(ThyBlackMan.com) I love Iggy Azalea. I think what she’s doing is brilliant. She has taken the rap industry and turned it on its head by coming out with a song, err rap, which highlights her ability to sound like a drowning kitten WHILE racking up over 135 million views on YouTube. That’s right, 135 MILLION YouTube views. You do the math. If only 10 percent of her fans went out and bought her single, she will have sold 13.5 million copies, on one song!
She’s making a lot of people a LOT of money.
And after all, isn’t that what the rap game has turned into? Cash moves everything around me, CREAM, get the money, Iggy, Iggy, Iggy yawl. The ends justify the means, and if the ends are all about, well, ends (money for
those of you less initiated to hip hop lingo) then Iggy Azalea gets my vote as being the queen bee.
Still, there are the critics who are saying that there’s no way this white Australian should be rapping about the things she’s rapping about.
I believe that this is where her true genius shines. What Iggy Azalea has done is pull the sheets off the façade that there is any redeemable lyrical content associated with any claim of ethnic pride or cultural relevancy.
Today’s brand of salacious cellulose that is saturated in gross consumerism and passing itself off as rap music is audible crack. The first time you hear lyrics and a beat that you like, you’re hooked. Couple that with the visual stimuli of The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous meets ghetto-fabulous and voila, you have found the mixture that is sure to gain you a lot of customers.
And, just like crack, it’s equally as useless and destructive.
Growing up in New South Wales, far from the pot-holed riddled and drug infested southern neighborhoods that created the style of music she does, little Miss Amethyst Amelia Kelly heard her first rap song and decided “I want to be a rap star.” The pull must’ve been so strong that, along the way, she decided to trade in one form of white privilege (Australian heritage, long legs, thin waist, blonde hair, and opaque white skin) and morph herself into the object of overt male misogyny. Iggy Azalea traded in one career, which was modeling for one of the top agencies in New York, for some butt injections and “swag-on-demand” when the studio producers yelled “spit” (with lyrics undoubtedly written for her).
One of her first hits to go viral was a song about a part of a woman’s anatomy that rhymes with the name Delores. Her audience was primarily comprised of hard living, what I call “catfish folks” who either don’t understand or appreciate the art of subtlety. She put it all out there, and then capitalized on flaunting her “otherness” to a people programmed to be envious of the very physical traits that she was genetically pre-disposed to have.
Think about it. Iggy Azalea already had the hair texture that she witnessed many of her rap contemporaries spend hours, and thousands of dollars, to get their hair to look like. Iggy Azalea already had the white skin, sans skin bleaching creams and who knows whatever else many of her other women of color artist were doing. She learned how to rap with the inflection, and the swag, of a rapper from the “dirty-dirty”. Iggy Azalea even started dating from what I am sure was a very willing, and eligible, pool of eligible, and not so eligible, black men.
What Iggy Azalea has done, rather what rap music in its degenerated bastardized form has allowed her to do, is to become the face for a new kind of minstrel act.
In the earliest days of minstrel the performers were exclusively white. They performed in black face to white audiences who were very comfortable with seeing the buffoonery and racially insulting caricatures of black people. What Iggy Azalea has done is a hybrid of minstrel act and survival in a male dominated industry. I have no doubt that she is truly a fan of this style of rap music, and as a woman she is doing what she feels is necessary to succeed in this genre. But, what is most damaging now is that black people have a much greater degree of control over our image than we did back in the 1830’s and 1840’s. The best that we can do is to equate having a big booty and over-exaggerated sex appeal as a mark of approval for a woman rapper?
The repetitive message that most of today’s top rap artist broadcast is as healthy as the residue in a used crack pipe.
This is why I like Iggy Azalea. Her presence atop the charts right now is a mirror that this present rap industry should look into and see that they are the emperor who is wearing no clothes. They’re the ones who have made it very easy for someone like her, and the multitudes that will surely follow, to become the undisputed queen of whatever you want to call it.
So keep on doing what you’re doing Miss Kelly. Maybe one day someone in the rap “game” will wake up and realize what they’ve allowed one of the greatest musical art forms on the planet to degenerate into. I long for the day when more rappers actually start saying something worth listening to. Until then Iggy Azalea, you really are fancy.
Staff Writer; Steven Robinson
May also visit this talented writer over at; http://noroomtowiggle.wordpress.com/.
