We Need to Stop Talking About Iggy Azalea (Article posted on FB by a friend, feedback welcome) [View all]

[ismnotwasm]

We need to stop talking about Iggy Azalea. Not forever, but for right now. We don’t need to stop talking about her because she’s a poseur—though she is and there should always, always be conversations about poseurs in the public sphere. We don’t need to stop talking about her because she’s white. But we need to stop talking about her because her whiteness has granted her a privileged position in a conversation about race that we've been having all year, and in all that talking, we’ve learned nothing and changed nothing. And now, as the year closes, we are still talking about her when she shouldn’t be the story at all; when talking about her comes at the expense of Azealia Banks, and what Azealia Banks has to say about the music industry and the world we live in is way more important that anything Iggy Azalea has ever said.

That Macklemore album wasn’t better than the Drake record. That Iggy Azalea shit is not better than any fucking black girl that’s rapping today. And when they give those awards out—’cause the Grammys are supposed to be accolades for artistic excellence—Iggy Azalea is not excellent. —Azealia Banks

Despite releasing her long-delayed debut album, Broke With Expensive Taste, to significant critical acclaim, Azealia Banks is likely better known for her caustic and combative social media presence, which has seen her exercise no amount of chill. She lashes out at her perceived peers and frenemies, her collaborators and producers, her icons and respected rap figures, the varied and many machinations of the music game. Unfortunately, the social media beefs have overshadowed the larger narrative formulating for the past three years, obscuring the journey of a woman who completed an arc from having her nose pressed up against the window of the mainstream music industry, to getting a major label deal, to growing disenchanted and striking out on her own. It’s a journey that usually takes an artist much longer, with many detours, false starts and regrouping. Told 140 characters at a time, Banks came off as often problematic, sometimes misguided and, quite frankly, wholly stank.
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More insightful than inciteful, she was all over the place, touching on industry politics and revenue streams (she’s happy to be independent and deal with her fans directly via the Internet forevermore), media conspiracy theories and race (“We have Eric Garner, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, and y’all fucking talking about Bill Cosby, like, what the fuck?”), the classification of hip-hop and the swagger-jacking of black culture—even bringing up reparations. “There are huge corporations that are still caking off that slave money,” she said. At this point, she broke down. Her voice cracked. She choked. There were tears, and she could barely finish her next thought: “At the very fucking least, y’all owe me the right to my fucking identity and to not exploit that shit,” Banks demanded. “That’s all that we’re holding on to—hip-hop and rap.”



http://www.complex.com/music/2014/12/we-need-to-stop-talking-about-iggy-azalea