The Fractal Immortality of Grimes

I thought my interview with Grimes-the mysterious techno artist, fan of all nerddom, and the deepest of insiders in Elon Musk's world-would be one-on-one. Instead it wound up as a roundtable discussion. Turns out there are multiple personas embedded in the surprisingly haimish human who sat under a tree with me and spent the waning hours of an afternoon in conversation. There was Claire Boucher, the given name of a Vancouver kid obsessed with video games and devoted to provoking adults with misbehavior and the embrace of taboo subjects. There was Grimes, the self-invented, scrappy DIY musician and provocateur who weaves sci-fi into her work and released what Pitchfork judged to be the second-best song of the 2010s. And there was her preferred nomenclature, "c," invoking the speed of light

- By Steven Levy. Photographs by Sam Cannon

C is the artist who's planning to go beyond music into ventures involving education, AI, and a book called Transhumanism for Babies. C is the sometime paramour of Elon Musk (exact terms of that relationship tend to oscillate) and co-parent of two kids. C has tattoos on her fingers underneath multiple metal rings, and what looks like a spiderweb tattoo on her right ear. C wants to die on Mars, or maybe an exoplanet-unless her kids, X and Y, want her to help out with the grandchildren. C is frank, funny, and a little worried that she's not getting her points across. C doesn't have to worry about that-communication, after all, is what she (and Grimes) are very, very good at.

And there was a lot to communicate. Frankly, I was wondering whether c and I would get along. I'm a baby boomer who mainlined Dylan, and she's a 35-year-old, laptop-oriented songcrafter, a polarizing social media icon, and a wary celebrity who sometimes shines in the glare of her partner's outsize fame and other times is understandably insistent on privacy. When I told my millennial son that I was interviewing her, he questioned her relevance. And why, of all people, was I doing the interview?