As we noted extensively last week, Azealia Banks is lately hip-hop’s foremost defender against cultural appropriation and the likes of Iggy Azalea. Yesterday Hot 97 hosts Ebro Darden, Peter Rosenberg, and Laura Stylez hosted Banks, who once again slandered Iggy, called T.I. “a shoe-shining coon,” and spoke that real about not needing Interscope or Top 40 radio play to make and promote her music. (Interscope dropped Banks in July, with Banks releasing her long-delayed studio debut, Broke With Expensive Taste, independently last month.)
At two points in the Hot 97 team’s discussion, Banks cries, clearly frustrated with the disparities in popular culture’s treatment of black and white musicians who make black music. “At the very fucking least,” Banks says, “y’all owe me the right to my identity. That’s all we’re holding on to in hip-hop and rap.”
“We need you,” Ebro tells Banks. “Your passion is needed.”
“It’s just upsetting given the deepness of the blackness that’s gone,” Banks says.
Today, Iggy responded:
This is your weekly reminder that Iggy Azalea, a blonde Australian who raps as if she’s a black woman from Atlanta, doesn’t give a shit about black women or black transcendence in general.
