Azealia Banks

(I also think you drastically overstate azaelia's potential for popularity in the U.s. Without a hit vs traditional street or college rap but w/e)

i think she came a bit before her time in a way in that streams weren't yet incorporated into billboard data, so she had a viral hit but nothing to propel it upwards. like, if "212" had jumped into the charts on the back of streams, radio would have paid attention to it, and it might have gotten her a stronger foothold in the industry. instead she used up all of "212" to get a record deal and then basically had to start from scratch.

i doubt it would have materially changed her career but it's an interesting thought exercise perhaps.

i don't really see why the us is even part of this argument

'212' went euro top 20, in a market with no quaint commercial/hipster polar binary where breaking the ice was the hardest part - she and the label p much had a free run at printing money and they blew it

At Hot 97, Banks said that label executives spent 2 million dollars on her album, but "were very specific about wanting something they could play in Top 40" as a return on that investment. But there is no clear slot for a petite, densely lyrical female from Harlem rapping over '90s deep house on today's Top 40, and Banks wasn't interested in becoming anything else.

oh word?

petite, densely lyrical female is like the phrase will self used

After 45 minutes in her presence, alternately infuriated, charmed and deeply impressed, I told her: "You're going to be huge – but probably first you should consider being normal size."

She is indeed a rearview-mirror dingle-dangle of a woman, but her ego is huge. She's also extremely beautiful, yet she's no ingénue: she attended the LaGuardia performing arts school and cut her teeth early doing musical theatre with the Tada! Youth Theater. When, in the course of our talk, she burst spontaneously into song, I almost swooned at the coloratura and melodic purity of her voice.

I know a whole bunch of IRL Banks fans, but they aren't str8 hiphop head dudes so they might as well not exist to deej

We're not talking about who I know, I know irl banks fans too. But Seattle =\= the u.s. any more than bushwick does

can I ask you to restate that point just for clarity's sake, like what exactly are you asserting re Seattle

Wait is the rev no longer living in Seattle

he was in Portland for a while, another non-U.S. city

true

this entire argument is subsidiary, Why Banks Flopped is hardly a mystery but neither is it exactly the point. must say i find it odd that deej boosts so many non-charting rappers because "regional popularity" but is so insistent that non-charting makes azealia banks entirely without merit

tbh everything about this latest argument is about iggy azalea, and banks is just getting praised because she was the one who explicitly said what everyone was thinking

Now in ninety-one we got a new brand, a new band
Lookin' like the same old Klan
Same old thieves that skeez so we gotta make sure
That real rap has got to endure

this entire argument is subsidiary, Why Banks Flopped is hardly a mystery but neither is it exactly the point. must say i find it odd that deej boosts so many non-charting rappers because "regional popularity" but is so insistent that non-charting makes azealia banks entirely without merit

― lex pretend, Wednesday, December 24, 2014 3:13 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yr conflating two independent concerns. one is my ambivalence towards her music, which isn't particularly related to why i think she doesn't really have a shot at broad success w/out a hit record ... u.s. is based on regional markets & she has none. she instead appeals to linked chains of cosmopolitan trendy ppl. a top 40 single (a la "Fancy") would enable her to bypass the need for the former but she now says she's uninterested in such things bc she is a ~creative~. Which is fair, and her prerogative! But lunging for top 40 is what iggy did that made her pop off like she has

Her fanbase is primarily queer so of course it's going to be cosmopolitan-based rather than regional. Also I'm completely over straight dudes dismissing queer aesthetics as hipsterism. Still none of this has anything to do with the point.

deej do you live in a world where regional charts have anywhere near the variation / diversity /impact they had prior to the Telecommunications Act of 1996? must be rad

What regional charts ? Who's talking about charts?

Her fanbase is primarily queer so of course it's going to be cosmopolitan-based rather than regional. Also I'm completely over straight dudes dismissing queer aesthetics as hipsterism. Still none of this has anything to do with the point.

― Dej & the Fommly Loaf (The Reverend), Wednesday, December 24, 2014 6:58 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

... Dog you know my taste better than this.

And there are obviously queer aesthetics that are very mainstream friendly and those which are not. I think you're being overly reductive of queer aesthetics if you think that's my argument here

on the one hand I'd like to heard you bear out "u.s. is based on regional markets" a little more

OTOH you've opened up multiple fronts here so I'm just going to make some popcorn.gif

im speaking of rap specifically but i think its p self evident, you have artists make it big in a local market which primes the artist for the big time bc their music is already at some level 'audience tested' by a community w wide swaths of taste as opposed to a self-selected community of like minds

Still none of this has anything to do with the point.

― Dej & the Fommly Loaf (The Reverend), Thursday, December 25, 2014 12:58 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't see how banks' commercial appeal or lack of is being used to distract from or dismiss her point, the reason she's being praised, which is not that much to do with her

i wish we could stop acting like only artists who make it to the "big time" are relevant

who is dismissing banks' point? who is saying only artists who make it to the big time are relevant? idek

you have artists make it big in a local market which primes the artist for the big time bc their music is already at some level 'audience tested' by a community w wide swaths of taste as opposed to a self-selected community of like minds

yeah this has been a music biz strategy for generations for sure, but it's generally been reliant on regional radio - the internet has massively reduced the need for regional success prior to blowing up

just imo I guess. I don't really think you need a regional "I'm big here" in any genre to get on, not in this day & age

I know managers care a lot less about one's local picture than they did a decade ago. it's still a thing, but

it's not just the internet that has "reduced the need for regional success" - the one-size-fits-all programming strategies of the companies that own radio stations has helped eradicate it

https://medium.com/cuepoint/robert-christgau-expert-witness-c691650fc17b

Is dude still getting checks from Microsoft or did he use bing as a verb out of habit? Genuine preference?

72 year old man writing about azealia banks' "genitalia" ...... nice

Sometimes gossip can be so enlightening. The reflective opener “All Things Go” is pretty solid on its own. But word that this particular best rapper alive just ended a 12-year relationship with her homeboy boyfriend

did he mean to write "black" here or...

I think you know the answer to that.

i thought deans were starting to clamp down on grade inflation nowadays

i mean he's clearly trying to denote that he's the New York guy she was with since before she got famous but it's definitely phrased very awkwardly

who is dismissing banks' point? who is saying only artists who make it to the big time are relevant? idek

you're the one who took banks' recent interview as a jumping off point to make the entire conversation about her commercial viability

my only point there was that she's saying two things that don't really reconcile: she didn't want to record a 'fancy', or any top 40 record; iggy did. At a certain point the argument becomes a tautology. the pop charts work the way they work; we live in a country full of ppl whose experience w/ music is based on very straightforward populist tools, and shunning those tools as a sign of ideological purity isn't going to give you a big slice of the pie. Arguing about jelly shoes and sea punk isn't off-putting to mainstream america; it's just confusing & a conversation that maybe 2% of the population of the country is even able to follow.

fwiw i spent some time w/ azealia's album & found it a lot better than i expected from a personal POV, kind of a cool kitchen sink vibe that is more Deee-lite than I expected. Also, she doesn't do that annoying hyper-enunciated flow that drove me nuts on '212'

"hyper-enunciated"

check out this dog whistle

-_- it's clearly an affect on her part, one that happens to bug me, it is not remotely the same thing as the racism of 'articulate'

and there are plenty of rappers who do 'enunciated' styles i dig (cf nicki minaj, young zee, too short, quik)

if it codes as anything to me its the associations of normcore tbrr

that is, ppl affecting normcore, not the norms themselves

I don't think it's the racism of "articulate," I think it's the racism of "not 'black' enough" (see also "thread for pics of Drake looking ridiculous," ilx's cryptic answer to "Drakes the kinda nigga that..."):

don't wanna open up a can of worms with this but there's something.. kind of... "white" about azealia's intonation on her verses. right? to the point that i actually thought she was white at first. not that i think that's significant or anything necessarily. this has probably been talked about before. but it creates a weird kind of frisson when she's throwing around the n-word, classic thug boasts, etc

she definitely uses at least two registers of voice in 212, the second one which is def a parody of a white bro nerd voice

well i think the question is is she fucking around w/a voice that she thinks codes white, cause the stoner voice in that song is def one you hear people imitating for lolz more than you like actually hear people speaking in, its a well known p clearly identifiable joke mode, tho obvs labeling it white is somewhat reductive as there are certainly many irl not white stoners who speak kinda like that

i didnt know azealia banks wasnt british

apparently she's from harlem! who knew

i'm not saying i thought she was british, just that a casual scanning of that shitshow of a song could plausibly lead one to that idea

xp yeah and then knowing lex liked it i just assumed lol quality zing

Knowing what lyrics "scan as new york" means you listened to more than 30 seconds of Alicia Banks without closing your browser window in disgust; so there's probably a TuNeYardS thread you should be posting in, bruh

Not to downplay the impact of race but I do think its a lil weird how everyone is pretending like she doesn't make retro hip house for hipsters

What makes it "clear" to you that her "hyper-enunciation" on 212 is an affect? How can you distinguish between which registers are more affected than others? How do you decide the authenticity of someone's register?

I can't even parse any sentence where you use the word "norm" or "normcore" and I'm not about to try.

i dont know how i'm supposed to explain to you that her vocal style on '212' never struck me as a normal speaking voice but as an affect, except to say that it seemed to draw attention to its artificiality, its caricature-ness.

i think you are getting at something worthwhile in general, i just think you're wrong in this instance. Look upthread at her shoes: Azealia Banks

i think those are NAGL on white ppl too; the whole style is just goofy to me. her weird enunciated delivery on '212' is the rap equivalent of those shoes.

that's what i mean about 'normcore.' ... actually, a better example is how azealia was also involved in the quest to bring back jelly sandals. i think that's a corny normcore look, and she had a corny normcore flow. it's like this reclaiming of the 'regular' that was more in line IMO w/ art school hipster shit than ... it never occurred to me that she might be parodying whiteness

er, that she was parodying whiteness exclusively, at any rate. i suppose that's the subtext of all 'normcore' looks

What makes it "clear" to you that her "hyper-enunciation" on 212 is an affect?

idk looks like it's right there in the quotes you just posted

I think her engagement with internet microcultures -- including normcore -- is more a reflection of her interest in these things than any kind of conscious statement on race. Same thing with the stoner voice she does -- the point is to demonstrate that her talent is boundless and that she can assimilate whatever she wants into her art without losing control. Clearly, considering her statements on cultural appropriation, she doesn't think that every artist should view culture the way she tends to, as a bricoleur's buffet, but still, if you look at her music it's obvious that she doesn't want to be tied to a constraining ideal of authenticity either. She is a child of the internet and the white stoner voice belongs to her as much as it does any white stoner. The heteroglossia of her best songs feels qualitatively different from like, nicki minaj's parodic "voices" or iggy azalea's exploitative one-note schtick.

yeah i mean like i said, in listening to the album now i was kind of impressed at the kitchen sink pastiche-ness of it the way i would be a basement jaxx record or something ... it's better and broader than i expected.

nb it still does not *shock* me that this isn't hugely popular in the U.S., although it's certainly better than iggy azealia's album, not that this was ever in doubt

She's a very different kind of artist than either iggy or nicki, i think. More gifted but less savvy in terms of positioning herself in the public/establishing a brand.

well, iggy isn't very savvy either. iggy just had a hit record and white privilege