Listen to a preview of Grimes’ new song “about having to defeat Azealia Banks when she tried to destroy my life”

Early on Sunday (ET) Grimes took to Discord to perform a “Metaverse Super Beta” DJ set as part of the Splendour XR festival. The set, which I managed to listen to live after a very confusing few minutes trying to work out how, exactly, to use Discord — I’m 23 and proudly cheugy — was vintage DJ Grimes, featuring a bunch of new music mashed up with songs like Britney Spears’ “Toxic”, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, and Enya’s “Orinoco Flow”. (It wasn’t entirely unlike her wonderful Apple Music Cyberpunk 2077 mixtape.)

As Stereogum points out, when Grimes dropped new song “100% Tragedy” during the set, she took to the Discord chat to explain the song’s inspiration, saying the track “is about having to defeat azealia banks when she tried to destroy my life”. Although the Discord set isn’t legally archived anywhere, the track was previously shared by Grimes in a TikTok; listen to a snippet of it below.

If you don’t have the incident in question burned into your brain, a refresher: in June 2018, Azealia Banks announced that she was going to collaborate with Grimes. Two months later, in August, Banks alleged, via Instagram, that she had flown to LA to work with Grimes, only to have been left “for days” in the house of Grimes’ boyfriend, tech billionaire Elon Musk. At the time, she called Grimes a “dirty-sneaker-inbred-out of the woods Pabst beer pussy methhead-junkie”, and Musk a “trash ass beta male” with “pork skin” whose family fortune “is rooted in emerald and ore mines in South Africa during apartheid”, referring to Musk’s father’s purchase of a Zambian emerald mine in the ‘80s. She described her stay at Musk’s house, ultimately, “like a real life episode of Get Out”, wrote a song about the affair, and was later subpoenaed in a lawsuit against Musk due to the fact that her stay at Musk’s house coincided with Musk tweeting “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured”.

In a response Instagram story archived by Stereogum, Banks responded to Grimes’ explanation of the song, writing: “Grimes def has some psychosexual obsession with me. 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. Starting to notice all the weird undercover millennial racists hide out on discord.”

@grimes

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♬ 100 Percent Tragedy by Grimes - Warnymph