Elijah Daniel wanted you to fall for his fake Grimes song. On Wednesday night, the content creator and internet troll posted a video of what appeared to be him and the singer Grimes flipping off a Tesla while singing diss lyrics about Elon Musk. “Fuck a Tesla I like a Honda/And fuck an X, double entendre,” sings Grimes' voice in the clip. Many users (and even Newsweek) fell for the troll immediately. Daniel's plan had worked.
“Everything that I do is generally so outrageous and stupid that it would make sense for me to do it, but I wanted to see how many people would believe it off the bat,” he tells Rolling Stone. “People will just kind of automatically assume it's real.”
The new video marks a return to the internet for Daniel after two years. The troll/creator/rapper — also known under the moniker Lil Phag — made headlines in 2013 when he petitioned for a Miley Cyrus song to become the national anthem (guess which one), and in 2016, when he tried throwing a two-foot pink dildo at Trump at a rally. He blew up on Vine at the time for his internet pranks and silly takes, and has since built a following on TikTok and Twitter. (Erm, X.)
Daniel wrote the song, titled “Nuisance,” as a Musk troll several months ago, enlisting Grammy-nominated duo SMLE to produce the track. He originally meant to find another artist to feature on the song, until he discovered Grimes' AI generator, Elf Tech, and decided to have the track double as a Musk diss and indirect commentary on the necessity of artificial intelligence regulation after Grimes unveiled the technology last April, writing on X, “Feel free to use my voice without penalty.” Daniel says that the song takes aim at “two of the biggest advocates of AI” by using Grimes' voice to diss the tech billionaire.
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