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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |