Grimes, currently known by the moniker c, is the subject of a new Rolling Stone digital cover story that I don’t expect her to like very much. Little time is spent on her dynamic new albumMiss Anthropocene, but the piecedoes offer an interesting portrait of an artist in her particular predicament: indie musician, born of a troublesome adolescence and synthetic enthusiasms, now dates one of the richest men on the planet—in turn, challenging her public, political perception. (“I was hard, hard, hard, left before. I still actually sort of am,” she says in one hilarious moment. “But there’s the obvious dissonance of my boyfriend. And I think this is the crux of most of the rage.”) I don’t particularly enjoy c’s interviews, but I got a big kick out of learning she not only supports Bernie Sanders for president, but she also believes Elon Musk (who she only refers to as “my boyfriend” in the piece) is similar to Sanders.
C remains concerned about income inequality. “It was something I spoke about a lot before dating my boyfriend, which is one of the reasons people were upset about our relationship,” she says. But, in her mind, Musk isn’t “buying 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.”
She goes further: “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.”
What? Perhaps she’s chosen to skip over Sanders’s stance on billionaires completely. I wish I knew what she said to follow up “situations have nuance.” How? What situations?
