National Post (National Edition)
Grimes ‘c’hanges her name, thanks partly to Elon Musk
CLAIRE HAS BEEN THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE SINCE I BECAME SENTIENT ... I CAN BARELY SAY IT W MY SPEECH IMPEDIMENT.
As one of the more mindboggling couples to walk a recent red carpet, Canadian musician Grimes and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk just keep getting ... well, weirder.
It’s not uncommon for a couple to begin mirroring each other within a relationship or, in the case of Evan Rachel Wood, become as close to a clone as possible of your partner. For Grimes, this has apparently meant wearing a choker resembling a Tesla logo (and co-designed by Musk, CEO of Tesla and Spacex) to the Met Gala just weeks ago.
At the time of their debut, she also removed the word “anti-imperialist” from her Twitter bio, then added it back, then removed it again.
But nothing could top the news that came just last week, when Grimes announced that she would be changing her name to “c,” a.k.a. the scientific symbol for the speed of light. Her real name, by the way, is Claire Boucher, so it may have more than one connotation for the singer.
She did offer a contradictory reason why, tweeting, “Claire has been the bane of my existence since i became sentient ... i can barely say it w my speech impediment altho c is technically worse 4 lisp haha.”
The real reason could be attributed to Musk, after she revealed in another string of tweets, “well he’s the one who pointed out that my working nickname (c) actually rox and i don’t need to look further (been trying 2 change name 4ever but couldn’t find a gud 1, but my friends call me c }.”
When the name change began to make headlines with many curious about Musk’s influence on Grimes, she tweeted yet again on Monday in reference to The Fader suggesting he made her change her name: “don’t b complicit in the internet’s attempt to rebrand grimes as arm candy. ppl called me c for yrs, been planning to change my name for yrs.”
It is lowercase and italics, and “will be much better,” she clarified on her Twitter. Its value, according to the Wikipedia description shared by Grimes, is 299,792,458 m/s, or 300,000 km/s, which could make for some very interesting nicknames.
Grimes did clarify, however, that while she’ll be legally changing her name from Claire to “c”, she and her band will still go by Grimes professionally, so for fans, this won’t be much of an overhaul.
But as the furor over her new relationship has continued and made for much Twitter and meme fodder, Grimes, an outspoken anticapitalist, has defended Musk against repeated accusations of preventing Tesla employees from unionizing. On her Twitter, Grimes wrote, “he has never prevented them from unionizing. it’s quite literally fake news. trust me, i’ve investigated this heavily and even visited factories etc.”
In a series of since deleted tweets, she also said, “i can respect a capitalist when they throw the phuck down on creating cheaper safer public transit, taking humans 2 space, movin the world into clean energy, fightin for ubi etc. humans w differing views on economics often hang out.”
Finally, she added, “this is way too nuanced of a convo to have over Twitter ... plz try to see me as a human being and not just an extension of another person . ... don’t wanna answer more questions cuz who i’m dating is irrelevant to my music.”
In her defence, Grimes was weird long before her relationship with Musk. The two did meet, after all, upon discovering a shared interest in 18th-century French art and artificial intelligence.