Lana Del Rey Talks To Grimes For Interview
Lana Del Rey has interviewed Grimes. (Our SEO is screaming!) The two pop stars have some history together — they toured with each other back in 2015 — and Interview got them to talk to each other for their latest artist-on-artist chat. Del Rey — we just named her album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, the best of the year — asked Grimes about her forthcoming album, Miss_Anthropocene.
They talked about the internet and “outrage culture.” They discussed making art when they get older, whether they’ll ever write novels or more long-form pieces about their life as musicians. They talk about baby names: “I think it could go anywhere from a simple Maria Estela to, like, Ivory Cricket. Oh, god. That’s a soundbite,” Del Rey said. “Knowing our fate, the headline will be that your unborn child is named Ivory Cricket,” Grimes replied. (It’s not.)
“I’m really obsessed with polytheism,” Grimes said when asked whether the songs on her new album “are more personal, or do they have the overculture weighing on them.” “I love how the ancient Greeks or the ancient Egyptians lived in this weird anime world where there were just tons of gods that could be anything,” Grimes continued. “It’s like every form of suffering had a representation.”
Their talk opens with this, um, exchange:
GRIMES: Hey, Lana. How’s it going?
LANA DEL REY: Good! Who is on with us?
ELON MUSK: I’m here.
GRIMES: E is here.
MUSK: Hey, Lana. It’s Elon. I’m about to leave.
GRIMES: He’s about to leave. He will not observe. Are you back from tour?
DEL REY: [Laughs] Yeah, I was touring and then I was in Oklahoma for a hot minute.
GRIMES: Why Oklahoma?
DEL REY: My boyfriend is there, actually.
Interview also got Grimes to talk to the actress Brit Marling, the co-creator and star of the now-cancelled Netflix series The OA. Naturally, this leads Grimes to talk about her favorite subject, artificial intelligence.
“What scares me is an artificial intelligence getting online, seeing everybody’s search history, and then blackmailing all of us into doing whatever it wants. It just feels inevitable,” Grimes said. “We’ve all sent weird e-mails or texts. Even if there are laws to prevent that, there will eventually be a sentient technology that is smart enough and strong enough and has access to take everyone’s shit, and then can make anyone do whatever it wants, Jeffrey Epstein–style.”
Yes, that’s right, Grimes goes into Epstein. She continues:
My theory on Epstein is that he had tapes of people with underage girls, and that’s how he was getting all this stuff from all these people. Someone gave him a house and a plane. It’s like, “What the fuck?” It reeks of deep blackmail to me. If you have everybody’s stuff, you can control the world. It seems a lot easier than a violent takeover. If I’m an AI, do I hold everyone hostage with nuclear bombs, or do I just blackmail everyone? Killing a lot of people seems hard.
Read both interviews here.