Dec 12, 2011
13 notes

“My World,” Iggy Azalea (Ignorant Art, Internet, 2011)

I find it very, very, very hard to figure out Iggy Azalea. Amazonian Aussies who can rap like this don’t come around, like, ever, and she’s magnetic/attractive enough on camera to make dissecting the audio in the context of the video impossible. (So I’m not even going to try, not in this post.)

She’s got an ear for beats, too: “My World” has synths that carom off canyon walls and head skyward, crunchy bass and drums, and a sort of Toomp-lite feel that makes me miss when Toomp was everywhere. This stuff is for sneering over, and T.I. has been figuring out that he’s still good at that of late, but, somehow, a white girl from fucking Australia’s damn good at it, too.

And that’s where the question of talent (Azalea has it) means the questions about intent: “Aussie hoe, put my country on” is fine from Oz’ finest as a statement of place and purpose, but then you get something like this quatrain.

G shit, I’m what you ain’t
Six-fo’ dipped wit’ a candy paint
I-I get done, what you cain’t
White bitch on Slauson, gangstas faint

Take away that lethal last bar, and that’s not that far from Bun B circa every year of Bun B’s career; add it, and it’s a white girl trying very hard to show everyone the G pass she got by spitting … while also being very aware of how strange it is for her to be hanging in this world.

There’s the Kreayshawn strategy, too: “My world, rhyme vicious / White girl team fulla bad bitches” is a) the sort of hook that would set a party off and b) language that reinforces the dichotomy between the “basic bitch” that rap despises and the “bad bitch” zone cordoned off for the cool women who own their sexuality and rap and generally carry themselves almost as feminists. Put aside that Azalea’s a demonstrably better rapper than Kreayshawn, and, well, are they really so different?

I’m not sure, honestly, which is why I come back to this: One of the privileges enjoyed by the attractive woman in rap is that she will have suitors of all sorts for her services, and the flurries of media coverage Azalea has already gotten have proven that she can turn heads and draw ears with who she is. Perhaps she’ll try to remain independent and do her thing without the machine she doesn’t really need; perhaps she’ll let the people with purse strings figure out a single lane for her to focus on. In any case, I care now.

  1. andyhutchins reblogged this from ironstring and added:
    Just want to clarify this: I’m not pitting Iggy against Kreayshawn, or at least not intending to, in part because I know...
  2. ironstring reblogged this from andyhutchins and added:
    my first thought was “if she ever catches on, there are gonna be a million new thinkpieces and every one of them will...
  3. imanunscripted said: well, she’s better than kreayshawn.
  4. andyhutchins posted this
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