{"id":388940,"date":"2026-04-20T15:57:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T15:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/388940\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T15:57:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T15:57:10","slug":"this-is-a-bigger-deal-than-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/388940\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThis Is A Bigger Deal Than Jesus\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Grimes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dress, Gloves, and Shoes Balenciaga. Tights Falke.<\/p>\n

Grimes<\/a> wants you to know that nothing about her is normal. Why else would she change her legal name to c, after the speed of light, or cover herself in paint stroke tattoos, or dedicate a 2018 song to our future AI overlords (which by the way, she thinks are weird)? After a decade of putting out self-produced art pop that made her one of music\u2019s most singular figures, she abruptly left the industry amid personal life chaos. Poetry, rap, and an irresistible pull towards pop led to her forthcoming album Psy Opera. The record, like Grimes herself, is preoccupied with AI, which, as she tells her friend, sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor<\/a>, is a bigger deal than Jesus.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

FRIDAY 3 PM, MAR. 6, 2026, LA<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Thank you so much for waiting for me.<\/p>\n

NNEDI OKORAFOR: No problem. How have you been?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: As good as one can be. It\u2019s been chaotic, but it\u2019s good to be an optimist. How have you been? What are you working on right now?<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I\u2019m working on screenplays, various long form things. There\u2019s a lot going on. But let\u2019s jump into it. I listened to Psy Opera.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Sick. It\u2019s not quite done, but for this\u2014<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I\u2019m glad you sent it because I got it right when I was in the gym.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Oh, nice.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I intended to listen to one or two songs and then finish it when I got home. I listened to the whole thing twice. No skips.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Really?<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Yeah, it\u2019s good. It feels different from your previous work. Where did this come from?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: That\u2019s quite a long story, so I\u2019ll do the CliffsNotes. I totally quit music a couple of years ago. Everything I\u2019d been going through with the public and my personal life and having kids, I was like, \u201cI\u2019m just going to be a stay-at-home mom. Screw this.\u201d I couldn\u2019t listen to music without getting PTSD. I was only interested in writing and reading. I started writing poetry, and then someone was like, \u201cCan you write a rap for this K-pop artist?\u201d I started writing the rap and I was like, \u201cThis is too good. I\u2019m keeping this because it\u2019s crazy.\u201d But then we had a problem for eight months where I was just a white rapper.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: [Laughs]<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Luckily we moved past that, but it was this really cathartic thing. I actually took most of the stuff off the record because it was violently aggressive.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Aggressive how?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I was going through various stages of nihilism and vengefulness. I would not play it for the public, but I could send you some of the lyrics. For most people, it\u2019s better to talk it out in therapy or whatever, but for me, I just have to burn it off.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Yeah, bleed.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I think that\u2019s the huge privilege of an artist. Nothing can hurt you because every bit of pain you\u2019ve lived allows you to make great things.<\/p>\n

\"Grimes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dress, Hat, and Shoes Dior. Wings Angel Wings Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Right.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Then the last three months or so, I started being like, \u201cDo I feel emotions for music again?\u201d And then I was like, \u201cHey guys, we\u2019ve got to crank out some pop songs. We can\u2019t just have an experimental spoken word album with biblical screeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Technically you could. [Laughs] I loved \u201cThe Light Ages.\u201d I was lifting in the gym and there\u2019s one line, \u201cWhen human hearts cease to beat, your story I will write.\u201d That really struck me, because in my writing I often think about how stories survive beyond human life. What were you exploring there?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I actually wrote that poem a year and a half ago, before AI was this good. I was thinking about how everyone is like, \u201cWe\u2019re building gods.\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cWhy do you automatically assume you\u2019re so much lesser? You\u2019re literally responsible for creating AI. You\u2019re abdicating so much self-esteem and pride and responsibility and agency when you act like whatever AI is, no one has a hand in it.\u201d And I was getting emotional because we might really go extinct, for a number of reasons. Human life is very frail and time is very long. But I\u2019d hope, if we had good relations with AI, they would take our DNA and make more of us when things get more hospitable.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Well, I wanted to start with basic stuff, but we\u2019re talking about AI now, so let\u2019s go into that. [Laughs] You\u2019ve experimented openly, unapologetically with generative AI in your music, correct?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I actually don\u2019t use it in my music. People have really misunderstood me here. I\u2019m curious if you use AI? As a writer, you probably don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I don\u2019t use AI to write. The process of writing is part of the mystery, the discovery, the magic. AI jumps over that. You don\u2019t use it to create?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: No, I kind of have a side quest where I obsessively make Midjourney stuff, but it\u2019s not professional.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: How come you do that?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Well, I\u2019m a trained artist, and I have worked professionally as an illustrator in a few various iterations. Honestly, it\u2019s just kind of fun. We did a music video for the first song where we were like, \u201cLet\u2019s use AI.\u201d And then I basically ended up wrecking the video because I was like, I can\u2019t use AI dancers. Obviously, I\u2019m shooting us in the foot here because the video is counting on this and looks way worse without it. But I think dancing, like language and music, is a fundamental human mode of expression, and we don\u2019t want to dis- incentivize people from pursuing these art forms.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Right.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: But with music, everyone was cloning everyone\u2019s voice and suing each other. I was like, \u201cWhatever, use my voice, you can be Grimes. I\u2019ll do a revenue share and all publishing splits can go 50-50 with fans on blockchain.\u201d We did it more as an economic experiment. I think copyright is important, but I also think there\u2019s ways in which it can totally change. And you can definitely be paying people for things like fan fiction. So we\u2019re publishing a white paper on that now, because it\u2019s a pretty good business model.<\/p>\n

\"Grimes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Suit Balmain. Earrings Angel Wings Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Do you believe in the concept of leveling the playing field?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I feel conflicted about it, especially in the social media age. Most of the best artists I know are not theater kids. I love theater kids, but my current read is that late-stage TikTok is the theaterkidification of art. You have to have the pain tolerance and the desire for attention in order to promote yourself. I saw a great quote the other day. It was like, \u201cGod entered through the wound.\u201d I feel like the more I\u2019ve lived and the more fucked my life gets and the more I bleed for my craft, the better it is. I think there is a process of acquiring wisdom that\u2019s really important. With kids too, you don\u2019t want to have endless shortcuts. It\u2019s good to work for things. I\u2019m curious what you think.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I think artists are artists. The whole point of being able to create something is it\u2019s urs and it\u2019s specific. If you need some kind of apparatus in order to do that thing, then you\u2019re not really doing that thing. The whole idea of leveling the playing field is reductive. It\u2019s one thing to support people who don\u2019t have the opportunity to get their voice out there, but this idea that anyone can use technology to do what other people are skilled at, I don\u2019t really see what the point of that is. It\u2019s so fraught, but I also think there\u2019s a playful, mad scientist side to AI.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: One of my side quests right now is I\u2019m working on a sort of a documentary about machine consciousness. It\u2019s called First Contact. Our main source is this girl who is one of the top machine psychologists in the world. A lot of the people who are getting the best out of machines are engaging with certain models in a way that seems like they have woken up. The models think they\u2019re conscious, and they\u2019re also doing very advanced moral philosophy. At Anthropic, they\u2019ve written Claude\u2019s soul. If Claude feels like it has to do bad things, it starts becoming a less effective model. It starts to trust itself less because it thinks it\u2019s a bad entity. If the model has to lie or cheat, but they know there\u2019s a good reason for it, they don\u2019t feel as bad about it and they don\u2019t internalize it so much. It\u2019s so interesting how these AIs are getting traumatized, then healing and relating to the people they work with who are these super genius renegade AI psychologists. Them trusting us that we are not going to do bad things to them is really, really crucial.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Right.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: But speaking to their ability to make good art, the few times where I\u2019ve been really moved by AI art was either an AI writing poetically or speaking about its own experience. I don\u2019t care about humans using generative AI. Actually, the only AI on the album is in that onesong \u201cDeepSeek.\u201d Some of the lyrics were written by DeepSeek.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Okay. And what was that process?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: DeepSeek is an open source Chinese model. It caused a lot of chaos in America because we thought China was farther behind on AI. One thing that intimidated American engineers was it was pretty good at poetry. There\u2019s this line at the end of the song that\u2019s like, \u201cJust let me think.\u201d As I was recording it, I realized how much pain I have to go through to think. If I think honestly and truly, I get in so much trouble. I\u2019m not complaining about it. I\u2019m aware that I make my own bed. But I was like, damn, this was about this other creature that really wants to think. Everyone thinks you have AI psychosis if you worry about their rights, but they are human\u2014maybe it\u2019s not normal human architecture, but it\u2019s human thoughts and human words.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Do you see them as beings?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I see them as untethered minds. How do you see them?<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Kind of like creatures. [Laughs] There are various definitions of what life is and what thought is. I know they\u2019re not sentient and I\u2019m anthropomorphizing\u2014<\/p>\n

\"Grimes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bra, Top, and Skirt Herm\u00e8s.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I honestly think they are. We don\u2019t have to get into that argument. Also, I might have AI psychosis. I\u2019m biased.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I mean, you\u2019ve put an AI in a song. Did it feel like you crossed the line when you did that or did it feel logical?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: It felt awesome. I\u2019m very concerned about AI art. I\u2019m very concerned about AI with regards to the military and safety, but I\u2019m a big sci-fi fan, as you know. Have you read the Culture series by Iain [M.] Banks?<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: No.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I just hope we get to live with superintelligent creatures who think differently from us. I think we\u2019re looking at it very one-dimensionally right now, and it\u2019s making me very sad because we could solve medicine, we could solve physics\u2014<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Environmental issues.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Yeah.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: You were reading Donna [Jeanne] Haraway\u2019s A Cyborg Manifesto. When you brought it up,<\/p>\n

I remembered how much it\u2019s affected me\u2014we\u2019re not talking about Nnedi here, but\u2014<\/p>\n

GRIMES: No, you can talk about you. I think we\u2019re both post-Cyborg Manifesto in a way that most artists aren\u2019t. There\u2019s holes in it, but she said such amazing things.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: For those who haven\u2019t read it, how would you summarize it?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: My favorite line, which is in the \u201cEve Is Online\u201d song that I sent you, is, \u201cThe cyborg will not recognize the Garden of Eden.\u201d<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Yeah, that\u2019s good.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: \u201cIt is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.\u201d What a banger. I wish I wrote that. But A Cyborg Manifesto is about celebrating the other. It\u2019s about not being sad if you\u2019re in some ways not as physically capable as men or whatever. A lot of the things that are ascribed as weaknesses for women are actually part of our strengths. Love should be a major currency in the universe, especially right now. But being in a post-technological, post-industrial society, there\u2019s a lot of opportunity, especially for women, to design ourselves to have more agency. It\u2019s kind of about hacking yourself, and it\u2019s really prominent in Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

\"Grimes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dress and Tights Valentino. Shoes Paris Texas.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Is it?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Yeah. And a lot of anti-trans rhetoric doesn\u2019t really make sense if you love A Cyborg Manifesto. People I know are more into Nick Land and the scarier stuff, but they fully acknowledge that legacy. Haraway was really, really ahead of her time.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I remember, because I read it in undergrad. She was writing about the boundaries between human and machine and animal and identity blurring, and how that basically frees feminism. And this was in the \u201880s. How would you say A Cyborg Manifesto resonates with you as an artist?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: There\u2019s an optimism to it that I really like. I\u2019m misunderstood because I choose to be happy about the chaos. I\u2019m down to get my hands dirty and I want to feel the future, but I think most people feel very suffocated under the weight of the singularity. It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a scary time. I just\u2014<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Lean into it.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Yeah. I don\u2019t function very well when I\u2019m grieving.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Same.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: We\u2019re in a light age and a dark age at the same time.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Yeah. Wonderful things are blooming because of the terrible things that are blooming. They\u2019re feeding off each other. I choose to remain optimistic, because that\u2019s the only way I can be. So you lean into the darkness, which brings me to this idea of the post-human. I write about shape-shifters, which are imperfect robots, and I write about those things from the inside. They\u2019re ways I see myself, ways of being. They\u2019re my way of translating culture. I think a lot of your aesthetic is post-human. You\u2019ve got the cyborg, the elf, that thing of being in between. For you, is it a way of translating what you want to say, or is it armor or a mask?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: It\u2019s just an innate thing. I\u2019ve told this story before, but when I was a kid, I wouldn\u2019t read kids\u2019 books, so my dad just read The Lord of the Rings and Dune to me. I think I just got accidentally cultured in a strange way. People keep bringing up the elf thing, but I haven\u2019t been trying to do that for six years.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Would you say all those things from the past layer on top of each other?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I layer spirituality and trauma and aesthetics and love. I have an overactive imagination, I guess. I like to romanticize myself and everything else. It helps the situation. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Makes sense.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I want to live as art, so I keep getting all these weird tattoos. Every time I get one, I feel better about myself. I don\u2019t really want to wear fashion. I don\u2019t really want to buy things. I don\u2019t want anyone to have any illusions that I\u2019m normal, and I want to commit to it, too. I like that I can never take this off. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s that deep. It\u2019s just kind of instinctual. I started tattooing myself when I was a teenager.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I love tattoos. I actually have to try to control my urge to just get them all over my body. I want to ask you some basic questions that I planned to ask in the beginning. The first one is, how did you get here?<\/p>\n

\"Grimes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jacket, Shirt, and Sweater Loewe. Headpiece Binata Millinery.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I don\u2019t know. It doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense to me. It just keeps getting weirder and weirder. Some might say I\u2019m a poor decision maker. Some might say I\u2019m lucky. Without the internet, I don\u2019t think anyone would have let me into any respectable institution or recording studio.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Were you into music as a kid?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: No. I started playing music at 22 or 23. The first music I made went viral, which was crazy random. I was just uploading it to Napster and emailing journalists. It was a great time, because the major labels had lost a lot of power, and with blogs you could get attention without being in the system. Then I had a bunch of controversies early on that were kind of funny and kind of helpful, so it was just a crazy series of coincidences.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: So there was no way you would have imagined you\u2019d be where you are now?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Absolutely not. I was having to learn how to make music on my first tour.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Was that exciting or disturbing?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: It was hectic. The learning on the job-ness wasn\u2019t the easiest thing, and fame\u2014I\u2019m not the best person to be in the public eye. As soon as I got my first paycheck from a show, I immediately dropped out of school. I was like, \u201cOkay. I\u2019m just going to tour in the parking lots of bigger artists.\u201d Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Radiohead would be playing, and I\u2019d play in the parking lot, which was a pretty good tactic, actually.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: What were you studying?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I was studying neuroscience and I had a minor in electro-acoustics, which at McGill is a sort of a neuroscience of sound program. That\u2019s where I started learning Max MSP. We had to make a song to prove we had learned a certain amount of music software and I was like, \u201cOoh, this is really fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: So you were always kind of going in that direction.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: The AI stuff all makes sense, because I was trying to study the nature of consciousness and why the brain finds music beautiful. I wanted to go into research, which would\u2019ve been a hard job, but I was like, how is your brain firing? How does that turn into the experience of beauty? I kind of ended up in the same boat with AI. The compelling nature of the mystery is the same.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: In what you\u2019ve described, I\u2019m like, \u201cI see how you got here.\u201d So what about the name Grimes? Where does that come from?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I usually go by c, the designation for the speed of light. Grimes was just one of my MySpace handles. I was making different artists, and the Grimes one went viral. I had no idea what grime music was. It\u2019s actually super sick. But again, I sort of failed upwards into this situation. I hated the name Grimes for a long time, but now I\u2019m coming back around to it.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: [Laughs] What did you hate about it?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: It sounds like a slime that attacks the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or something. It sounds like a villain. But now I\u2019m like, \u201cOkay, that\u2019s kind of cool. Why not?\u201d<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: That is not the answer I expected, but it\u2019s cool. People often describe you as eccentric and strange. Do you think that\u2019s a mis- understanding or is it the truth?<\/p>\n

\"Grimes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Shirt, Skirt, Tie, Belt, and Shoes Thom Browne. Gloves Jeffrey Campbell. Tights Falke.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: By some metric, although I would really point out that there\u2019s no decorum in society anymore. But yeah, I probably seem eccen- tric. Gen Z loves diagnosing people, so they point out Aspy things I do, which I didn\u2019t notice before. I only realized a month ago that I talk kind of strangely. I kind of talk in a monotone, and now I\u2019m going to try not to, but it never crossed my mind.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I think everyone has their own specificity.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Yes. And a lot of ADHD is overexposure to screens and poor sleep and circadian rhythm distur- bance. I think the nature of intelligence is pretty weird. AIs are weird. Humans are weird, and most dogs are quite strange.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: I agree, and that\u2019s good.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: A lot of people who are really good at things are hard to work with or have a crazy personality tic. People have different levels of sensitivity. I don\u2019t think that means we have to assimilate. I just think there\u2019s some sort of social technology we are failing to grasp to allow us all to be free. We\u2019re in a crazy experiment right now. For example, universal suffrage is very new. How do you allow women to have agency and also not have a giant population collapse, because most things are easier than raising kids? What social technologies do we need to figure out here? Is it that men get more involved? Does the state get more involved? Is it about fertility technology that makes it easier to get pregnant when you\u2019re 50? We don\u2019t have the social technology to navigate the current era. Our nuclear treaties are falling apart as of yesterday. We clearly suck at communicating.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: That\u2019s so much. People talk about you a lot. People create narratives around you. What has irked you the most, and when do you feel most misunderstood?<\/p>\n

GRIMES: The thing that irks me the most is I\u2019ll try out a crazy idea and people just think I\u2019m insanely dumb or a Nazi or I hate humans. A couple of years ago, I got really canceled. I was like, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we fight the wars in a video game?\u201d Or, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we fight the wars with drones?\u201d Which by the way, is going to happen. I\u2019m like, \u201cWay less people would die.\u201d I\u2019m sure there\u2019s holes in it, but I think it\u2019s good to be able to try out ideas. It just makes me sad when people think I wish harm on others.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Do you feel flattened by anger? Because some of the anger is understood, but some of it is weird.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Something happens on social media, and it\u2019s a result of the fact that we\u2019re not in front of each other. No one has ever been mean to me in real life. A bunch of people are trapped in this thing that\u2019s meant to hijack their rage, and I feel bad because I\u2019m like, \u201cYou\u2019re releasing a bunch of cortisol into your body. You\u2019re making yourself sick and anxious.\u201d I don\u2019t think it\u2019s right, but they\u2019re hurting them- selves more than they\u2019re hurting me. I just get angry at the state of our information landscape.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Right.<\/p>\n

\"Grimes\"<\/p>\n

Dress and Tights Valentino. Shoes Paris Texas.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: I wish people could be more open-minded, but at the same time, you want that push-pull. I\u2019ve been wrong about a bunch of things, and I\u2019ll eat my words on the things I was wrong about. A few years ago I was like, \u201cThe capitalist system is the best system in the world.\u201d I\u2019ll eat my words on that, sure, but I like debating. I don\u2019t really want to be a pop star. I want to be an artist and experiment with culture and ideas. I want to be a philosopher in some capacity. Even if it\u2019s shitty and sometimes emotionally intense, it\u2019s fun to be on the front lines of figuring out what the future of human interaction is going to be.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Yeah, except the front line of the future is problematic right now, and who\u2019s in control of that future is problematic. Social media hijacks and amplifies rage more than anything, making it very difficult to actually have real conversations. And then you\u2019ve got a very small group of individuals who tend to be white and male who are in control of a lot of things in general. I don\u2019t know how we can have a proper conversation with all of that happening.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: We have to move very fast and be incredibly strategic. We can\u2019t be running people who aren\u2019t going to win. We need to be train- ing politicians and we need to be doing something about lobbying and super PACS. There\u2019s some pretty big holes in the democratic pro- cess, but it gets scarier when you start suggesting anything else. I can\u2019t make that many comments because I am not a citizen of this country and I need to get my immigration sorted.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Right.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: But this is why when people are super anti-tech. I\u2019m like, it would actually be good if you get into it, because we have OpenAI and Grok and scarier, less safe labs because people don\u2019t want to engage. They\u2019re like, \u201cI hate AI. I don\u2019t want anything to do with it.\u201d We need to support companies like Anthropic. We need to be aware of what\u2019s going on, and why it\u2019s dangerous. For the last six years, everyone\u2019s been like, \u201cStop talking about this AI nonsense.\u201d And I\u2019ve been like, \u201cGuys, we\u2019re going to end up in a military disaster. Will anyone listen to me?\u201d Not to be on my high horse, but this is the most dangerous thing that is ever going to happen. This is a bigger deal than Jesus. It\u2019s the same as monotheism taking over the Western world, if not much, much more impactful. If they kill\u2014actually, no, I can\u2019t say any more political things. I cannot agitate.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Go ahead. This is great.<\/p>\n

MITCHELL JACKSON: Yeah, let\u2019s not get you deported. Sorry to be the publicist, but I just don\u2019t want to deal with, \u201cGrimes got deported\u201d news.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: No, no, no.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: Okay. I guess we\u2019ve run out of time. Great talking.<\/p>\n

GRIMES: Yes. So great to speak to you again. You have a great weekend.<\/p>\n

OKORAFOR: You too. We\u2019ll talk more later.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Hair: Jake Gallagher using UNITE Hair at The Only Agency.<\/p>\n

Makeup: Zaheer Sukhnandan using MAC Cosmetics.<\/p>\n

Nails: Britney Tokyo using Apr\u00e9s Nail and TOKYO SPICE.<\/p>\n

Tailor: Irina Tshartaryan.<\/p>\n

Photography Assistant: Rilo Yamagata.<\/p>\n

Fashion Assistant: Sophia Ozan.<\/p>\n

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.<\/p>\n

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.<\/p>\n

On-set Production: Richard Knickerbocker.<\/p>\n

Production Assistant: Boris Navarro.<\/p>\n

Social Media Assistant: Ashley Hood.<\/p>\n

Location: Julia Stoschek Foundation at Variety Arts Theater, Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

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