Rude Girl

In the increasingly unlikely event that you're unfamiliar with singer, rapper and ace provocateur Azealia Banks, please find below a selection of her lyrics by way of a neat ‘n’ tidy introduction.

“I’mma ruin you, cunt!”
“I’m a hoodlum, n****”
“I’m a taker and a fibber and a faker”
“I make hits, muthafucker, do you jiggle your dick?”
“Take a lick up on my genital”
“Try something slick and get your dick hacked up, you can either hit the door in peace or watch your meat hit the floor in pieces”

It’s unlikely to charm your gran, but through Azealia’s high-octane dance-rap, I’ve learned several new words for vagina, one new word for cocaine and countless new ways to intimidate the male of the species. Excellent. Not only that, but since I began following her on Twitter, I’ve witnessed my use of the English language become considerably more vulgar, as Banks floods my daily feed with outlandish exclamations of varying coherence.
Her online shtick is so consistently brazen, even writing this profile has become damn-near impossible, as I struggle to decide which impressively bizarre outburst to pluck off the conveyor belt. Perhaps the decidedly indiscreet, “Lost my really expensive, fancy USB powered vibrator in Berlin (sad face)”? Or the totally mad, “I’M IN VOGUE MAGAZINE!!!!!! HAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”?
As if torturing myself over which tweet best illustrates the wildly inappropriate Ms. Banks isn’t enough, someone has gone to the trouble of setting up a Twitter account for the singer’s lady parts, which she celebrated by proclaiming, "Everyone go follow my twat!"
Of course, pretty soon Banks will need no introduction at all. Kele Okereke was an early convert. Hot Press hunted Banks down for an autumn interview that I handled. Mumford & Sons, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kanye West are already fans. She made the BBC Sound Of 2012 list and she’s just topped the NME’s Cool List for 2012, all without the help of an album, an EP or a single. Most of Banks’ success comes care of one song, the unblushing and triumphant ‘212’, which has featured on every ‘Track of the Year’ list not compiled by a herd of gormless llamas. Blunt, crude and boasting not one, but a handful of choruses, the song is easiest described as the music biz equivalent of Cee-Lo’s ‘Fuck You’.
“I wrote ‘212’ after being dropped from XL,” Banks tells me, speaking from her home in New York, “after firing my manager and firing my lawyer. I decided that I didn’t want to do music anymore because all these people just wanted to live vicariously through me. I felt like I really needed to step away and build a shell around myself. ‘212’ came out of that rejection and betrayal. It was just me laughing about it, having a bit of fun after being fucked around and kind of realising that all of the power really rested in me. That’s why that song is being listened to by so many people. Even if people can’t relate to me as an artist, they can relate to rejection. You know, like, ‘Who the fuck are you? You don’t do shit for me! Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can and can’t do? You can’t rap, asshole! I’m the rapper! I’m the musician! I have the power!’ I mean, there are some really awesome people in the music industry, but generally speaking, I have a really sour taste in my mouth.”
This is one of several times Banks gets a little, er, worked up over the course of our fabulous 40-minute conversation, during which she effortlessly lives up to her self-imposed title of “the rap Larry David”. And so what if Banks loves a good moan? Like David, her tirades are mostly justified, and always entertaining.
“I’m fucking insane,” she raves. “The music industry has fucking made me insane. When I first came up in this shit, everybody was looking at me with some other fucking shit in their eye, dollar signs in their eye, pussy in their eye… everybody was trying to get everything else from me but fucking music. And when it came down to the music, if I didn’t want to work with a certain producer or use a certain beat, then I was an amateur. There was all this mindfuckery. Like, this is the reason why geniuses like Dave Chappelle and Lauryn Hill disappear: there’s so much stupid shit. I could have easily fucking crumbled too, but I don’t do drugs. I smoke weed and I drink but I don’t do drugs, and I’m not out here trying to live a life that doesn’t need to be lived. There’s a monster inside of me right now, it’s not even me, and that monster is ready to tear shit up over the next couple of years.”
Oddly enough, Banks began our interview sounding every bit the mild-mannered Valley Girl, even throwing out the occasional, "Oh, jeez" – a likely offshoot from her time as a musical theatre princess.
“Have you ever seen that movie Fame?” she asks. “That’s the school I went to. Performing was just my thing. There are so many eyes on that school. They do a big production every year and when I was 16, I had a lead in the musical. It was really crazy, we had all these agents and stuff come to the show and watch it and I got scouted by a manager and I started going to auditions and freelancing with this acting company.”
Banks was right on course for a starring role in Glee, but luckily for fans of obscene, house-fuelled hip hop, things didn’t go exactly to plan.
“I was going on all these auditions for Nickelodeon and PBS and I was going for some legit stuff, like the Rent revival, but any adult part I wanted I couldn’t get because I was 16, and any of the Nickelodeon stuff I was auditioning for, I was too grown-up. Well, that’s not true, I looked really young but when you hear my speaking voice and my singing voice, there’s a bit of a maturity there that just doesn’t fit with the Nickelodeon aesthetic… obviously, when you hear my music!
"So that’s what I started doing, just to keep myself out of trouble. I was hanging out with the wrong people and stuff like that, so I just isolated myself. I started listening to a lot of hip hop and rapping. I kept it really, really private, I was still going on my auditions and hanging out with my friends and shit and keeping my rap kind of low, but as soon as I started putting songs online, I started getting legitimate attention.”
After signing with, and subsequently leaving, XL Records, Banks gained a hefty fan base overseas by making ‘212’ available as a free download on her website.
“I feel like shit’s gonna pick up here in the US,” she muses, “but Americans just aren’t as forward thinking as the rest of the world. I’m not really the biggest fan of any one culture but American culture is just like rigid and really stale and really stupid, real conservative. Everything is really formatted, it’s just fucking stupid. Bleugh.
"Hip hop is super, super American, it’s just as American as blue jeans and Coca-Cola, but I feel like the UK is gonna play a really, really key role in the progression of hip hop. I’m not saying that UK hip hop is better than American hip hop because I don’t think so at all, but I feel like England takes it and does what is the logical next step. I feel like the UK has a social structure and being a good member of society is important. In America, being cool is important. Like me? I’d rather put out one good-ass album and disappear for five years and come back with another good-ass album than put out a bunch of shit and be everywhere and be wasting people’s time.”
When it comes to talking smack about other artists, Banks is surprisingly restrained, openly applauding artists like Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna. What’s even more shocking is that the New Yorker is a seasoned indie fan who probably knows more about The Strokes than you do. As well as layering her razor-sharp raps over a Peter, Bjorn and John beat, she lent her Aaliyah-style purr to Interpol’s ‘Slow Hands’ a few years back, all in an attempt to catch a certain frontman’s eye.
“I'm fucking in love with Paul Banks!” she laughs, echoing a Valley Girl again. “He’s so fucking hot, he’s so gorgeous, he’s so funny, he’s smart and just so great, I kind of covered that song because I had a crush on him! I couldn’t stop thinking about him and I couldn’t stop singing the song. Of course they heard it and they definitely hit me up and were like, ‘That’s great’.”
If the elder Banks has his sights set on appearing on Azealia’s forthcoming debut album, he’ll have to wait in line with the rest of her fans, especially with Adele and Florence producer Paul Epworth twiddling the knobs. You can practically feel the hype mounting, but Ms. Banks remains totally unfazed.
“It’s almost like a pimp and a prostitute,” she says, as if this were the obvious way to describe it. “Your job as a prostitute is to make sure that you have a way out when that pimp decides that he can’t sell you any more... that you have something to fall back on.”
You mean like a musical safety net?
“Hell, yeah! While you’re out there selling your ass, you better be fucking stacking some shit on the side…”

Azealia Banks plays Whelan's, Dublin on February 6. Broke With Expensive Taste is due for release later this year. In the mean time, you can download ‘Runnin’ for free from azealiabanks.com.