SEAL ON PSYCHEDELICS

Iggy Azalea // Glory EP // July 30 // Grand Hustle

It seems that I tend to listen to a lot of hip hop and I’m not the sort of person to listen to one genre predominantly. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder what attracts me to this genre. Is it the wordplay? Instrumentals? The aura of the musicians that perform this music? I mean c’mon, we all want to be rich and have loads of bitches don’t we? Well guys do. Here’s a girl that wants all the same things and ends up sounding like complete white trash, rapping (hardly) about things that are different to her world.

You know what’s hilarious? The titular character here - Iggy Azalea comes from Australia, a place that is not known for its amazing rappers. She received some coverage last year to the “so disastrous it’s disastrous” internet hit Pu$$y among a couple of others that made Azalea look like everything that is wrong with hip hop. Think of her as a more hood version of Ke$ha. Her first proper release for Grand Hustle finds her doing what she does worst: pretending to be a man, claiming how much money she has, clothes and shoes. On here she is as believable and likable as Rick Ross. Even Ross has his moments on production and guest verses. Azalea’s tape finds her collaborating with people like Mike Posner, B.O.B. and T.I, you know, the ringtone crowd. Amazingly enough she struggles to have a single good, memorable hook and a great rhyme on Glory which really defeats the point of such trashy music.

Simply said, Azalea is a clown who is being painted different colours by a bunch different men. Female rappers is always a tricky prospect but even by those standards Glory is a complete car crash. Even Nicki Minaj had multiple mixtapes before dropping Pink Friday that showed that she can actually rap and be credible, whatever that really means. Azalea on the other hand sounds completely manufactured. This is the moment when she should be establishing her own sound by the songs on Glory are absolutely mediocre. On Millionaire Misfits and Runway she brags about how much money she has, which is blatant lies as she is just starting out and only has one mixtape on the internet. Me, Myself, My Money claims how hot she is and how all the competition should basically kill themselves without actually giving any reasons to explain why is she so amazing, while on the follow up Flash she does the “Nicki Minaj” and goes 180 degrees on what she just said by moaning about how she is a slave to the man and will get out of bed in the middle of the night to make sandwiches for him. Even after a couple of listens to Roman’s Revenge I have to conclude, I have never heard a more useless excuse for a female rapper. I get some people sending me demos and even those are better than Glory. I just feel like I’m listening to Ladette To Lady’s contestant’s first rapping attempts and it is painful and predictable.

Oh yeah, Iggy Azalea is also white, like porcelain white. While she doesn’t drop the N word on here, it doesn’t mean that she isn’t on the same level as people like V Nasty. And while you don’t have to be black to appreciate these values of commercial hip hop, Azalea just sounds like she is uncomfortable in her own skin which takes away that tiny piece of realness that such music could ever pretend to have. Glory is trash. It shows someone who has no vision and need guidance with every musical step she takes. The only hope she has is by surrounding herself with forward looking producers and quick before she turns into another white trash icon. Ignore your haters Azalea, be strong, you’ll need it as for someone who brags so much, at the moment you have absolutely nothing to offer.