feminist groan

Even Grimes Can’t Talk About Elon Musk Without Groaning First

Grimes. Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Everyone’s favorite pop provocateur Grimes (who’s temporarily changed her legal name from Claire to c) has given a rare interview to the WSJ. Magazine to talk about all the things you wish she wouldn’t. There’s, of course, her situation with Elon Musk, whom the magazine notes she won’t mention by name and before she can even form words about him “nearly collapses on the floor in a long, pained groan.” Not just any groan, an empowered groan — “I groaned out of, I don’t know, feminism.” With that out of the way, she sums up her feelings about him like so: “I mean, he’s a super-interesting goddamn person.” And later, “Look, I love him, he’s great. There’s got to be some reason. I just think …” She doesn’t finish her thought, exactly, except to say “cool” after “contorting” her body into a ball in the chair. Musk’s two cents about that love, expressed over email, are, equally, uh, heartwarming: “I love c’s wild fae artistic creativity and hyper intense work ethic.”

Grimes suggests that she’s become cagier about Musk because of the feeling that she’s already said too much, referencing the uproar she caused when she tweeted a defense of her man’s union-busting at Tesla. “I was simply unprepared. I’ve just been wallowing in indie music for, like, a decade,” she says. “I just thought I could keep going along in my funny little way, and then you casually respond to someone in a tweet and it’s on Fox News, and you’re like, Ugh, you know? That was a very disturbing moment.”

As Grimes prepares to release her next album Miss_ Anthropocene this summer (whose concept is to “make climate change fun”), she’s also planning to kill off the old, 2009 blog version of “Grimes” first: “It will be a public execution followed by — by something else. I shouldn’t say yet.” Where do we send flowers?

Even Grimes Can’t Talk About Elon Musk Without Groaning