In 2018, you go unhinged or you go home.
Azealia Banks, the prodigious MC who remains a Twitter villain even after being banned from the service and an underground rapper even after being dropped from multiple record labels, let loose on Instagram after an allegedly disastrous weekend at Elon Musk’s home to see Grimes, Musk’s girlfriend and a fellow musician.
However, when reached via Twitter direct messages, Musk told Gizmodo that he “has never even met [Banks] or communicated with her in any way.” In other words, he doesn’t know her.
A Tesla spokesperson told our sister site, Jalopnik, that the claims were “complete nonsense,” but Banks is a veteran of long and nonsensical beefs. She’s feuded with everyone from Sarah Palin to Nick Cannon. And, like both Musk’s Space X endeavors, wants her future beefs to be interplanetary.
Like a dystopian epistolary novel about two feuding houses, Banks told her side of the story via a breathtaking and scattered stream of Instastories. There’s a damsel in distress (Banks, left alone in the mansion), enigmatic villains (Grimes and Musk), and heady oppression metaphors (Banks compares the entire ordeal of having her time wasted to white colonization of Africa.)
According to Banks, she spent the past few days at the Musk estate in LA, hoping to finish a song with Grimes for her upcoming sophomore album. The collaboration never came to fruition. Banks alleges Grimes ignored her for days, the first point in a deeply absurd comedy of errors that Banks describes as “a real [life] episode of ‘Get Out.’”
“I waited all weekend while grimes coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on twitter while on acid,” Banks posted. “It was probably some weird threesome sex shit to being with.”
Banks and Grimes, however, have been teasing a collaboration on Twitter for months in advance of Bank’s new album. But rather than cut her losses and simply fly back to New York in silence, Banks went on a separate Insta-rant that began as a delirious critique of colonial wealth and racial privilege, became a vaguely eugenicist denigration of Musk as a caveman, and ended, ultimately, on a few lines that will probably appear on her album in lieu of Grimes. (Gizmodo, it should be noted, could not verify all of these messages were sent by Banks, which were captured by other reporters but have apparently been deleted since.)
“Elon Musk is really part of the problem...when you talk about white male privilege and colonialism,” it begins. “The last time I try working with a white bitch,” it ends.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to shock anyone this late in the Internet Beef game, yet Banks has delivered.
Additional reporting by Bryan Menegus.