Was it ever cool to like Elon Musk? It's hard to remember now. He's obviously an absolute fucking pariah right now, and most people presumably feel absolute fucking revulsion whenever his stupid fucking face appears on their feeds. But it wasn't that long ago that Musk had enough cultural capital to, say, host Saturday Night Live. That should've never happened, and a great many people thought it was fucking stupid even then, but it still happened. Someone thought he was cool. Swedish pop queen Robyn has been ahead of the curve on a lot of things, and she would like you to know that hatred of Elon Musk was one of them.
In a couple of months, Robyn will return with Sexistential, her first album in nearly eight years. She dropped the single "Dopamine" late last year, and she just followed it with the two-pack of "Talk To Me" and the title track. That means we're in a Robyn promo cycle right now. She performed on Colbert last week, and now she's on Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers' podcast Las Culturistas.
Robyn's conversation with Yang and Rogers is long and pleasant, and it touches on subjects like the creative process and the need to put phones away. But of course, the bit about Elon Musk is the one that's making all the rounds. Yang usually does a segment called "I Don't Think So, Honey." This time, Robyn did one of her own, and she did it about Musk. Here's what she had to say:
I always hated Elon Musk. I always hated him, way before it was cool to hate him. Because there was a time when it wasn’t cool to hate him. People didn't think about him that much, at least. But you know what happened? For me, I started hating him when he put a Tesla into space with a David Bowie song on it. He actually shot a car into space, as if there wasn’t enough shit floating around.
So this is the thing. I think there should be democracy in space. There should be democracy on Earth, too, which we really maybe don't even have at the moment. But the fact that anyone, or any commercial company, can decide what to do with natural resources and also do tacky things, like sending a stupid fucking car into space, that’s also dangerous for people. Think about the astronauts that are up there in the International Space Station. They don't really know what's going to hit them or whatever. Can we all just get to have a vote on whoever gets to do anything?
I'm not too terribly worried about the space Tesla running over any astronauts, though this does lead into a funny riff on what would've happened if a Tesla came for Sandra Bullock in Gravity. (Robyn refers to Bullock as "that brown beautiful woman.") But I am firmly behind the idea that rich people should not get to do their stupid fucking bullshit without the approval of the voting public. Watch Robyn's Las Culturistas episode below; the Elon Musk bit is at the 56:43 mark.
Sexistential is out 3/27 on Konichiwa/Young.
