Azealia Banks

i know no one cares about her anymore on even a schadenfreude level but her begging to be dropped from Universal is too funny

my favorite parts

I would literally give anything to be on XL right now

I'm tired of having to consult a group of old white guys about my black girl craft. they don't even know what they're listening for or to.

which is interesting, given that less than 2 years ago this is how she was explaining why she split with XL: "I was like, this is not what I worked so hard my entire life to do - to be rejected by some English guy in West Bumblefrickin' nowhere London, telling me I'm amateur or something like that."

I'm tired of having to consult a group of old white guys about myhttp://i934.photobucket.com/albums/ad184/sdolnack/thecraft_zpsae454a80.jpg

Everytime this thread is revived, I think, "oh who did she dis or underwhelm now?"

Would love to read a blow-by-blow oral history of this clusterfuck tbh - getting on for three years since 212 and I don't really know why

there's no way that Universal would willingly let this shit go on forever, not want to capitalise on how huge 212 was, etc. there are some idiots around but the biz isn't some huge cabal of evil forever destroying the souls of poor misunderstood artists - I'm betting all this will come back to her being unmanageable and irritating.

surely not the first or the most unmanageable/irritating artist signed to a major label tho

Less forgiving times. A decade ago she could have yapped her way into all kinds of dumb controversy and still probably have come up with at least a release date and while the ignominous fade into irrelevance couldn't happen to a more deserving person, can't help but rue the wasted potential.

There's not exactly a lack of historical precedents for artists that happen to get their shit together long enough to release one great song. It's just that there was nowhere other than the end of the local bar for those artists to bitch about how misunderstood they were.
Social media...

Also. There's a similarly long precedent for record companies sitting on records by people that literally no-one at the company can stand. Generally you have to get through at least one album campaign before that happens though. It takes a great perseverance to be enough of a nightmare that people won't even put your first record onto itunes.

She's managed to make herself the villain of the piece, in contrast to Sky Ferreira, whose whole narrative now is the woman who survived major label malice/cluelessness to make a great debut. I don't know if the behind-the-scenes scenarios are as different as they seem but when you've spent over two years publicly railing against everyone you meet, people are more likely to think the A&R guys have a point.

idk...i've certainly made my fair share of "hey azealia banks is beefing again" jokes and she rarely comes across well on twitter, but i just feel judging pop stars on social media actions shouldn't be the be-all and end-all that it seems to be now. she might well have herself to blame for turning herself into a punchline but like bieber, once someone seems to exist only as a punchline i question how much of that is informed and how much of that is just running with What Everyone Thinks regardless of how little we actually know of what's gone on behind the scenes.

let's not forget there's a long history of major labels fucking over artists, clashing with them over aesthetics etc, and generally being in the wrong in these situations. sky ferreira's a pretty good example.

Bumblefrickin' nowhere London

this is classic though.

on the other hand -- and I really liked night time, my time, this isn't about that -- there is a difference between sky ferreira and azealia banks that probably has a great deal to do with how the "whole narrative" shakes out

sorry West Bumblefrickin' nowhere London

I liked the 1991 EP and Fantasea mixtape but all the gross shit she's said since then has made me definitively stop caring about her.

just make a good goddamn song and all is forgiven

I am certain that the obvious difference between Azealia and Sky is playing into the way this narrative is being spun/received but then again I am not aware of Sky Ferreira saying anything remotely like any of the objectionable things posted on this thread

http://i1.wp.com/vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/7528190724_d35b4731fd_z-e1343855148482.jpg%3Fresize%3D330%2C500

http://i1.wp.com/vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/7528190724_d35b4731fd_z-e1343855148482.jpg

"just make a good goddamn song and all is forgiven"

I guess that's the sticking point for me, though -- everything Azealia Banks has released (for various definitions of "released," etc.) has been pretty good to really damn good. you can argue that it's mostly the fault of the beats, but in 2014 you can argue that for basically everyone, and even if Banks is more or less running through the same set of branding adjectives she's doing it with style and skill, at least.

everything Azealia Banks has released (for various definitions of "released," etc.) has been pretty good to really damn good.

I fundamentally disagree with this

i think her problem is that she either hasn't shown the skill or the desire to write a crossover pop song

"212" was completely accidental in that sense. but everything she releases just screams "small and very limited fanbase"

& i would more or less agree w/ katherine re the quality of her work

and by "crossover pop song" i don't mean selling out, she seems particularly well positioned to something that could appeal to a bunch of people while still sticking to her core sound and vision

but, i dunno. "ATM jam" just wasn't very good. i guess that was the one.

and if she didn't wanna have to write crossover stuff she probably should've signed with any number of indie labels that i'm sure would've been glad to have her

I mean, this is probably not a good comparison for, uh, feud reasons, but someone like angel haze has released a good amount of genuinely bad songs. but then azealia probably dodged that by never actually releasing an album

the problem with conflicts/disagreements in taste is that I am looking at "angel haze has released a good amount of genuinely bad songs" and thinking "... and so has Azealia Banks, who in my opinion has yet to release a song I would call 'good'; plus, Angel Haze leaking her album points to the fact that the album was actually done/recorded, which is something Azealia Banks seems unable to accomplish"

basically, I don't think Azealia Banks has the work ethic necessary to be a recording artist, leaving aside all opinions on talent

the trouble with everything AZB has put out post-"212" hasn't so much been that it's outright terrible (well, apart from "atm jam") - more boring, demoish, stuck in a holding pattern, makes her look like she's a one-trick artist. aside from "young rapunxel" which was a laudable but failed experiment. we haven't seen any evidence of her putting together a strong, coherent statement - which angel haze had done and then some even before her album...

Never really saw AB as a statement artist to begin with though whereas Haze had something to say from the get go. I mean some artists take entire careers to grow into that shit and some do perfectly fine without doing so at all.

The 1991 ep was hardly boring or demoish. I think those songs together definitely represent a coherent statement that she should've ran with. But this industry waits for not a soul, so poor dat.

Really? As much as I liked it it felt pretty loose and thrown together and wasn't exactly a complete reflection of her repertoire.

See, I felt the same way about Fantasea. Totally a random assortment of songs with ~sea-punk references. I like it, but coherent it is not.

fantasea gets a pass from me because it came out more or less at the same time as 1991, so it felt like the "getting this weird stuff out my system" dump to accompany the polished EP

*cohesive

The difference between her and Sky Ferriera is that I think Sky genuinely wanted to do something that was against the grain of what her a&r thought they'd signed but in the end she made a good record. I think Banks just took the big money advance, pissed it against a wall and then turned in an average or worse record that the label spent 2 years in a stand off about. In a nutshell "we gave you $X, we want a record that's worth that amount of money".
That's the hidden dialogue behind most of these stories.
It's also exactly what happened with XL, she took an advance to make a record, didn't make one, asked for more money, was told no, fired everyone on her team and XL dropped her cos it wasn't worth the hassle.

let's not forget there's a long history of major labels fucking over artists, clashing with them over aesthetics etc, and generally being in the wrong in these situations. sky ferreira's a pretty good example.

yeah but...this isn't exactly a secret? like, I feel bad for anybody who ends up in the grip of a shitty major label contract, but...it's not like people haven't been yelling for years & years & years that when you sign to a major, you're going to lose autonomy, you're basically trading it for an advance

these kids haven't been listening to people yell for years & years though

they do have this thing called the internet though I heard it has lots of information

and she'd already been through a contract process once, right? when you sign with a major, come on...nobody who's worked with any other musicians at a professional level, even small-time, for half a year, hasn't collected several "I knew a guy and then the majors" stories. they are literally some of the first things you hear if you get even the tiniest little two-hundred-people-showed-up-at-the-New-York-show buzz going. every musician age 14 and up has heard that major labels are dicey business.

good point

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091019192910AAgKF9q

ya for example they could read the rapgenius page for the song Labels by GZA

Lot of people, you know what I'm saying
That be getting misinformed, thinking everything is everything
You could just get yourself a little deal, whatever
You know what I'm saying
You gonna get on, you gonna get rich
And all these labels be trying to lure us in like spiders
Into the web, you know what I'm saying

RZA’s talking about his experience with Cold Chillin' Records who released GZA’s first album Words from the Genius. In the book Check the Technique, RZA states, “Cold Chillin' didn’t promote the record, unfortunately. I felt good to be on that label because they was the Def Jam of that era. But things didn’t work out for me. I wasn’t getting no recognition, so i bounced. It was back to the drawing board.” and “I came to [Cold Chillin' records] where i was just as lyrically talented as their top artists and they didn’t recognize that. They fucked my album up”.

So sometimes people gotta come out and speak up
And let people understand
That you know you gotta read the label
You gotta read the label
If you don't read the Label you might get poisoned

Just like people who don’t read food labels, the people not checking the record label could get screwed over.

[Masta Killa]
Bomb these niggas God!

Masta Killa was in the booth during the recording of this track and starts it off by encouraging the GZA to drop some lyrics on these record labels.

lol

yeah but...this isn't exactly a secret? like, I feel bad for anybody who ends up in the grip of a shitty major label contract, but...it's not like people haven't been yelling for years & years & years that when you sign to a major, you're going to lose autonomy, you're basically trading it for an advance

― joe perry has been dead for years (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, January 27, 2014 7:45 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah...everyone does know or should know that deals are a gamble, but the jackpot they'd win if it works out, however unlikely, remains irresistible. it seems like so many artists have the vague idea that not being signed means making whatever you want and releasing it whenever you want, but don't actually realize how important those freedoms are to them until they don't have them.

some dude otm, the story of major label deals is "I knew it would probably suck but I could not turn down the chance and when it didn't pan out I wished I'd listened to the part that knew it was gonna suck"

but anybody who claims they really couldn't find good information about how major label deals work? after already having had a label deal with a large indie? come on, now.

I think there's just an assumption that once you have fame/a fanbase, there's always some kind of escape hatch for you. even if you have to beg to be dropped from your label on twitter to find the escape hatch.

i feel also like when '212' dropped there was more of a mystique about the song as a whole, and not just her rapping—and then the whole "(ft. lazy jay)" reworking of the song's official title happened, which took a little bit of shine off the idea that she was crafting beats instead of just rapping over previously extant songs in their entirety. obviously being skilled at picking banging jams and rapping like hell over them is nothing to sneeze at but that seemed to be the first crack in her veneer imo (and her subsequent feuds with producers who have worked with her to create beats tailored to her style haven't helped, even if you take prevailing notions about 'difficult women' into account).

"212" still slams

yeah but...this isn't exactly a secret? like, I feel bad for anybody who ends up in the grip of a shitty major label contract, but...it's not like people haven't been yelling for years & years & years that when you sign to a major, you're going to lose autonomy, you're basically trading it for an advance

so? doesn't mean it doesn't happen. not really surprising that every young brash upstart kid thinks they can make it work for them even despite the warnings.

i mean, it's not just sky ferreira and azealia banks. fiona apple, jojo, toni braxton, nina sky, that's just off the top of my head - regardless of whether they "should" have "known" the major label game they'd be expected to play, i don't think placing the blame on the artist is a particularly helpful way to assess these matters.

i think her problem is that she either hasn't shown the skill or the desire to write a crossover pop song

"212" was completely accidental in that sense. but everything she releases just screams "small and very limited fanbase"

it's interesting also how often this happens to rappers who aren't accepted by hip-hop's core fanbase, too - we were talking about yelawolf and angel haze the other week, both of whom never seemed suited to major label expectations/making crossover pop songs, but the fact that they stood out from other rappers (for superficial reasons as well as artistic ones)...made the major labels think they would be? azealia banks seems to fit into this pattern as well. the body of work that would display these artists at their best (reservation, trunk muzik, imagine a less amateurish fantasea) isn't accepted by the audience that would accept the equivalent from a chief keef type, but neither is it a crossover pop album in any sense.

i wonder if they'd have fared better on major labels a decade or two ago, when cult artists could be sustained in that system more easily?

i also wonder whether it'd be completely impossible for a major label to attempt to make some of the stronger/hookier moments on reservation a crossover pop hit, on its own terms? stranger records have charted.

i guess the larger question is what you do with critically acclaimed, very distinct artists with a cult fanbase that isn't part of a larger ecosystem.