Hip hop’s wild child Azealia Banks has leveled a stinging accusation: She says white female R&B acts and rappers are corny—and so is their appropriation of Black culture.
In a profanity-laced interview with Pitchfork, Banks described how cyclical and forced she thinks the music industry is.
“It’ll be like, ‘For a couple of years, we’re gonna fuck with blue-eyed soul, and here’s Duffy, here’s Adele’—who’s great—but now we’ve got a thousand White girls singing blue-eyed Soul,” Banks said. “It’s so regurgitated and corny. You have it in everything. You have it in indie rock. You’ll have Interpol, and then the National, and it’s just like, “Really, dude? Really?”
But now it seems that record labels are moving away from “blue-eyed soul” and selling the rapper Barbie prototype, which from the looks of it is just a Black stereotype on steroids.
“Or it’ll be like, ‘We’re gonna pop off the White-girl rapper,’ so we’ll have Gwen Stefani and Fergie, and then it’ll get worse and worse and worse,” continued the 212 singer, in an obvious reference to Iggy Azalea. “And you’re just like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ The whole trend of White girls appropriating Black culture was so corny—it was more corny than it was offensive. Trust me, I’m not offended: All the things I’m trying to run away from in my Black American experience are all the things that they’re celebrating. So if they fuckin’ want them, have them; if they want to be considered oversexualized and ignorant every time they open their fucking mouth, then fucking take it. But more than that, the art is not good.”
Even more confusing, she said, is where these new rappers are getting these stereotypes of how they believe Black women should behave.
“These songs are not good,” Banks said. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, you’re doing this Black woman impression, is that what the fuck you think of me, bitch? I need to meet the Black woman that you’re imitating because I’ve never met any Black woman who acts that bizarre.’ It’s crazy that this becomes mainstream culture. All of America is celebrating shit like that. It’s so weird.”
Banks apparently missed the irony of calling out stereotypes of ignorant Black women while filling her comments with over-the-top profanity.
