‘Poptimism Gone Wrong’ is a column that looks at the stories we tell about pop music, the artists we love to hate, and asks… what if we’re wrong?
Great hip-hop transports you to a time and place, into the vivid imagination of a street poet. Grandmaster Flash and Run-D.M.C., who grew up in the gang warfare and the rubble of the 1970s Bronx. good kid, m.A.A.d city, where Kendrick Lamar tells the story of Compton, L.A., through his own fictionalised coming-of-age. Black America’s story is one of struggle, and beauty – and hip-hop teaches you to survive, to find self-respect whatever your surroundings.
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But maybe you’re a teenager who hates your dead-end town. Maybe you’re a white kid who doesn’t see yourself reflected in your own culture, or your neighbourhood – but in the allure of that unattainable other. Hip-hop doesn’t discriminate. It’s generous – it speaks to its listeners regardless of race or class. But if you forget the culture hip-hop came from, you risk losing everything it stands for.
Iggy Azalea dreamed of worlds far beyond humble Mullumbimby, New South Wales. Iggy’s my kind of Australian patriot: she’s not. I don’t believe in nationalism, nor any enforced cultural values. We are who we choose to be. I was born and grew up in Melbourne; my parents are Chinese migrants. Some second-generation immigrant kids assimilate easily, but I never quite managed to. Australia has its upsides – there’s a real, utopian multicultural spirit, but also a white default inherited through centuries of British colonialism.
“I want to say that Azalea embodies a borderless way of thinking about art, where you don’t have to be the exact boring identity you’re born into. But it’s not that simple. I want to love Iggy Azalea, but she won’t let me.”
Most modern Australian music is regionalist to a fault, which I find predictable at best, solipsistic at worst. There’s value in art that speaks to yourself and others like you – but great art shouldn’t limit its audience. So I make – and write about – pop music, because it’s universal. While hip-hop can feel universal in its specificity, pop transcends reality. It gives you permission to reject your surroundings.
When you grow up in a nation of (mostly) immigrants, you also have the freedom to leave. I want to say that Iggy Azalea embodies a borderless way of thinking about art, where you don’t have to be the exact boring identity you’re born into. But it’s not that simple. I want to love Iggy Azalea, but she won’t let me.
Last month at Jezebel, in The Making and Unmaking of Iggy Azalea, Clover Hope profiled Iggy’s long journey to fame – and struggle to stay at the top. Hope’s fairer than most would be. She depicts Iggy not as some gleeful, money-grubbing exploiter, but the inevitable product of a culture that desires black art without fully understanding the politics of its creation or consumption.
Hope lets you come to your own conclusions. But many will misread her piece as a simple takedown, and leave it at that. But it’d be facile to write off Iggy’s success as if it never meant anything. Iggy’s appropriated black culture, sure, but that’s not the end of the conversation – it’s the beginning.
In the spirit of Poptimism Gone Wrong, let’s ask the questions no one wants to. What’s good about Iggy Azalea? How was she responsible for her own success? What can we learn from Iggy’s many failures, and how does her career reflect on us?
When I reviewed her debut album The New Classic in 2014, I wrote: “Iggy Azalea isn’t a graceful rapper, but she’s an distinct, often awkward presence… Few rappers sound more at home on a three-minute pop song than a mixtape… “Fancy” might be the closest we’ll ever get to the Spice Girls’ “Rack City”.”
The New Classic’s music hasn’t aged as horribly as its title. Iggy understood how mold her persona into pop songs better than most rappers ever have. Her image promises Kardashian-like glamour and wealth, and “Change Your Life” delivers – it’s dazzling, a song only she could pull off.
But the backbone of hip-hop is storytelling – and as an MC, Iggy takes too many shortcuts. Look at a song like “Black Widow” – it’s supposedly about a love-hate relationship, but good luck making sense of whatever narrative Iggy’s trying to tell. There’s little connective tissue between each line; the beat’s all glittery surfaces, but Iggy never fills in the blanks with the emotional detail the song demands.
Iggy’s mocked for both trying too hard, and not hard enough. Her rapping is effortful, but it’s neither technically nor emotionally expressive. But her clunky flow is memorable – her aggressively weird delivery is part of what makes “Fancy” so catchy. As another iconic white woman probably never said, “It’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring”.
There is no glass ceiling for white female rappers – that implies that there’s a systemic bias against them. It’s the other way around; they have to earn some bare minimum of credibility. And Iggy deserves some credit for being the most significant white woman to meet that bar. For all her later transgressions among the hip-hop community, she’s a shrewd tabloid presence – and she was a canny popstar. Her success can’t solely be attributed to “white mediocrity” – others were far more mediocre, and left far less impact. “Gucci Gucci” was a bop, but don’t even talk to me about V-Nasty, Lil Debbie, Brooke Candy, Karmin, Chanel West Coast…
The enjoyment we got from Iggy’s singles was real. “Fancy” didn’t reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 because of some collective 2014 delusion. Her cultural crimes don’t erase her appeal – in fact, her appeal explains her transgressions. Hate her if you want – she’s given us plenty of reasons to. But the impulse to bury everything we used to like that’s problematic is short-sighted. It suggests that other people – never the ones pointing the finger, of course – like art because it’s problematic.
It’s tempting, but naïve, to believe that culture progresses in a straight line. Bury the past, and you risk never learning from it.
Case in point: we made Danielle Bregoli a thing. In September last year, the then-13-year-old and her mother first appeared on Dr. Phil. Bregoli was a classic troubled teen – acting out, getting in fights, stealing cars – with a twist: her put-on blaccent was ridiculous. When the show’s studio audience dared to laugh at her, she threatened to fight them: “Cash me ousside, how bow dah?” Responded Dr. Phil, “I didn’t get that… are you speaking English?”
Here was the clearest case yet of cultural appropriation that ridiculed itself. Surely this mini-Rachel Dolezal was too laughable to be harmful? But Bregoli was endearing despite herself, like a puppy trying to bite your leg off.
The video went viral in January, completing the life cycle of a meme in record time. First came mockery: both teens and adults shared clips and GIFs, mocking Bregoli’s appropriated AAVE (African-American Vernacular English). Then came empathy: you start to relate to her. Who among us wasn’t driven mad by puberty? Then came appreciation: quoting “cash me ousside” and “I’m about to start swinging” post-ironically. Aren’t there times when you want to lash out at everyone? The only thing that holds us back is adult society: respectable, vanilla, boring.
But in the social media age, there’s no laughing at – only with. Even serious cultural critiques of Bregoli’s appropriation served to fan the flames. Attention is currency, and we rewarded her because we don’t know any better – or perhaps because, deep down, we still dream of our own 15 minutes of fame. Bregoli hired an agent, started selling her own t-shirts – why let someone else profit off her catchphrase? She became a typical teen YouTuber, doing the usual routine – reaction videos, makeup tutorials – with more cussing than usual.
Then Bregoli adopted “Bhad Bhabie”, her Twitter/Instagram handle, as her rap name, dropped her debut single “These Heaux” in August, and achieved the impossible: the song was… nowhere near as terrible as it should’ve been? Listenable?? Maybe even good???
40 million views later, Bhad Bhabie signed a multi-album deal with Atlantic Records. Call it cynical, call it opportunistic – I call it pragmatic. “Hi Bich” and “Whachu Know” followed, to no less fanfare.
So why didn’t Bhad Bhabie’s rap debut end civilisation as we know it? First – she’s self-aware. Bregoli isn’t as delusionally cocky as she seemed on Dr. Phil. She knows it’s a performance. “These Heaux” is the perfect attention grab – she’s not ignoring her haters, she’s baiting them. In the video, she stages her own protest, “Mothers Opposed to Bhad Bhabie”, sending a clear message: she’s edgy, and you’re a prude. You’re either with her, or you’re a ho. Like a dastardly heel wrestler who insults the crowd, she’s working you. You’re booing her, but you bought tickets. She’s already won.
Second – the new wave of SoundCloud rap is by teens, for teens. Bhad Bhabie may not be lo-fi, emo, or mumble rap – her songs have clearer hooks, verses and choruses – but she fits right in alongside those trends. Check out her Spotify playlist – she knows the scene better than most grown hip-hop journalists. Enough to internalise the sound and attitude… enough to write her own lyrics?
If her songs are ghostwritten, that wouldn’t change a thing. She might utilise Migos’ familiar triplet flow, but Bhad Bhabie’s voice is her own. Her auto-tuned yelp, voice constantly on the verge of breaking, recalls early Rae Sremmurd. Bregoli sounds brash and nervy, the archetypal teenager: she embraces her wild hormonal emotions, but has total control over them. Bhad Bhabie’s music perfectly embodies the physical and emotional states of being a teenager.
Third – these songs expand on her meme status. She might be one of the most mocked people of 2017, but not once does she embarrass herself. She reclaims the brattiness that made her famous – but not as the punchline, as the auteur. There’s no “Cash Me Ousside” song – January is old news. Each song is around two- minutes long, perfect for the teen attention span.
And Bhad Bhabie’s three videos are shockingly self-assured. Shot in one take, “These Heaux” turns a neighbourhood into her queendom. “Hi Bich” takes her from a courtroom to the electric chair, where she’s sentenced to death – then resurrected as a bride. It’d be uncomfortable imagery for any popstar, let alone a 14-year-old. But “Whachu Know” has no gimmicks. All she does is lipsync, but she’s a compelling – and creepy – screen presence.
This isn’t Bregoli’s first time getting media coverage; when she was six, she helped nurse her single mother through chemotherapy. It’s hard to say how much of her recently-violent relationship with her mother was fakedfor Dr. Phil, though her arrests and probation are real. Most surprising of all, her “Roll in Peace” remix shows genuine introspection – more than Kodak Black and XXXTentacion’s original. She embraces the beat’s melanchol, confessing her insecurities. “Said I was too disrespectful / Putting my mama through hell / FYI we doing well / And I got the mortgage secure”. She’s not wrong: “Yeah I’m young / And I’m rich / And I’m small / But I’m brave”.
At 14 years old, with at most six months’ studio time, Bhad Bhabie’s making more credible trap rap records than Iggy Azalea’s managed in nearly a decade. Look, Bregoli’s not detailing her real life in the trap – she’s closer to Bart Simpson than Gucci Mane. But she sounds believable – and that’s enough, for now.
Wrangling with the politics of Bregoli’s existence is enough to make your head spin. Call Bhad Bhabie’s blaccent minstrelsy if you want – but SoundCloud rap is, if not totally race-blind, murkier in sound and origin than traditional regional hip-hop. No one mistook Iggy Azalea for the Atlantan rappers she was trying to imitate. But Post Malone, or Blackbear? Their ethnicities aren’t so immediately apparent in their music.
Iggy Azalea’s conditioned us to hear blaccents as both inauthentic and offensive. But while Iggy still speaks with her native accent, with just a twinge of American, Bregoli’s blaccent waxes and wanes on social media. Sometimes it’s egregious, sometimes she sounds like a regular Florida teenager. But unlike Iggy, Bregoli sounds more herself over a beat. The more she appropriates, the more convincing she becomes. The blaccent, a symbol of appropriation, creates wealth – then ironically, it becomes a symbol of empowerment.
At what point does appropriation become genuine musical influence? Artists like Elvis, Led Zeppelin, Paul Simon, Diplo and Eminem have worked within traditionally black idioms, but their artistic voices were their own. In the long run, do their musical contributions outweigh their tangled cultural legacy? It’s impossible to draw the line. Iggy Azalea’s easier to dismiss, but doing so won’t make her – or her influence – vanish overnight.
Anyone can learn to play three chords on a guitar. Anyone can learn to sing. But not everyone can learn to rap. It’s never just been “talking rhythmically over a beat”. Rapping is lyricism, flow, attitude – and it’s knowing your relationship with the black American culture that still defines hip-hop.
Hip-hop is governed by the principle of credibility. On a personal level, that means being believable. On a social and cultural level, that means knowing your place in the hierarchy. MC Hammer could never have dissed Tupac, Iggy Azalea lost her feud with Azealia Banks – rappers can’t punch above their weight, lest they get their ego checked.
But as genres and cultures cross-pollinate, things get more complicated. In 2014, I wrote: “Hip-hop worships authenticity because, like jazz or blues eons ago, its experience is still tied to race. But we no longer need rappers to do all the hustling they boast about — did we ever? Did they ever? ‘Iggy Azalea’ is a performance. All rappers perform.”
There are no objective truths in songwriting – only emotional truths. A song either resonates with the listener, or it doesn’t. But artists need lived experience to fuel their imagination. Art without reality has no emotional grounding. Art without fantasy is flat, literal autobiography.
Great rappers’ careers reflect their lives – they’re in an ongoing dialogue with their audience. Iggy Azalea raps, but she operates as a popstar – to whom each single is a new pose, a costume change. She rarely raps about her life – she raps about who she wants to be seen as. Bhad Bhabie, however, raps as the wild child we think she is. There’s more to Bregoli than meets the eye. But Iggy – we see right through her.
An iconic rapper is a folk hero, a symbol of their culture. If Dr. Dre or Kendrick can make it big, so can anyone from Compton. They might be famous, but they never really leave. Black capitalism, though conflicted, symbolises aspiration. A pair of Yeezys or Beats by Dre can give a kid a dream to work towards, regardless of whether they want to be Kanye. But if Iggy Azalea drives a Ferrari, it’s just a nice thing. It’s a symbol of her status, an unattainable luxury. She only represents herself. In hip-hop, there can be no success without struggle. Success not shared is just consumption.
There’s one person we haven’t talked about: Amethyst Amelia Kelly. The woman behind Iggy Azalea reveals herself occasionally. Many celebrities have done Vogue’s 73 Questions series; most come off like media-trained aliens masquerading as regular Joes. Iggy, however, is completely disarming. She’s unpretentious, down-to-earth, self-effacing – which, funnily enough, are extremely Aussie traits.
Behind every successful artist is a fascinating origin story. Iggy Azalea told it once, and never again. On 2013’s “Work”, perhaps her best song, Iggy tells us about Amethyst – the girl from the hippie town of Mullumbimby, who dropped out of high school and high-tailed it to Florida with dreams of being the female Tupac. “No money, no family / Sixteen in the middle of Miami…”
She always knew she was special, and she struggled for years before she had the chance to prove it. “People got a lot to say / But don’t know shit about where I was made / Or how many floors that I had to scrub / Just to make it past where I am from.” She raps so fast she lets her guard down, letting in glimpses of her Aussie inflections. “White chick on that ‘Pac shit / My passion was ironic and my dreams were uncommon.”
Iggy frames her adopted accent not as appropriation, but as a successful reinvention. She goes from Aussie squalor to the American dream, and transforms into her true self along the way. It’s a Cinderella story… if you ignore the cultural implications. So what if she’s the villain? What if Iggy escaped Australia, only to colonise black America?
As recently as five years ago, mainstream Australian hip-hop was seen as a total cliché. Unaffectionately dubbed “skip-hop”, the scene was stagnant – run by aggressively macho rappers who’d had no new ideas since the ’90s. The attitude, beats and overall aesthetic stubbornly ignored a decade of progression in the US – in particular, how the south had become hip-hop’s driving creative and commercial force in the 2000s.
Iggy Azalea understood Aussie hip-hop’s limitations, and wanted nothing to do with them. I admire that. She hustled her way into the unimaginable, working with genuine southern rap legends – mentored by T.I., features from Lil Wayne, Pusha T, Juicy J. In Australia, she was ordinary. But in the US, she was exotic three times over: white, female, Australian. Iggy bet on herself, and she won. She never became the trap rapper she saw herself as – pop rap suited her better – but from 2011 to 2014, she was never dull.
But in the years since, artists – mostly of colour – have rehabbed Australian hip-hop. The new wave of Aussie rap has its own distinct flavour: joyful, meaningful, current. Tkay Maidza, Remi, Briggs, Sampa the Great, Citizen Kay – the list goes on. They’ve made their multicultural Australian identity a strength.
By cutting herself off from her identity of birth, Iggy Azalea risks having none at all. To quote Eve, “It would be dope to hear [Iggy] with her swag. What are you? Who are you?” If Iggy dropped her blaccent, it’d be an admission of guilt. It’d mean relearning how to rap, reinventing every facet of her persona. That’s even harder to imagine than a white Australian rapper with a blaccent in the first place.
For the most part, people’s upbringing determines the course of their lives: politics, religion, socioeconomic status. Nearly four in ten Americans never move from the place where they were born. But from childhood, Western art and culture instil in us the Hollywood dream, the “chosen one” myth. Amethyst Kelly added to that two more dreams: hip-hop stardom, and immigration. She saw more of herself in black American rappers than white Australians.
But hip-hop is not a perfect representation of black America’s entire history. Systematic racism still exists; not everyone succeeds. When Iggy moved to the US, she struggled economically – but she never experienced racial oppression. You can’t take the cool of black hip-hop’s image without incorporating the struggle – it has no substance. I can relate to African-American art, write about it, even be influenced by it – but my empathy can never replace their lived experience.
But I’d rather live in a world with good Iggy Azalea songs than bad ones. You might prefer none. But would that change hip-hop for the better? Will the inevitable next generation of white rappers be any more educated? In a perfect world, everyone – including divisive figures like Iggy – would be the best version of themselves. I want to believe that white girls can make fun, empowering pop rap without stumbling into cultural minefields. Is that so idealistic?
So I’m still rooting for Iggy, even after she’s put her foot in her mouth time and time again. Maybe I relate to her because she’s fucked up so publicly. Who among us hasn’t? Let she who was born woke cast the first stone. We expect better of Iggy, but are we so sure about ourselves?
Even the most bitter of us still want to root for the underdog. Social media has changed very little about fame, except that it lets us see the entire journey. What if Iggy Azalea had been a punchline from the beginning? If her Sway freestyle, that unintelligible Vine from her live show had made her famous? And if then she released “Fancy”, we’d be stunned! But the Cinderella story only works if you tell it from the beginning. Otherwise, she’s just another entitled rich white girl.
The defining trait of 21st century celebrity is shamelessness: a refusal to be defined by how others see you. It’s easy to be cynical about celebrity culture – it’s harder to change the narrative once people think they already know you. But fame is an opportunity: everyone may look down on you, but at least they’re looking at you. Look at Kim Kardashian, who went from Vivid to Vogue. The Chainsmokers, who spun the worst debut single of the decade into genuine pop credibility. Cardi B, who went from stripping to social media to reality TV to 2017’s most beloved rap song. With “Bodak Yellow”, Cardi B became the first solo female rapper with a Billboard #1 since Lauryn Hill in 1999 – excluding Iggy and Charli XCX’s “Fancy” duet in 2014, a song some would rather forget.
Iggy Azalea, Bhad Bhabie and Cardi B have more in common than we’d like to admit. All three dreamed of rapping themselves out of their circumstances. Their determination made them famous; their differences will determine their longevity. Can Iggy show us who Amethyst Kelly is? Can Danielle Bregoli become a three-dimensional artist? The jury’s still out, but underestimate her at your own risk.
In “Bodak Yellow”, Cardi B lets us in on her entire journey – being a stripper, working overtime, getting her teeth fixed – with no shame whatsoever. She told us her story; now it sets an example for us. Isn’t that all we want from art? Started at the bottom, now we’re here.
Richard S. He is a pop producer and critic. You can tweet your grievances to @Richaod.
