Yesterday, I was watching Iggy Azalea’s set at Made in America on live stream, just out of curiosity, just to be sure I am entitled to say I dislike her… at least I can say I have watched her perform once. She had a free show on Santa Monica pier during the summer, I found out when I was around but it was only accessible for people who had made a reservation via Pandora and I hadn’t… nevertheless, I had zero regrets.
And watching her doing what she usually does on stage, selling swag and sex packed into some hip hop beats, rapping like a man and exhibiting her junk in the trunk in a super revealing small blue short, I can repeat that I have any regret. I don’t get that kind of stuff and never will. I am not a prude at all, that’s not the point, I just don’t understand this much confidence on stage, this much sex attitude shoveled in your face.
She has good moves on stage if you are into this kind of stuff, and my guess is that lots of guys were probably fantasizing about her super tall and fit body, lots of girls were probably thinking they should work out a lot more to get her statuesque stature and super fit abs, but she annoyed the hell out of me.
She raps like a guy, with a very low voice, and there’s no doubt in my mind she sounds like a fabricated rap star, with a porn star name (Iggy was the name of her pet and Azalea the name of the street she grew up) and with a style that an Australian blonde girl had obviously to borrow somewhere. There was a lot of questions raised about her authenticity in the press, most people have noticed that she sounds nothing like that when she talks with her Australian accent, and it’s not me, who know about nothing about rap, who is going to bring some light about how a rapper should sound, but she certainly looks like some rap wannabe who unfortunately has succeeded very well…
Looking at her perfect plastic and blonde ponytail, she has something from a Barbie doll who suddenly thought she could do hip hop, this possibly could not come from an authentic place… how a white girl from Australia can steal the black American experience and get away with it? Because it’s lucrative? Critics don’t even like her that much – she got a 57 out of 100 on Metacritic, even Rolling Stone does not approve her rap, ‘If this is the future, it’s one strange place,’ writes critic Simon Vozick-Levinson, but why should she care? At Made in America, the crowd really loved her, she has played other big festivals, and she even joined the Beatles ‘as the only acts to rank at numbers one and two simultaneously with their first two Hot 100 hits’.
Her performance at Made in America let me totally uninterested though, she did everything you can expect from a rapper in this surrounding, she almost kissed Rita Ora on stage – but hasn’t this be done a million times before? More than ever, she was embodying the valley girl responsible for the current branding of hip hop made for widespread consumption,… but she is hardly the only one.
