The Grinch Who Stole Hip-Hop: The Curious Case of Iggy Azalea Making dope music is all about strategy: How do you portray a familiar feeling in a novel, unfamiliar way? Audacity is one of hip-hop's favorite strategies, one it does better than any other genre. From its park-jam origins to Diddy's desert two-step as hip-hop entered the commercial era, brash, unapologetic presumptuousness—a defiance of the natural order—has been one of rap music's great strengths. And perhaps no one in recent history has been as audacious as Iggy Azalea. The blonde Australian jumped to the top of the pop charts rapping in a jarring imitation of a rapper from the American South over a fake version of a DJ Mustard beat earlier this year, and it's propelled her to superstardom. At once an intruder in hip-hop's house and a student of its every dropped "g," Iggy personified audacity, a bull switching into a china shop built on a fault line. Last week, when Ebro Darden conducted an interview with Azealia Banks on Hot 97, there was an earthquake. Even if Iggy happens to have stumbled into a situation larger than herself, she's certainly done her best to aggravate it from the jump. The discussion around her place in hip-hop has snowballed for some time. It first began publicly when Iggy Azalea landed on the XXL freshman list. Social media provocateur and rapper Azealia Banks called Iggy out on Twitter, citing Iggy's lyrics about being a "runaway slave master," which had received blowback for the obvious reason of being, best case scenario, in terribly poor taste. Iggy's past, it turned out, was full of offensive tweets and poorly formed opinions: Bossip collected a gallery of them. But Iggy's audacity was best epitomized by her gratingly effective vocal style. The sour taste of her note-for-note recreations had an outsider's obliviousness that was, at best, socially tone-deaf. EVEN IF IGGY HAPPENS TO HAVE STUMBLED INTO A SITUATION LARGER THAN HERSELF, SHE'S CERTAINLY DONE HER BEST TO AGGRAVATE IT FROM THE JUMP. For some time, the media covered Iggy and Azealia's running Twitter beef on a spectrum ranging from mild derision to bemused indifference. Neither artist was particularly beloved within hip-hop; neither made music that had much of a popular profile in the U.S. Both created spindly hip-house and rapped with unconventional accents, which, despite the cosigns, only really found traction in the U.K. and on hip coastal dance floors. Neither artist really fit in with American hip-hop's dominant or secondary sounds; both artists had a tendency to say something ridiculous or offensive. (Indeed, Azealia Banks was no stranger to cringe-tweeting, dropping an F-bomb on Perez Hilton back in March.) Then came "Fancy." Credit for its massive success has widely gone to its fake Mustard beat and Charli XCX's undeniable hook. But it's become apparent that as much as Iggy's voice has been a distraction for hip-hop's core fans, for others it's a huge part of the appeal. At Gawker, Rich Juzwiak argued Iggy was rap's "best drag queen," that to complement her conceptual focus on "work" and grinding, Iggy's voice was always in a state of effort: "'realness' within drag contains within it an awareness of its own inattainability—realness is not so much about how convincing you are, it's about how convincing you are within your limitations." For that large swath of pop fans for whom hip-hop has always been mediated through music videos and radio, its inauthenticity was authentic; fans for whom rap music is, and always has been, a collection of cliches, tics, slang, and attitude; a caricature one simply had to master, a performative mask. Ann Powers argued that it wasn't the mask of black women Iggy was co-opting, but of black men, that "adopting masculinity is as important to Azalea's shtick as taking on blackness."

Originally posted by Starburst I ain't reading all that.

i read it all, and i just cannot understand why this is such a huge deal

like, there are starving children across the planet and here we are, concerned about whether a white girl's success is undermining a rapper who know one even cares or knows about. this isn't about race, it's about people not liking iggy more than anything.

regardless the topic is tired and everyone needs to move on.