SHAZAM

If internet cred was record sales, Azealia Banks would be pulling down the kind of cash that keeps P Diddy in platinum-plated Bentleys and unicorn horn backscratchers. The New Yorker has been riding web since day one, scoring a bona fide viral smash with her delightfully foul-mouthed ‘212’. The track married sticky, party-friendly hooks with a volley of genuinely surprising C-bombs and the internet duly went crazy. No surprise that Banks found herself topping the NME’s oh-so-influential Cool List in 2011, before she’d even released a record.

But online stardom can only take you so far. Banks is currently working on her debut album proper ‘Broke With Expensive Taste’, tentatively slated for an early 2013 release. In the meantime, she’s found time to put together the mixtape ‘Fantasea’, from where ‘Esta Noche’ springs. Kicking off in a fairly subdued style, it isn’t long before the track explodes with siren shrieks and X-rated references to lady parts. Any ideas that Banks is going to tone things down seem way off the mark. Which is just the way we like it.

“I think my true, hard-core fans are people who enjoy being bad,” she recently told Vibe. “People who enjoy drinking and smoking, but wanna get it together and just don’t know how. When you really listen to my music you hear a girl who’s going through the motions. She’s experiencing men, having money, not having money, people who are trying to tell her she’s not cute, people telling her she can’t rap, she can’t dance… She’s really dealing with life. I’m not some little light-skinned bitch out here. It’s a young black girl doing this for herself, by herself. Y’all can’t keep trying to pin me up against the wall. Hip-hop has to help me not let this slip through my hands.”

Don’t believe what you’re told. Sometimes swearing is both big and clever.

AUTHOR: Huw Thomas