Azealia Banks Still Hates The “Ugly One” From Disclosure, Loves Ariel Pink Despite His Questionable Hygiene
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.”