Azealia Banks is ready for the apocalypse. Even if the rest of America is not. It is crazy, she says, how the United States allow “an economy to exist within an economy that it has no control over”. She’s talking about tech — and the new technocratic class she says is taking over. The rate at which that class is accruing wealth “versus what that wealth will actually be worth in the event of a nuclear fallout, or a meteor hitting earth” has got her paranoid. “You absolutely need guns,” she says.
Banks, 32, is the world’s most controversial female rapper. Her music has won her plaudits, and her feuds notoriety. From Cardi B to Lana Del Rey (whose house she threatened to burn down using witchcraft), Banks has pulled no punches. Her latest target is the pop star Troye Sivan. He said last week that 212 — a thumping electropop romp about cunnilingus which Banks released in 2011 — was his go-to pre-game song. The rapper replied by calling him an “expired twink” and said this was “white kids’ way of apologising for bandwagoning”. He clearly had “no clue” what was happening to her behind the scenes.
Banks says she hasn’t earned due royalties on 212, or its parent album Broke with Expensive Taste, since 2020. It traces back to a deal she struck with her former manager, the attorney Jeff Kwatinetz, when she was 23 and he was 49. He sued her for extortion during the pandemic; she countersued for breach of contract, fraud and deceit, claiming that he groomed her. Kwatinetz’s lawsuit hinges on Banks’ “caustic” personality and weaponising her outspokenness to present her claims as “the rantings of a lunatic”, the complaint reads. It is, in many ways, free speech that is on trial.
Banks speaks in soundbites. It is an art form she has honed like nobody else. Along with 212, early hits like Liquorice and Van Vogue set the stage for a decade of cocky one-liners that made the divas before her sound like purring kittens. As such, Banks occupies an increasingly rarefied place in the pop pantheon: that of a woman who says it like it is.
Ron DeSantis has “fat boy syndrome”. Keeping Joe Biden in power is “elder abuse”. Her nickname for Vladimir Putin is “El Put-Put”. We speak for over an hour and the zingers just keep coming. Banks believes free speech has only ever been reserved “for white men”, but her language, slurs and unique talent for offending everyone means she is, in her own words, “the biggest f***ing white d**k in the world”.
Banks thinks the song and dance we make around free speech is part of the problem: “People have too much time to talk.” Polarisation over neuralgic topics which have fractured the cultural landscape is driven by “technocrats”, “career dopeheads [...] j***ing off” while “writing code”. The culture wars, she argues, are the construct of an AI controlling our behaviour. She calls it Amy. “The more anyone talks online, the more Amy learns how to better manipulate you and make you spend your money,” she explains.
Amy, Banks says, is part of a streamlining operation designed to “homogenise” our voices and — as evidenced by the term POC, which she loathes — our differences. “Never say the word POC,” she tells me. “Thanks for letting me know there’s no difference between me and Kim Jong-un.”
The culture wars incense and unite around ideologies that leave no room for dissent. Unlike Jordan Peterson, Banks does not sit comfortably in any camp. On one hand, she believes we owe $100 trillion in slavery reparations to African Americans; on the other, she has used the term “sand n***a” to refer to Zayn Malik and his Pakistani heritage. The progressive Left does not know what to do with her.
For Banks, people afraid to voice a dissenting view aren’t petrified victims of cancel culture cajoled into silence. “I think it has more to do with their aptitude for logic and reasoning,” Banks says. “Some people cannot hold two opposing opinions at once and be fine.” Big Tech has made this worse.
Yet for someone so terminally online, Banks’ attack on Big Tech feels contradictory. “I am the internet,” she quips early on in our chat. “A lot of the time I would be on Twitter talkin’ shit because I wanted to see what this SEO thing was all about,” she says. Search engine optimisation is the process of getting one’s name or webpage higher up in search engine rankings. For Banks, this is a matter existential. “I don’t ever want to be buried in SEO because then it means I no longer exist,” she tells me. If in 300 years’ time “you start typing A, Z, E, and ‘Azerbaijan’ and ‘Azealia Banks’ aren’t the first two things that come up, I’m f***ed.”
You get the sense, with Banks, that all press is good press; that being a “relentless troll” is the gateway to being a “fearless truthteller”, as one headline described her. She calls cancel culture her “biggest f***ing blessing”, thanks to “Gen Z and the generation under them”. In their mind, Banks says, “if you don’t get cancelled you’re not, like, cool”. Young people on TikTok have been “remixing old clips of her saying things out of context”; she says it has given her “a second lease”.
Banks first got cancelled 10 years ago when her outspokenness cost her a contract with Mac (she had called the blogger Perez Hilton a “f****t”). Today, she takes issue with the notion of gay rights as if it is some kind of subcategory, implying rights only for one group of people.
For Banks, everyone gets to say and do what they like. Even Donald Trump. “He’s just f***ing funnyyy,” the rapper says. “He’s been through how many bankruptcies? How many wives? How many television shows? Seriously, nothing can take him down.”
Banks, who moved from LA to Miami in 2021 and feels “way safer” in a state where “everyone carries a gun”, will be voting for Trump in 2024. How does she feel about him being near the nuclear button again? “Well, he didn’t press it the first time,” she says. “You never know, Biden might hit the wrong shit on the antennae and blow the whole thing up.”
Her words on Florida’s governor DeSantis are less kind. She has little truck with his attacks on drag culture or his quarrel with Disney (the company sued DeSantis this year following the Don’t Say Gay Bill). “Seriously, that’s the guy who’s running for president? The guy who wants to argue with Mickey Mouse? Mm. Okay.”
Does Banks worry, like I do, that DeSantis is part of a growing group of cultural conservatives, weaponising the excess of liberal progressive thinking? (Read: the firing of employees and debanking of clients whose views aren’t woke enough). It’s not that deep, she thinks. I’m curious to find out whether she also considers herself a libertarian. “Um, yeah,” she concedes, though labels aren’t her thing. When I ask if she is a free speech absolutist, she looks confused: “What did you just call me??” I can’t tell if she is flattered or scandalised.
Even for her, there is a line that cannot be crossed without consequence. Her former mentor, Kanye West, last year flogged T-shirts saying ‘White Lives Matter’ at a fashion show and went on an antisemitic verbal rampage. Banks has said she hopes there is no way back for him. There is a point where “shock culture” tips over “into stupidity,” she said earlier this year. “You deserve to reap what you sow.”
Her own middle finger to the establishment has long been refreshing in a world increasingly starved of sanguine creatives who don’t play by the rules. Yet for her own sake, Banks has sometimes sought to quash her combative instincts. “Get off the f***ing phone and go touch some grass,” she says we should all do. (I agree.)
Like Peterson, Banks has been criticised for the ire and vitriol of her online rants. “I don’t look for those kinds of feelings anymore,” she tells me. “I’m just lookin for some n****s!” She is not an angry person, just someone with “frustration” and “undealt with trauma”, including the death of her father from pancreatic cancer when she was two. I ask whether she’s ever tried ayahuasca, renowned for its healing properties. She hasn’t yet but wants to, just not in “one of those commercialised places for young white kids with paper sandals”. To Peru, then, we laugh.
During the pandemic, Banks launched a beauty brand called CheapyXO, which is every bit as wacky and unfiltered as she is. Products include “feminine hygiene bars” which promise to “shrink capillaries in the clitoris, labia, inner labia and anus”. (Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina scented candle suddenly seems vanilla).
She’s making music again now too. A new single, DILEMMA, dropped last month; her second album, Business & Pleasure, is out next year. And with that, surely, more feuds.
Her final target today is Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI. “I was in on that Worldcoin project very early,” she tells me. It was a “bio mechanical data grab” masquerading as technological outreach. “It’s like, ‘oh look, we’re bringing technology to Africa’, but baby, Africa has some of the oldest f***ing technology [...] We had shit before you even knew about it. Weaves and wigs and medicine and maps.”
For Banks, the journey out of the culture war is a journey out of big tech, and towards a world where something like freedom of speech is no longer politicised because it isn’t discussed so venally. The solution is simple, she says. Get off the phone, and “have more sex”.
