“I make up my own genres a lot of the time,” she tells me with casual indifference. She can glide from acid house and post-disco to surf rock and bachata, all within the space of a single track. She’s always at home on any house beat, but Banks is also impressively chameleonic. “ I put the boy in Galliano, now he’s a fuckin’ model / I’mma make him famous, rename him, I’m icin’ out his chain and / Still grippin’ the stainless, stay dangerous, ’cause most of these n***as is brainless… ” On her latest single, “New Bottega” – which, last autumn, had everyone and their gay mother yelling “ New Bottega, Prada-da ” – Banks affects an Italian accent over a thumping electroclash beat, lovingly reciting a list of high fashion labels before delivering a characteristically Banksian bar: She’s a technical wordsmith who foregrounds cleverness, and arranges her verses with a preternatural ear for nursery-rhyme assonance that doubles down on its often nonsensical, juvenile humour. It’s brash, raunchy, intoxicatingly confident. It has the gilded sheen of invincibility. ”īanks’s discography is playful and energetic and deeply original. I’m doing bossa nova with that cover of ‘Chega de Saudade’. “I do have some house songs, but a lot of my category is technically electronic music, and people really do gloss over how great of a traditional rapper I am,” she says. She works against trend, smuggling into hip hop her glitchy, rave-friendly sounds with such virtuosic ease that you forget to question how bizarre the songs really are. Carl Hiaasen, our foremost chronicler of Florida’s “amiable depravity”, once referred to it as a “magnet for outlaws and scoundrels”.Īnd how else to describe Banks without first acknowledging her roguishness, her lawlessness, her aversion to convention? The rules have never seemed to apply, or even occur, to her. Dysfunction is the governing logic, or illogic. Some credit the absurdism to the yearlong humid summers, others the wild diversity of 21 million people stuffed together on an electoral battleground, and still others the golden promise of laissez-faire living. It’s like all the loucheness and weirdness of US culture drips down and gathers at its southernmost tip. Shit gets weird in the most mystical American state. It seems strange and strangely fitting that Banks, who is as New York as they come, should feel at home in the heart of the American unconscious, what Joan Didion called the nation’s “psychic centre”. Where everyone owns guns, and so everyone minds their business. A drought is no place for a self-styled mermaid. “I was just like, ‘I need to move to the wettest part of the fucking country,’” she says.
Never mind that she couldn’t breathe, or go to the weed store without getting a funny look. This happens all the time, they promised, optimism superseding fact.
“I remember opening my door one morning to get an Amazon package,” she tells me one night in late January, “and there was, like, soot, falling on my tongue.” Her Californian friends were puzzled by her distress. The year Azealia Banks finally decided to give up on living in Los Angeles, the wildfires were so apocalyptic that the whole sky turned blood orange. You can buy a copy of our latest issue here. Taken from the spring 2023 issue of Dazed.
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