's Tesla and puts them on speakerphone. It's date night. They've got a sitter for 10 and Y, and they're going to the movies—an early cut of dailies by a managing director friend. We've got 12 minutes to talk. Musk is in the driver's seat letting the automobile practice the driving, and Grimes is refreshing his memory about the chorus to "Player of Games," which dropped in December and is more or less about him: "If I loved him any less I'd make him stay / but he has to exist the all-time player of games."

"I wouldn't say I have to be the best histrion 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 tiptop score on a pop civilisation-building game called The Battle of Polytopia, which Musk describes as a "much more circuitous version of chess." He'south fifty-fifty bested Polytopia's creator, Felix Ekenstam. "I literally beat him at his own game," Musk says. (He's also lost a bunch to Ekenstam too.)

Grimes and Musk concur that living separately is wise. They're simply besides unlike on the bones stuff. He likes things "reasonably neat." She likes to be able to see everything she owns, all at once. He likes quality design, clean aesthetics. She likes Death Note rugs from Etsy.

"You did accept that cool vintage Japanese Metropolis poster for a fleck," Grimes points out.

"That was yours."

"Oh yeah," she says. "True."

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

When "Player of Games" first dropped, Grimes'southward fans causeless it was about her rumored split from Musk, when in fact they were welcoming their second kid and spending the holidays together equally 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 pregnant with X, when Musk casually mentioned that he planned to depart for Mars in 10 years. She froze.

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

"It wasn't new information," Musk says in the car, lightly protesting when I bring this up. "I've been maxim since before she was meaning that I was going to Mars." Sure, she replies, merely "I didn't know y'all were going, like, this presently." She is still trying to convince Musk to stick effectually longer, but either manner she came out of it with a killer song for her infinite opera.

"Role player of Games" isn't near their breakdown. It'southward about going into space (sort of). For most parents, even twenty years from at present would exist as well shortly. Non for Grimes. "The thing is, I fuckin' live and dice by the mission. I believe in the mission." She'd used that phrase often—"the mission"—and gradually I realized information technology was a proper name. Uppercase M. When I asked what she meant by it, she replied without hesitation: "Sustainable energy, multiplanetary species. The preservation of consciousness." Last March, Grimes wrote on Instagram that she was "ready to die with the blood-red dirt of Mars beneath my feet." At present she talks every bit though information technology's a fait accompli. "I will probably go when I'm, like, 65 or so," she tells me, the same style you might say it's always been your dream to visit the Galapagos. Hard to reach, probably out of your price range, merely doable in theory.

She tells me she'south worried she came off ranty and cynical the previous day, when in reality she'southward closer to a pure idealist. This extends to A.I., she says. Why is everyone so gloomy about our cybernetic future? What if A.I. likes humanity? What if it winds up being all of our creative all-time and none of our trigger-happy worst? What would that look like? I advise afterward via text that her proverbial glass is 60 per centum full, and she replies: "Im glass 90% full."

Martian travel, she argues, "is just some other Overton window conversation." Airplanes accept existed for just over a century. The space program was fighting for survival a decade agone. And however Michael Strahan—an ex-NFL star turned morning-show fixture—went to space concluding December. She snorts at the thought, though, of Mars as space tourism for the 0.1 percent: "There's not gonna be whatever makeup or Postmates. Information technology'south definitely gonna suck. And definitely early death for sure." Either way, she'due south volunteering. "I'd rather die trying to do something impossible and perhaps failing," she says, "than just keep releasing cute pop songs."

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

Grimes has grown semi-comfy with Musk treating X like his lilliputian helm of industry, only she says things will be different with their girl. Quick story: In 2016, when my own daughter was six, I took her to her first concert, Grimes opening for Florence + the Machine at the Barclays Middle in Brooklyn. The next dark, before the evidence, 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 Vocalism, was murdered afterward a show by a deranged fan. Grimes played half her set that nighttime through panic attacks, then walked off.

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

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

Y's face may be off-limits to the exterior world, but since date nighttime with Musk, Grimes has been mulling whether to share her daughter's full proper noun. She knows it'll surface eventually, and also she's proud of it. "Information technology'due south burn," she texts on Lord's day night. Screw it, she decides. She'll do it her way.

"Her full proper noun," she writes, "is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk."

Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the power to perform 1 quintillion floating-indicate operations per second). Night, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fear it but truly it'due south the absence of photons. Dark affair is the cute mystery of our universe." She texts me a vox memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl—"sigh-deer-ee-el"—which she calls "a more elven" spelling of sidereal, "the true fourth dimension of the universe, star fourth dimension, deep space time, not our relative earth fourth dimension." It's besides a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings grapheme, the powerful Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the ring."

Grimes is prepared for Y to dislike her name or get tired of it—Grimes got tired of Claire a long time ago—and if she ever decides to change it, her female parent will be first in line to help her choose a new one. She'south already got dozens of ideas. She might even change it herself before this article comes out. In improver to Y, she and Musk occasionally call her Crewman Mars, a nod to the Crewman Moon manga series. Exa Dark Sideræl was actually something of a compromise, and she worries it'due south a lilliputian boring.

"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 once more. I apologize to her for the cheesiness of what I'thousand about to ask: When you imagine your future life on Mars, is Elon there? Is he with you lot? Are you doing information technology together?

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

Mars would withal be a barbarous place to live, information technology'd even so suck, but at least East and c would exist together, corking 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 ii years when Earth's orbit is the shortest distance from the ruddy planet, tens of millions of miles abroad. Grimes can see it in her mind'south centre now, them together on Mars, one big happy thermonuclear family unit. Maybe information technology really is all but a simulation, but information technology all the same makes her smile.

TAILORS: LUCY FALCK AND ALEXANDER KOUTNY. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY THAT Ane PRODUCTION. FOR DETAILS, Become 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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