Q: Can you spot the difference between these two pictures of a translucent, pregnant Grimes that she posted to her Twitter?
A: The nipples. It’s the nipples.
Look, despite the literal, actual transparency in this picture, Grimes can sometimes be a bit opaque, so we can’t take this post as a pregnancy announcement at face value. Could Grimes and her partner, Elon Musk, be expecting? Based on that one photo where she looks like his daughter, Grimes seems to get along fine with at least one of Musk’s five sons. Plus, Musk is kind of a meme-fluent troll, so it’s not impossible that this is how he’d want to announce it. Also, Grimes responded to an Instagram comment on the pics by writing, “being knocked up is a very feral & war-like state of being.” (The post has since been taken down.) If this is really the case, Musk and Grimes had better invite Azealia Banks to the baby shower or else she’ll go full Maleficent.
Then there’s the second possibility, which is that this is Grimes’s way of announcing she’s pregnant with her upcoming album, Miss Anthropocene, which is due for a February 21 release date. She posted the pictures with a Jupiter emoji, a knife emoji, and an underscore. The underscore makes us think it could all be a line of unknowable code from the apocalyptic nü Stone Age computer on the announced album art? Also, on the upcoming album cover, there’s a glowing pomegranate with a slit down the middle attached to an umbilical cord that is being used as a computer mouse. The fetus and the slit down Grimes’s chest in these new pictures could be callbacks to that? We’re really spitballing, at this point.
And then there’s the third possibility: that Elon Musk saw the Avacar and didn’t want to be one-upped by Mercedes-Benz, and this is his way of telling Tesla fans that he too will birth a car that merges human and machine against a Na’vi-blue motif. It’s a metaphor, duh.
Whatever plane of reality we end up meeting Grimes and Musk on, we wish her and her creepy CGI baby all the best.