Over the weekend, Grimes debuted several new songs during her set for the virtual reality festival Splendour XR.
The Grimes Metaverse (Super Beta) saw the wacky pop star perform five unreleased tracks, ‘Shinigami Eyes’, ‘Love Is A Drug From God’ with Chris Lake, ‘100 Percent Tragedy’, ‘Utopia’ and ‘Player of Games’.
Grimes streamed the Splendour set on her Discord server. During the stream, Grimes delved into the backstory of ‘100 Percent Tragedy’, a song inspired by her feud with Azaelia Banks.
For those that need context as to where this bonkers beef stems from:
Two musicians, both alike in dignity, in the fair mansion of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, where we lay our scene.
According to Azaelia Banks, back in 2018, she went to Los Angeles to record a song for her as-yet-unreleased album, Fantasea II: The Second Wave, with Grimes. Grimes was staying with her partner, Elon Musk at the time. The scheduled recordings were never to be, instead, a winding domestic drama ensued.
The troubles, like all great calamities, began with an ill-advised 420 tweet. Around the time of the trip, Elon Musk tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla, private, at $420 a share — and Tesla stocks skyrocketed.
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Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018
Obviously, given Musk’s unhinged online personality, and the 420-ness of it all, people were confused as to whether or not it was a joke. It was (obviously) a joke, but a joke that constituted securities fraud. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty legalities of it all (because I don’t understand them!). Shit went south, you know the vibes.
Anyway, Elon Musk’s personal meltdown put a spanner in the recording plans. According to Banks, she spent the entire weekend at Musk’s house waiting for Grimes, who was too busy comforting Musk.
After reaching her wit’s end, Banks took to Instagram to unleash on the couple, calling Musk a “trash ass beta male pig,” a “beta male who took steroids and got hair plugs to convince himself he was alpha,” and “not cute at all in person.” Whilst calling Grimes a “dirty-sneaker-inbred-out of the woods-Pabst beer pussy methhead-junkie” and “an idiot.”
Following Banks’s rant, a spokesperson for Musk and Tesla said that Musk had “never even met [Banks] or communicated with her in any way” and that Banks’ claims are “complete nonsense.” In a following interview with The New York Times, Musk revealed, “I saw her on Friday morning, for two seconds at about a 30-foot distance as she was leaving the house. I’d just finished working out. She was not within hearing range.
“I didn’t even realize who it was. That’s literally the only time I’ve ever laid eyes on her.”
In response to Musk’s comments, Banks penned a lengthy letter to the Tesla CEO, which you can read below.
Which mostly brings us to the now. During the Discord stream, Grimes explained that the new song was “about having to defeat Azaelia Banks when she tried to destroy my life” in reference to the 2018 incident.
As Stereogum notes, Banks responded to the new track in a since-deleted Instagram story. “Grimes def has some psychosexual obsession with me,” she wrote.
“I think it’s bitterness cuz she doesn’t have the musical capacity I have. Everything she does is out of pretentiousness and it comes out like that … while everything I do is out of natural swag & geniusness lmaoo,” she continued. “Starting to notice all the weird undercover millennial racists hide out on Discord.”
