So What if a Few People Have to Die? That's Show Business, Baby!

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

For a person who has spent her entire life flinging herself at the earth and making art out of the combustions, her new being has required some adjusting. Discretion does not come naturally to her. Last year, someone posted a vii-minute mash-upward 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 Globe Series of Poker star and trained astrophysicist, whom Grimes met through Musk and fell madly in friendship with after a marathon conversation nearly bogus intelligence. "I find it and then refreshing and exhilarating, merely obviously it causes her problem."

Once upon a time, this was part of Grimes's charm, but now an errant remark could follow her child for life, or crater Tesla's stock, or tip off people about where she lives. Doxers and stalkers and paparazzi are zip new for her—she's a female person popular star in 2022—but these are people trying to outmaneuver the guy who runs Tesla and SpaceX (and founded the Boring Visitor and Neuralink). They track his private jet and post its location on Twitter. They swarm his factories with drones. Once they find him, they find her presently plenty, and then they find Ten.

"Nosotros movement and motion and move," she'll tell me later, "because people keep finding where nosotros live."

Grimes opens the front door wearing a double-layered cream and blackness shirt, fabricated by a Korean designer friend's characterization, with the word algorithm stitched in cherry on the collar and cuffs. She invites me in with a cheerful hello, then apologizes for the spartan weather condition. She's only just moved into this house, which belongs to friends. X is with his begetter until tomorrow, so the house is dim and silent.

We settle into a cozy nook off the entryway, the 1 room she's had time 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 carve up a six-pack of some local arts and crafts beer and get slowly buzzed considering nosotros're both lightweights, Princess Mononoke glowers at me from a thin blanket behind her on the couch. Covering the flooring is an enormous Expiry Annotation rug, based on a gory 2006–2007 Japanese anime Boob tube series about a teenager who tin dictate the time and fashion of anyone's death by writing it downward in a book. (It's on Netflix.) Death Note is the chief inspiration for Grimes'south recent unmarried "Shinigami Eyes," as well equally the video costarring her pal Jennie from Blackpink. "I like making friends with demons," Grimes chants in her demon-infant singing voice. "You need special eyes to meet 'em."

Grimes is an invigorating hang. Time flies around her in nonlinear style. Art and ideas are her power source, and her energy is infectious. She speaks and then fast, in a unique Esperanto of bookish theory, Silicon Valley three.0 futurism, and 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 await like alien scars. However for someone who might exist from another planet, she's remarkably down-to-earth. For someone who's so excited about A.I., she sure does honey the company of people.

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

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN KLEIN. STYLED Past PATTI WILSON.

About fifteen minutes after nosotros sit down downward to discuss her new music, a "space opera" due this jump-ish tentatively called Book 1, I hear what sounds vaguely like a alone cry from an infant upstairs. I think I notice Grimes wince, but I say nothing and move on. Could be anything.

Some other few minutes pass. Only equally I'm about to bring upwards ane of Book ane'southward highlights, a shortlyhoped-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'southward multiple cries, and it's unmistakable. I've got 2 kids. That'south a baby. And I can tell by the frozen await on my host's face that she heard it too. So I brace myself to ask the strangest question of my career: Do you lot have another infant in your life, Grimes?

Her torso clenches and she looks away.

"I'thou not at freedom to speak on these things," she begins, and and 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 X is just out at that place. I hateful, I think East is really seeing him every bit a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… X is out there. His situation is like that. Only, yeah, I don't know."

She'south rattled, and I'm mortified by fifty-fifty accidentally making a woman—a new mother, no less—experience exposed and vulnerable. I suggest we pause for a moment to discuss the surreal professional person ethics at play, which are that I can't pretend I don't know she'southward got a secret baby with the globe's wealthiest man hiding upstairs. Particularly when she invited me here. Information technology'south a calming flow that breaks with a sitcom punch line: full-blown infant screams upstairs, followed past the vocalization of a adult female pleading SHH. Now we both start laughing.

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

Grimes merely shakes her head. "She'southward a little colicky too." She laughs over again and buries her face in her easily. "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'south a girl!

Y'all probably have some questions.

When Grimes was pregnant with X 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 experience similar he'southward going to exist a peaceful giant.' " She was right.

Grimes, meanwhile, used to get chosen "waifish" so oftentimes in profiles that she railed against information technology in a viral 2013 Tumblr post. The last month of her pregnancy with Ten, she couldn't walk. "He was pressing on my nerves, and so I kept collapsing," she says. "I took a few steps and collapsed. It was kind of scary, because you don't desire to autumn a lot when you're 8 months pregnant. So I would just crawl to the bathroom and clamber back or whatever." At i betoken during the pregnancy, she idea she was dying. "Like, I hemorrhaged. It was scary." She and Musk wanted more kids, but she feared serious complications.

Last fall, though, Musk appeared to confirm rumors that they'd split upwardly. "Grimes and I are, I'd say, probably semi-separated," he told Fourth dimension, which named him its 2021 Person of the Year. He chalked this upwardly to busy careers in distant cities. He was spending more time in Texas, where SpaceX operates its Starbase circuitous and Tesla is opening a new Gigafactory. Grimes was bunkered in Los Angeles with X and working on Volume 1. Around the fourth dimension of her daughter's birth in December, though, she relocated full time to Austin, and that'due south where I'm meeting her—on a sleepy neighborhood cul-de-sac 15 minutes from downtown, less than an hour by individual jet from Starbase, and a short drive from the Tesla factory.

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

That'southward what they call her, by the manner: Y. She'due south got a full name, merely this doesn't seem like the moment to ask for it. If today's excitement turns out to exist how the world learns that X has a little sister, well, at least Grimes did it her manner.

So, wait—are Grimes and Musk still together?

Yeah. No. What exercise y'all mean by "together"?

"At that place'south no real discussion for information technology," she begins. "I would probably refer to him equally my young man, merely nosotros're very fluid. We live in separate houses. We're all-time friends. We meet each other all the time…. We just have our ain thing going on, and I don't await other people to sympathise it." What matters, I offer, is that they're happy. So are they? "Yeah," she says. "This is the best information technology's ever been.... Nosotros just demand to exist free." They programme to have more children besides. "We've always wanted at to the lowest degree iii or 4."

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

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

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

"But at the same time…" I can physically observe her brain cells saying spiral it. "Like, bro wouldn't even become a new mattress." This was dorsum when they were both living in Los Angeles. Her side of the mattress had a pigsty in it. When she raised the effect, he suggested they replace his mattress with the one at her house. The mattresses are fine now. Still: "Bro does non live similar a billionaire. Bro lives at times beneath the poverty line. To the indicate where I was similar, can nosotros not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, picture show us, and at that place's no security, and I'thousand eating peanut butter for 8 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 dwelling house in Austin could be any house 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 large fan of dominicus. It's a nice house. It's no Versailles.

"I'm not super into civilities," she says. "Merely, um, I demand nutrition and stuff."

Grimes often describes her music as "post-cyberspace," considering the entire history of sound is just a click away, from 9 Inch Nails to Hildegard von Bingen'due south 12th-century chanting and Stravinsky to Mariah Carey's daunting octaves, set up for her to pluck, curve, shape, and morph. If y'all 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 anthology, Art Angels, is the perfect 4-minute crash class. Information technology's a pulsing, menacing dance-punk rager, told from the perspective of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Function II, simply in the Grimes remix, he's a genderfluid vampire wrestling with a moral conundrum. Only your garden-multifariousness pop disquisition on the nature of human and the inexorable pull toward brutality and anarchy. "Kill V. Maim" has been streamed 72 million times on Spotify lonely. Decades from now, it'll still sound like a revolution.

Volume i remains a work in progress, merely the 15 songs Grimes has got so far represent her most audacious work yet, each song its own planet of sound—crisp California pop, gild shakers, arena anthems, ethereal requiems, "fairycore." The anthology takes identify in the afar time to come, at a stage of technological advocacy when you tin can upload your consciousness into a robotic body and essentially live forever every bit a Cymek, in the parlance of science-fiction aficionados. ("I feel similar Jeff Bezos is gonna be a Cymek," says Grimes.) Her space opera's antihero is a Cymek she calls "the dark king," the world'south greatest engineer, whom Grimes featured in the video for her recent unmarried "Player of Games." By the time our story begins, he's pushing 10,000.

Grimes is still hammering out the plot, but one key 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 girl, a simulated courtesan who grows weary of being a muse) and there's a black swan (an A.I. menace who wreaks havoc in the simulation), except in Grimes's feminist reboot, the swans ditch the Cymek, fall in love, and fight for each other instead. From at that place it gets kind of complicated. "Despite all my rage / I am notwithstanding just a doll in a cage," she sings, paying homage to Baton Corgan of the Corking Pumpkins, heroes of her wilding teens.

Book 1 is Grimes's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, with a hint of Lemonade, and information technology was partly inspired by a theory of Musk's: that she's a simulation. "We proceed having this conversation where E'southward like, 'Are you real? Or are nosotros living in my retention, and you're similar a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion hither?' " If this sounds like he's asking her if she's a virtual pleasance bot, that's not (entirely) what he means. 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 hateful the perfect companion for him specifically?

"Yep. Even simply studying astrophysics and neuroscience. And it'south actually annoying because people recollect I'm an airhead who went to art school." (She actually wanted to, only it was too expensive.)

A conversation with Grimes tin be like staring at a Tokyo subway map when you don't speak Japanese. She's always using scientific terms and alluding to exciting concepts, so checking with me to make sure I know what they mean because ordinarily I exercise non. If there'due south an airhead in this room, it'due south non her.

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

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

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

"What most neuroplasticity?" At present I'm worried she just thinks I'1000 stupid.

Grimes was raised as a strict Catholic, which she struggled with, though she loved the spectacle of church. The Erstwhile Testament was like an ultraviolent blockbuster. Biblical manga. She spent year one of the pandemic taking care of Ten and plunging down a rabbit pigsty of Homer, Herodotus, the Anglo-Saxon Relate, the Icelandic sagas. An thought began to form: a space opera nigh the galaxy-altering events unfolding before her eyes, in which she has get an unwitting participant. A love story about some epic stuff. The time to come of civilisation. Faux protopia. The dawn of artistic A.I. Terraforming Mars. Here was a gilded opportunity to pry open that Overton window, Grimes-style. "The idea of the female Herodotus," she says, "nearly doesn't exist."

Grimes isn't but the narrator, though. She'south also a master graphic symbol, and over the course of written history, her archetype—the lover, the siren, the mistress—hasn't been treated with much respect. Book 1 alludes to Athena, Calypso, Persephone, the black swan, Anne Boleyn, courtesans, concubines, geishas. "These weren't simply hot girls," she says. "They were the smartest girls, some of the nearly educated women of their time." They painted, sang, designed their own 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 caput / Villain of the internet," Grimes sings on a Constabulary-inflected rail from Book one called "Marie Antoinette 2077." "I'm super inspired by the way women get pulled into orbits in this manner," she tells me. "At that place's this weird dismissal of them. These are some of the well-nigh interesting characters in history to me, and they're and so demeaned…. I feel like the virtually radical matter I could do right now is just become Marie Antoinette." She considers it for a 2nd. "Infamy is kind of fun."

She apace adds that she doesn't desire this to become all near Musk. She says it often during our conversations, and she'southward referring to this article, merely she could just as hands be referring to her life. The culture took sides on Grimes from the moment the couple appeared at the Met gala in 2018; their incongruous outfits, her looking similar an interstellar Elvira, him wearing a prim white jacket, became an instant mismatch meme. Her Instagram mentions turned into a cesspool. She'd continue social media and defend herself. Approximate how that went.

"It killed me at first," she says now. "I spent 10 years fucking producing, writing, engineering, every single fucking matter on my ain. And I fucking proved myself." Her friends are yet furious on her behalf, more than for the erasing than the hating. "It frustrates me considering she's as vivid as him," says Boeree. "When I see her referred to every bit the significant other of another person, it's like, Oh, come on."

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

In other words, rebellion didn't work.

Grimes also started to feel unexpectedly conflicted about her role in this theater. For one matter, she liked being Musk'south girlfriend. She knows she's going to get slaughtered for maxim this, but: "Personally, I don't recall 'manic pixie dream girl' is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I understand information technology's supposed to exist a critique of certain things, but then I claiming that critique." She began to decline what she calls "this misplaced thought of feminism of, similar, I need to be my own affair, I need to be split." She has kids with Musk. "Separate" is off the table for adept. "There is no way to extricate myself," she says at present. And so she did what artists do: She turned her gold muzzle into source material.

According to her little brother Mac, the Bouchers' childhood in Vancouver was like Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. Kids in nearly every house 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 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 too difficult, 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 Alliance. She tried LSD for the first fourth dimension when she was 13 and has lost multiple friends to opiate overdoses. She would pay for drugs by doing homework for Taiwanese loan sharks. Mac, who is two years younger, got involved in sports instead, and he sounds almost amazed that he was the younger sibling. She was always doing what he calls "dumb Claire shit." He asks if she told me nearly the houseboat. Yes, she did. "That was one of the first adult choices she made."

The Euphoria phase was less almost defiance, Grimes says, and more nigh DNA, particularly that of her grandad on her father's side, whom she describes as "crazy" and "jarringly unwoke." "My grandpa is difficult as fuck," she says. He grew upwards 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'south parents divorced when she was around eleven, and her mother married a man with ii sons, bringing her blood brother count to four. Her grandpa nursed her competitive fire. You gonna let your brothers defeat y'all? Being outnumbered by the boys has never phased her since. She says he taught her to drive a standard manual by instructing her to reverse the machine to the edge of a cliff. If she lets the machine whorl backward, 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 be in a cocky-driving Tesla, presumably. And anyway, she won't take to thrust X and Y into barbarous tests of their mettle. Merely being the children of Grimes and Elon Musk will be enough of a barrage, and the shields never seem to hold.

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

Grimes'due south grandfather is notwithstanding alive and still lives like a hermit in remote British Columbia. Once he gave her some professional feedback: You actually demand to sexual practice information technology up. You should be more like Miley Cyrus. "He was like, 'Your career is going to be way meliorate if you start showing more skin,' " she recalls. "I was like, 'Grandpa.' "

Grimes's first record was a Dune-inspired concept album called Geidi Primes, a reference to the militaristic planet ruled in the contempo movie past an enormous Stellan Skarsgård. (She dubbed herself Grimes because MySpace allowed 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 four. She loved information technology. At i Met gala, she cornered Sting, who starred in David Lynch'due south 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, but when she heard about Denis Villeneuve'due south two-office blockbuster, she fangirled all over once more and signed on to aid 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 non woke in the Dune universe," she says, and then the studio had to be extra-cautious, and she was far from indispensable.

When she finally saw the picture show, 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 offset album—this story was at present her story. Specifically Lady Jessica'south story. This goes by fast onscreen, simply Jessica (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is not a wife but a concubine. Grimes saw herself in Jessica, and she saw Ten in Jessica's son, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). Paul is more a duke's son. He'south a called 1, tasked with becoming a great leader. "When I run into Ten," she says, "like, I just know Ten is going to accept 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 experience like there's very few people in the world who could have similar sentiments near their son than Claire with X," Mac says when I relay this to him. I ask if it's surreal to watch his sis live this life. "Yes," he says, laughing. "But I'm as well 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 information technology, and she was also 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 ever been "level-ten 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 style to be an artist, which meant figuring out a new way to make money being an artist. "I hate touring, and I hate selling merch," she told her new director, Daouda Leonard, during their first FaceTime call. He laughs at the retention. "If you know anything about existence a manager in the music manufacture.…" At this signal most managers would take hung up. Instead he said, "Cool, y'all'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 February 2021 Grimes became amidst the first musicians to sell an NFT drove of digital artwork, some with accompanying music. Mac'due south idea. She generated $vi million from that 1 drop—more than she'south e'er made from whatever of her albums. They engineered a deepfake of her phonation 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. Look at fan fic, she says. So much inventive stuff is happening there if you know where to expect. She has similar plans for an A.I. girl group she's designing named NPC, which is gamer speak for "nonplayer character." She puts the A.I. daughter group out into the world, you get brand something with it.

The NFT project was so lucrative that if it had happened two weeks earlier, Grimes says, she might not have signed her first major-label bargain with Columbia Records. No shots at Columbia, she adds—they've been keen—but she only did information technology to pay for the ambitious videos she had in mind. The ane for "Shinigami Optics," a futuristic dance-pop phantasmagoria, was among the first 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 nevertheless another betrayal by the Grimes purists, but where they run across a sellout, she sees artistic liberation. You sign with a label—any label, of any size—for money, which you tin can either put into your pocket or turn back into the mission.

The pes traffic is heavier the adjacent afternoon when I return to Grimes's house, including little X. He arrives about thirty minutes later on his mom and I take settled dorsum into the anime nook, and as he charges through the door she leaps to her anxiety with a delighted yelp. He says a friendly howdy to me and after makes a bid for her laptop so he tin can sentinel My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki'southward classic with the behemothic Catbus.

In solidarity with all the new moms out at that place, Grimes is wearing the aforementioned 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 cracking pile of picture books, and at the bottom, Time'due south Person of the Yr effect with X'south father on the cover. The room is dominated by a massive red couch shaped like a giant Tootsie Roll, and it looks amazingly comfy, but the kids have done a number on it, possibly both numbers, so Grimes sits cross-legged on the flooring instead, and we hash out the Elephant of the Year in the room.

"We live in this society correct now where people wait everyone to comport right, and talk right," she begins. "You lot have these manifestations of genius, but and so you desire them to behave normally—but the reason they're like that is because they're so asunder from correct behavior." Humans are beautiful and toxic in equal supply, she says. "Like, we fuck up. We're all gonna exercise bad things in our life. Nosotros're all gonna do stupid things." She's talking about Musk, only once again she could be talking about herself. "They're both such securely original thinkers," says Liv Boeree, whom Grimes drafted to costar as her black swan in the video for a Book 1 rails called "100% Tragedy." "The lines blur with them well-nigh whether it's fifty-fifty art versus engineering or science, because really we're talking well-nigh creating something that does not exist."

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

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

Again, she doesn't desire this to become all virtually Musk, but…she wishes his progressive haters would show some respect for the work, for actually accomplishing their goals. He's done more than whatsoever other individual denizen 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 then many people view his Mars ambition equally some billionaire's boondoggle, rather than the essence of being human and maybe, just maybe, the central to our survival.

"The Mars project is hard," she says. "In that location's no income for it. There's no way for it to make money." You can't make money, afterward all, without customers. "It's for the benefit of humanity, and information technology's dangerous and information technology's expensive, and people are like, He's hoarding money! No, he'due south spending everything on R&D." She knows she tin audio besides 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 right affair."

In the days after I render home from Austin, I settle into a new morn routine: Wake up, check my phone, and read the texts that Grimes sent the dark before at around two a.m. She's every bit nocturnal every bit ever.

"I would literally dice for a time machine but especially for similar pre civ type stuff," she writes during an exchange virtually the earliest known tattoos. "Similar man it must take been Difficult. The aesthetics of that time r just like adjacent level like haha they had insanely good manner." She sends a photo she found online. "Like this girl looks like she's dressed in Yeezy." She gives me fun assignments, and then checks to see if I've done them. ("Did u read the omegas brusque story at the beginning of life 3.0 past Max tegmark even so?" I did. Mind-diddled emoji.)

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

A week afterward, 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 machine do the driving, and Grimes is refreshing his memory most the chorus to "Player of Games," which dropped in December and is more than or less about him: "If I loved him any less I'd make him stay / but he has to be the best actor of games."

"I wouldn't say I have to be the best player of games," Musk says. He thinks the guy in the song sounds "somewhat overwrought." Grimes concedes a bit of dramatic license, just "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 pop civilization-building game called The Battle of Polytopia, which Musk describes as a "much more circuitous version of chess." He's even bested Polytopia's creator, Felix Ekenstam. "I literally beat him at his own game," Musk says. (He'south besides lost a bunch to Ekenstam as well.)

Grimes and Musk agree that living separately is wise. They're merely likewise unlike on the basic stuff. He likes things "reasonably neat." She likes to exist able to see everything she owns, all at once. He likes quality blueprint, clean aesthetics. She likes Death Note rugs from Etsy.

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

"That was yours."

"Oh yep," she says. "Truthful."

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

When "Actor of Games" starting time dropped, Grimes'due south fans assumed it was nigh her rumored dissever from Musk, when in fact they were welcoming their 2d kid and spending the holidays together equally a family. The idea for the song came to her during a conversation with friends ii years agone 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 similar, 'Uhhh….' " She remembers laughing nervously. "I said, 'Could we brand it xx?' "

"It wasn't new data," Musk says in the motorcar, 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 lot were going, similar, this soon." She is still trying to convince Musk to stick around longer, merely either way she came out of it with a killer song for her infinite opera.

"Histrion of Games" isn't about their breakup. It'south about going into space (sort of). For most parents, fifty-fifty 20 years from now would be too soon. Not 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 proper noun. Uppercase One thousand. When I asked what she meant past it, she replied without hesitation: "Sustainable energy, multiplanetary species. The preservation of consciousness." Terminal March, Grimes wrote on Instagram that she was "ready to die with the red dirt of Mars beneath my feet." Now she talks as though it'due south a fait accompli. "I will probably go when I'one thousand, like, 65 or so," she tells me, the aforementioned way you might say information technology'south ever been your dream to visit the Galapagos. Difficult to reach, probably out of your price range, just doable in theory.

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

Martian travel, she argues, "is just another Overton window conversation." Airplanes have existed for just over a century. The space programme was fighting for survival a decade ago. And yet Michael Strahan—an ex-NFL star turned morning-show fixture—went to infinite last December. She snorts at the thought, though, of Mars as space tourism for the 0.1 percent: "There'due south not gonna be any makeup or Postmates. It'southward definitely gonna suck. And definitely early on death for sure." Either fashion, she'due south volunteering. "I'd rather die trying to practise something incommunicable and perchance failing," she says, "than but keep releasing cute pop songs."

In the meantime, Grimes gets to turn the whole feel into art, and her kids become a digital-age version of Jedi training. When Musk and Grimes kickoff met, he was Tony Stark and she was his kooky Pepper Potts. Now their domestic life is more like the Incredibles. Her role with X, she says, is "handling his creative stuff." She's gear up to start him on Ableton Alive, the digital audio software, and she'southward taken him to his first rave, though he left at 11:30 p.1000.

Grimes has grown semi-comfortable with Musk treating Ten like his piddling captain of industry, but she says things will be different with their daughter. 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 Center in Brooklyn. The adjacent nighttime, 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 audience. This was just days after Christina Grimmie, a singer who rose to fame on The Voice, was murdered subsequently a show by a deranged fan. Grimes played one-half her set that night through panic attacks, and then walked off.

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

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

Y's face up may be off-limits to the outside world, but since date night with Musk, Grimes has been mulling whether to share her daughter'due south full name. She knows it'll surface somewhen, and also she'due south proud of it. "Information technology's fire," she texts on Sunday dark. Spiral it, she decides. She'll do it her way.

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

Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform one quintillion floating-point operations per 2nd). Dark, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fearfulness information technology but truly it's the absence of photons. Dark thing is the cute mystery of our universe." She texts me a phonation memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl—"sigh-deer-ee-el"—which she calls "a more than elven" spelling of sidereal, "the true time of the universe, star fourth dimension, deep space time, not our relative earth fourth dimension." It'south also a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings grapheme, the powerful Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the band."

Grimes is prepared for Y to dislike her name or get tired of it—Grimes got tired of Claire a long time agone—and if she ever decides to change information technology, her mother volition exist first in line to assist her cull a new one. She's already got dozens of ideas. She might fifty-fifty alter it herself before this article comes out. In improver to Y, she and Musk occasionally call her Sailor Mars, a nod to the Sailor Moon manga series. Exa Dark Sideræl was actually something of a compromise, and she worries it's a little irksome.

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

We speak once more than by phone on the eve of Lunar New Year and discuss Mars over again. I apologize to her for the cheesiness of what I'thou almost to ask: When yous imagine your future life on Mars, is Elon there? Is he with y'all? Are y'all doing it together?

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

Mars would however exist a savage place to alive, it'd all the same suck, simply at to the lowest degree E and c would be together, smashing that Overton window to bits. And if X and Y desire 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's orbit is the shortest distance from the cherry planet, tens of millions of miles away. Grimes can come across it in her listen'due south eye at present, them together on Mars, one big happy thermonuclear family. Maybe information technology actually is all just a simulation, just it still makes her smile.

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

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

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