Oh, right: Azealia Banks. It’s been three years since her debut single “212,” an apparent breakthrough that now looks more like those scenes where Wile E. Coyote bursts straight off a cliff, kicking his legs in mid-air. She released the seapunk-invoking mixtape Fantasea (a description that tells you just how long ago this all happened), and the retail EP 1991, and then discovered that her erstwhile label Interscope didn’t feel like granting a release date to any young artist without a mainstream hit. And not only young artists; even Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj have pushed back their latest albums, because pop radio no longer plays much hip-hop, and urban radio isn’t playing many women. (“Anaconda” has 300 million YouTube views, but never cracked the Top 20 in either format.) The major labels’ strategy for rappers is so illogical that Rick Ross will supposedly be releasing his second LP of 2014 later this month. When upstart MCs lacking Drake’s benevolence do notch a crossover hit, it’s often through unconventional means—witness, say, the saga of Bobby Shmurda’s hat.
Banks did hamper herself by feuding with half of the music industry on Twitter, whether righteously (calling out dark namesake Iggy Azalea for some flagrant racism) or obnoxiously (she’s still trying to justify slurring noted MS Paint user Perez Hilton). Despite retaining rights to all the songs on debut album Broke With Expensive Taste after escaping that Interscope contract, her reputation made other labels leery—the LP went on sale a week or two ago not with the pomp of a Beyoncé-level stealth campaign, but a shrug. Here, take it. When Eminem is still around threatening violence against a famous woman for attention, more desperate to impress adolescent boys than Count Aschenbach in Death in Venice, one suspects that Banks only became a pariah or punch line because she refuses to treat the vagaries of the music industry as orthodoxy. Emphasis on she.
