Tall, blond and radiating fame-glow by the kilowatt, rapper Iggy Azalea looks every inch the pop star of the moment. She also looks a tiny bit like a lightning rod, another job the 24-year-old Australian is currently working.
Azalea prances on stage for this one-off London show later than advertised, surrounded by half a dozen dancers, backed by her DJ, Wizz Kid, and two backup singers. In the wings are controversy and scandal. She performs for a dazzling hour, working her hips and her hits, as well as material from the mixtapes that first gained her notoriety. But it’s Azalea’s current hit single that really gets the rafters rising.
Midway through, Rita Ora turns up to sing the female revenge fantasy Black Widow alongside her, and the place erupts even more than it has already erupted for nearly every song, with Azalea’s every bum wiggle cranking the screeching louder. Rump-shaking turns into a major theme tonight; too major, perhaps, when a pole-dancing pole appears for the song Pu$$y and Azalea’s dancers take turns on it. Roughly a year ago, Azalea was in a tiny West London club. Now she’s packing glitter cannons, steam eruptions and a clever bubble machine that emits dry ice-filled bubbles during Rolex, a track that pre-dates her debut album The New Classic, released in April. It’s a deft lyric about a watch she gave an ex-lover, which riffs on time, love and timepieces.
Really, though, this date isn’t just a gig in which a new star showcases her wares. It’s also a perfect storm of pop in which a great many forces are swirling. If you don’t already have a stance on the Mullumbimby-born rapper, you haven’t really been paying attention.
Having made her name as an oddity – white female Australians not having previously been known for their flow – Azalea is now properly famous. She recently equalled the Beatles’ record by having her first two US singles place at Nos 1 and 2 in the Billboard Hot 100 charts simultaneously. (“I’d rather be the Rolling Stones,” Azalea quipped recently to Billboard about the Beatles comparison.)
Those singles were Fancy, her co-write with our own Charli XCX, the most-streamed song on Spotify ever, and Problem, with squeaky-clean Ariana Grande. Both sound on point tonight, despite some absenteeism. Problem is truncated, as Grande is not here. But, then, Grande lives in LA. The excellent Fancy is missing the Charli XCX guest appearance that everyone is hoping for.
Azalea’s ascendancy hasn’t come without static. Back in May, Forbes – that well-known music website – actually declared that Azalea was “running” hip-hop. It later changed its headline after outraged hip-hop fans pointed out that she wasn’t exactly running it.
Ranged against Azalea’s being appointed CEO of hip-hop were rappers like Nicki Minaj, Tyler the Creator and Azealia Banks, plus incalculable numbers of online haters. To them, the woman born Amethyst Kelly in New South Wales is inauthentic, a shameless cultural appropriator and a racist to boot.
In Azalea’s corner, meanwhile, you find an unlikely coalition: her pop pal Charli XCX, august American rock critic Robert Christgau, who recently penned a gutsy appreciation of The New Classic, and, most significantly, Questlove of the Roots, a man who knows something about authenticity in hip-hop. “You know, we as black people have to come to grips that hip-hop is a contagious culture,” he recently told Time’s website. “If you love something, you gotta set it free. I will say that Fancy… is a game-changer; we’re truly going to have to come to grips with the fact that hip-hop has spread its wings.”
Everyone here tonight would probably concur with him. This is a pop show, in that the audience is young, but it’s a hip-hop show too. Azalea’s flow is literate and pacy; her lateness is merely hip-hop timekeeping. She has a sense of humour and a grasp of skits. Pu$$y is introduced by a video clip from Boomerang, the 1992 Eddie Murphy comedy about double standards in which co-star Grace Jones shouts about her pussy in a crowded restaurant.
This week the lightning rod has had to deal with another jolt too. The sex tape Azalea apparently made with her former manager-boyfriend, Hefe Wine, is on the verge of going public; Azalea has unleashed a lawsuit in response. Towards the set’s end, Azalea makes reference to her “awful, awful, terrible” week, and how performing makes it all better.
Many of Azalea’s tracks drum home the message that she is ambitious and independent – “Fuck love, gimme diamonds,” runs Fuck Love, a crass, curt and catchy track, “I’m already in love with myself”– but there is a now also a sense that she is a woman wronged. Whether this endears this star any more to all those haters remains to be seen.
