Grimes Is Still Concerned About Income Inequality But “Can Make An Exception” For Elon Musk
A new round of Grimes interviews promoting Miss Anthropocene is upon us, and you know what that means: provocative tidbits! After learning about Claire Boucher’s eating habits yesterday, today we’re blessed with a long and informative Rolling Stone feature by the great Brian Hiatt, in which c weighs in on all kinds of topics.
Grimes talks extensively in the story about her romance with Elon Musk, who she confirms is the father of her baby. She says she didn’t realize the extent to which their relationship would dominate the discourse about her: “The shit that’s happened with my boyfriend this year has overwritten so much of my life’s work.” She doesn’t yet have her Green Card, but she supports Bernie Sanders for president: “I was hard, hard, hard, left before. I still actually sort of am, but there’s the obvious dissonance of my boyfriend.”
On that note, although she remains concerned about income inequality, she has no problem with Musk’s billionaire status because he’s using his money to build the future and not just to buy yachts: “If someone’s just gonna take everything and just put it into R&D to make the world better, and just get up at the fucking crack of dawn every day and go to bed really late every night, doesn’t take vacations and just actually puts every single ounce of his energy in everything he cares about and all his money into making the world better? Like, I can make an exception. I admire it a lot. I think it’s great. To me, it does not contradict my beliefs.”
Furthermore, Grimes says, “When I look at the aims of my boyfriend and I look at the aims of Bernie, like, their end goals are very similar. Fix environmental problems, reduce suffering. It’s worth dissecting the wealth gap, it’s worth dissecting the existence of billionaires, but situations have nuance.” Although she expects Musk to pay for child care, she’s not funneling his money into her career: “Grimes is funded by Grimes. I don’t want to divert funds from, like, Tesla to my stupid art project. I can’t say the things I say and believe what I believe and then take money from my boyfriend.”
Elsewhere in the story, Grimes alludes to getting into a lot of trouble in her teenage years: “I’m worried about having a kid, because I’m so worried that my kid will be as crazy as me.” She says she’s loosening up about her insistence on producing and engineering all her own music, an impulse she says stems back to her desire to “defeat Diplo” because “he was a cunt” when they toured together in 2012. She talks about her sense of kinship with Billy Corgan: “Billy can’t keep his shit together, and I so relate.” She confirms last summer’s bit about experimental eye surgery was a prank cooked up with her brother and collaborator, Mac Boucher. There is talk about her drama with Azealia Banks, a tattoo inspired by Christina Aguilera, her ideas for future albums, Game Of Thrones, and much more. It’s a great story, and you can (and should) read the whole thing here.