Let me begin totally honestly: I hate Iggy Azalea. With a sincere, eye-rolling passion. Not that I’m necessarily an authority, but as someone with two ears and a brain, I can confirm her music is not only a supreme form of trash, but it’s also some of the most blatant copy-and-pasting done thus far in the music industry. Top that off with arrogance and racism towards the genre she claims to be "on top of" (she's unaware she isn't Nicki Minaj) and her heinous outfit choices and you have an unappreciative, greedy girl who speaks into a microphone when she isn't lip-synching.
To give some background on what’s so wrong with Iggy Azalea, I’ll start off with a history lesson: hip hop and rap music have been intertwined as not only a music genre, but a culture in the African-American community since the 1970s. Seen as an outlet for the disenfranchised and low-income youth, particularly in New York City and most specifically, in the Bronx, the music quickly grew as a way to express feelings and struggles through art. This music reflected their economic, political, financial and personal realities and it was music to relate to. Fast forward to 2015 and you find Igloo, a white fame-monger who has taken advantage of popular hooks and beats (play "Fancy" and Kid Ink’s "Show Me" at the same time, the only thing that really changes is the voices) to claw her way to “the top” of the Hip-Hop/Rap genre. She has answered questions such as Complex magazine’s “In a country where ‘speaking [Black]’ has been a hindrance in almost every profession but rap, do you see how a White person making money in rap by adopting this accent could ruffle feathers?” with… wait for it…
“If you’re mad about it and you’re a [Black] person then start a rap career and give it a go, too. I’m not taking anyone’s spot, so make yourself a mixtape. Or maybe if you’re [Black], start singing like a country singer and be a white person. I don’t know. Why is it such a big deal? This is the entertainment industry. It’s not politics. You should be more concerned about the message, not the voices saying it.”
To spell it out, the question was, essentially, "Do you not understand that you're appropriating black culture by faking what's often considered a 'hood' accent and using that culture to advance your career, although it isn't your own?" And her response? "If you're black and you're mad, pretend to be white." Which isn't a solution, it's really just stupid. What Azalea fails to understand is that she's taking a culture of oppression and literally copying it to make herself money, all the while saying outrageous things that deserve her a kick in the mouth.
I’m not an expert or one to speak on cultural appropriation, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize it when it's obvious. Is it that hard to wrap her brain around the fact that if African-American kids in the Bronx hadn’t come up with this way to express themselves, she wouldn’t have a genre in which she could annoy us all in? To be inherently racist towards the culture that built what she’s now taking advantage of just doesn't make sense to me.
What makes matters worse, Azalea is completely unappreciative of everything that she has been given. I say "given" because I’m not sure spelling your name out and half-hearted rhyming on an Ariana Grande track really constitutes “hard work.” She brags on herself about how talented and hard-working she is, while stealing the opening lines from Kendrick Lamar’s "Look Out for Detox" and “making it her own” by turning “runaway slave” into “runaway slave…master.” I wish I was kidding; I'm cringing typing the words. She has no artistic creativity or talent, just the ability to copy and paste, yet parades around as if everyone owes her the world just because she said her name against a looped beat. This act of copying and pasting is often referred to as “musical osmosis,” when artists use the same “samples” that other artists have made popular and incorporate it into their own songs. Like Macklemore making the saxophone hook popular in “Thrift Shop” and it finding its way into “Talk Dirty” and “Problem,” which Iggy Azalea speaks on. So basically, all of her success can be credited to just about everyone else in the music industry who made these things popular and then she stole them.
To sum up: Azalea, who speaks with a weird Australian-American mix of an accent, suddenly turns into how she assumes a “hoodrat” would speak when she talks into a mic and she isn’t even good at rapping. Yeah, tracks like “Fancy” are fun to listen to sort of, but get her in a live performance like on "Saturday Night Live" and your ears may seriously start to bleed and you'll be annoyed just watching her. Even worse, put her in a situation where she thinks her freestyling is actually good and you’ll want to slap her.
Can we stop making these heinous acts popular? Can we stop supporting bad music and even worse people? Can we stop thinking something or someone is the “next big thing” just because they sound like everyone else? Let’s continue to reward and support true artistic talent like Kanye West (yes, he's artistically talented, believe it), Beyonce, Sam Smith or Kendrick Lamar. Let’s start ignoring attention-hungry brats who throw hissy fits at Papa John's on Twitter and not give them what they don't deserve.
