Azealia Banks may have finally gotten her debut album out into the world, but that doesn't mean she's given up her infamous beefing ways. A new profile for The Guardian reads like a laundry list of the spats that Banks has gotten herself into over the past few years, and she tries to offer up explanations for a few of them. In general, she attributes her beefing to being unhappy with her relationship at the time with her 45-year-old ex-boyfriend: "My first two years doing music was hard, because I was dealing with so much in my love life. I didn't enjoy it, and you could see it. I was always on Twitter, arguing. I wasn't happy." (She also says in the piece that she has a thing for "really older white guys.")
Specifically, she's most candid about her scrapped recording session with Disclosure that led to some nasty barbs being shot back-and-forth in a few interviews:
I tweeted that I just had the best session with Disclosure, because I was such a fan-girl and I was so excited to have met them. But I guess their thing was: 'What if the song isn't that good and you hyped it up?' But I was like: 'So fucking what?' So they tried to be, like, assholes. And the next day they went to the media and they were like," – she assumes the identity of an uptight Brit – "'Oh well, I don't know why she's so excited, because we haven't even finished this song or written a hook for it.' I mean, come on!"
She reflects for a second. "I want to punch one of them in the face – the little one [possibly Guy Lawrence]. The ugly one. I want to hit him so bad. I saw him at the airport in Australia and I came over to him and I was like: 'Hello? Like, what are we going to do with this song?' And he was just being a dickhead. I started crying, I was so angry. I wanted to hit him. I cannot stand that little boy with all those pimples around his mouth. I love their music, though.
She also tells her side of her spat with the Stone Roses after she called them "old saggy white niggas" on Twitter after sharing a bill with them at a festival:
I was dating this tour manager, and we stopped dating. I didn't want to fire him, but I wanted to bring my new boyfriend on tour. So he did something really stupid where he had dinner with the Stone Roses and he made a pact with them to have one of their roadies come on my stage and soundcheck during my set. Whatever. I broke his heart and it was unfair. I kind of deserved it. But don't fuck with my stage or I'll kill you. Anyway, I'd been looking for [the Roses] all day, and this van comes up and Ian Brown gets out the car, and he's like: 'Why you talkin' about me on Twitter?' And literally I got this close to him." She stands up and bends towards me, her face millimetres from mine, and roars: "I'm like: 'Rarrrrrr!'
When asked about calling Perez Hilton a "faggot" on social media, she sets the record straight on what she believes the word means:
I don't regret doing it, but I'll never do it again, because I don't care enough about the person to have the battle again and defend my use of the word ‘faggot.' [...] A lot of gay men are way more misogynistic than straight men. The shit they say about women behind their backs, it's like: ‘Wow, oh my God!' You can be a straight faggot, you can be a gay faggot. A faggot is anybody that hates women. It's like, y'all sing along to my words when I'm saying ‘nigga' and ‘cunt', but as soon as I call this one white man a faggot the whole world exploded. Listen, I didn't say all gay men are faggots; I said Perez Hilton is a faggot, so don't try and bring the rest of the gays down with your faggotry.
And Iggy Azalea? "Nobody's going to go to Nobu and have a McDonald's." I'm not totally sure what that means -- Nobu is a world-renowned chain of Japanese restaurants, but I'm not so sure her metaphor works here...
As for who she likes, here's a running list: Drake ("I like Drake. Drake's cool."), Lana Del Rey, Ezra Koenig, and Ariel Pink, who she collaborated with for a song on Broke With Expensive Taste and who she affectionately calls "Stink Pink" because of his questionable hygiene:"Once Stink Pink says it's a go, it's a go! He's a fucking creep. But I looove him."
