Iggy Azalea, “My World,” Ignorant Art (2011)

Man, I dunno. The beat’s cold, and she’s not embarrassing on the mic, unless you know where she’s coming from. And that’s where it gets a bit complicated.

I mean this chick’s from Mullumbimby but she hits her vowels with a twang (“baaad bitches”) better suited to New Orleans than the north coast. (Also check her rhotic rs.) But she’s rapping in front of the Southern Cross in the opening shots of this video, and saying shit like “Aussie ho/I put my country on,” so it’s not like she’s trying to deny where she comes from.

It’s just… look, I’m not one to police accents. I know from personal experience that the way you talk can be complicated and I’m not judging anyone’s patriotism because of how they talk. Azalea’s been in L.A. for five years, since she was 16. That can do things to your accent. But this interview makes it clear that her speaking voice is distinctly Australian in a way her rapping voice is decidedly not. (Also, she says “cotton candy,” not “fairy floss,” but we’ll let that slide. You gotta change your vocab when you’re around the Americans.) Sure, she’s talking to an Aussie interviewer there, which can do weird things to your accent, but I feel pretty safe in saying that when she raps, Iggy adopts a “hip-hop accent” which she may or may not consciously realize is a parody of African American speech patterns.

I do suspect she’s a bit racially ignorant, what with her White Girl Team thing, in a way that many Australians can be ignorant of the racial dynamics of another country. (I also think a white Australian in America is subtly but decidedly distinct from a white American, and that it is important to understand Azalea as an immigrant, albeit a white immigrant.) But that doesn’t mean it isn’t kind of weird the way she fits herself into a foreign culture by transforming herself into Trina or Lil Kim, without considering how that foreign culture will read that transformation.

I don’t think artists — or people — should be bound by their background. Authenticity is bunk, and building a new persona is a creative choice anyone should have. (The hard part is filling it.) But Iggy Azalea proclaims her Australianness while seeming to erase any aural traces of it from her performance. She’s all-but-refitted herself as a white American, but hasn’t fully committed to that reinvention either. I’m not accusing her of Not Being Real, on some Officer Ricky shit, but there are some contradictions in her that I can’t reconcile without assuming of her a cynicism she hasn’t been able to successfully hide.

(The cynicism: She wants to be a big rapper in the biggest market in the world — so big that it might as well be the only market in the world — and, to do that, she has to jettison almost everything that marks her as foreign, because Americans have little interest in art that strikes them as foreign. At the same time, her backstory makes her stand out a bit — particularly since Americans tend to have vaguely positive feelings about Australians — so she keeps around a few token signifiers of her exoticness while erasing anything that would mark her as too foreign.)

(But, at the same time, I’m an Australian who has absorbed a lot of Americanness, and I don’t think I’ve diminished my Australianness by doing so. So I really don’t want to posit nationality as being an either/or quality. It’s just… Iggy Azalea strikes me as an outsider performing “American hip-hop” rather than someone explicating the contradictions inherent in being an Australian expatriate.) 

Just listened to Ignorant Art, by the way. “My World” is far and away the best thing on it.

DOWNLOAD: Ignorant Art.