Iggy Azalea and Vanilla Ice are both white rappers who were marketed like pop stars while also trying to tell us they were hardcore rappers. They’ve both achieved incredible levels of success only to be hampered by questions of artistic credibility. In Ice’s case, those questions ended his career. In Azalea’s case, I think it’s a real possibility that we may see history repeat itself.
In the past year, Azalea had two singles simultaneously at numbers one and two on Billboards Hot 100, and her debut album, the New Classic, hit number three on the Billboard 200 album chart and number one on the Rap Album chart. She’s also faced a backlash that has repeatedly called her credibility into question. Some of it is certainly understandable: she’s not only the first white woman to hit it big in hip-hop, but also an Australian, compounding her outsider status. One of the biggest questions hanging over her is the very sound of her voice. In interviews, her natural speaking voice doesn’t have a particularly heavy Aussie accent, probably the result of her living in the US for eight years. But it is discernable enough to make her “rap voice” all the more questionable. The harshest criticism is that she isn’t so much rapping as imitating black Americans.
One of the things that always made hip-hop interesting was that rapping was an extension of the spoken word art form, with the idea that one’s “rapping voice” would be consistent with one’s natural speaking voice. It also stands to reason that because rap and hip-hop were linked to poverty-stricken communities, the form’s performers and fans have had little patience for pretense or artifice. White performers like Beastie Boys and Eminem never pretended to be anything more than what they really are: crazy Jewish kids from Brooklyn who were too smart for their own good, and a mixed-up guy from a Detroit trailer park who found both solace and purpose in hip-hop.
On the other hand, even 20 years after Vanilla Ice’s pop career faded out, his true background remains shrouded in confusion. The biography put out by his record company appears to have been different from his actual life story, and there’s no way to know how much was written and released with his knowledge or consent. There are also questions about who actually wrote his biggest hit, “Ice Ice Baby.” Ice compounded the embarrassment when made when he denied that the main sample was taken from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” (For the record, it was, and he did end up having to share songwriting credit with Queen and Bowie, in addition to paying back royalties.)
Another problem for Ice was that his own self-image of being a hardcore rapper was decidedly different from the kid-friendly marketing campaign that was rolled out, complete with action figures. At that time, two of the biggest acts in rap were New Kids on the Block and MC Hammer. Ice was supposed to fill a gap between the two.
The end goal was to have Ice do for hip-hop what Elvis Presley had done for rock ‘n roll. But while segregated radio meant that early rock ‘n roll was still fairly obscure to Elvis’ fans, when Vanilla Ice broke, “Yo! MTV Raps” had already been on the air for a couple of seasons. While Vanilla Ice was being embraced by bubblegum pop fans, he was being derided as a fraud by hip-hop fans. At the same time, the Milli Vanilli lip sync scandal broke (taking C+C Music Factory, Black Box, and Technotronic down with them). The rise of gangsta rap and grunge was in part a response to the years of actual fraud perpetrated by these acts, which left music fans hungry for something far more genuine and authentic. A lot of acts perceived as pop were suddenly guilty by association, simply for sharing the same genre.
And no one was hit harder than Vanilla Ice. In 1990, his debut album, To the Extreme, was number one for sixteen weeks, selling 500,000 copies a day at its peak. A year later, his follow-up live album failed to crack the top twenty, and his movie debut, Cool As Ice, barely made more than $500,000 at the domestic box office, getting pulled from theatres less than a month after its release. In 1992, Ice was so detested that the white rap group, 3rd Bass, scored a hit just by having Henry Rollins lampoon him in their video for “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
Perhaps then, Iggy Azalea could be on a similar career trajectory. Like Ice, there seems to be little genuine sense of who she is. A description of her hometown of Mullibimby reads similar to the bohemian arts haven of Taos, New Mexico. Azalea herself has talked about her humble background, and has said that she and her mother worked as house-keepers in the vacation homes of Mullibimby’s more affluent residences. When Azalea moved to Miami as a teenager, she went to work as a hotel chambermaid.
Aside from her song, “Work,” there’s little indication of the effect of her background on her as an artist. Frankly, she spends most of the song judging women who exchange oral sex for designer shoes. Perhaps her real crime isn’t being an Australian woman trying to sound black, but that she’s cultivated a mean girl persona to sound black. While trash talk is practically its own sub-genre, she lacks cleverness, and sounds like she’s punching down in order to build herself up.
So, is Iggy Azalea the female Vanilla Ice? In terms of marketing, absolutely yes. They were both sold to pop audiences rather than rap audiences. While Ice eventually said in an episode of Behind the Music that he sold out, Azalea doesn’t strike me as having any morals to compromise. As for actual talent, one of the things Ice had going for him was that he was a good dancer. He did also show some real promise as a rapper, and if he’d been in more of a position to hone his craft like Eminem, instead of being thrown onstage as a kind of rapping New Kid on the Black, he might have developed some genuine artistry.
For her part, in a recent radio appearance, Azalea was asked to freestyle, and she balked. If you can’t freestyle, you’re not a rapper—race and gender are irrelevant. This should end her career, but it probably won’t.
When I wrote that Rock is Dead, I didn’t put enough emphasis on the fact that the under-30 audience sees rock as old people music, the way my generation (Generation X, I suppose) saw jazz as our grandparents music. For young people today, music is electronic dance music, R&B, and hip-hop, all with a great deal of overlap. Younger music fans aren’t plagued by the same questions of authenticity in regard to race and genre because they learned music appreciation from the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. Also, Auto-tune has made it easier to sell attractive people who can barely carry a tune; I don’t see another Milli Vanilli-type scandal on the horizon.
So Azalea’s career trajectory may not parallel Ice’s, but that isn’t because she’s more authentic or talented. It’s just because the audience is willing to put up with less authenticity for longer. The public turned on Ice, but we’ll probably just get bored of Iggy.
I wouldn’t call 3rd Bass a white rap group, it was made up of 2 white guys and a black dude. Splitting hairs mebbe, but I wouldn’t label them a white group.
The internet’s reaction to Iggy’s failure to freestyle convincingly made for quite the hilarious day.
The final nail in Vanilla Ice’s career coffin: his rap number in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Secret of the OOze.
Can’t you fail at freestyling and just be a bad rapper?
@Ng Suat Tong
Yes, it’s more humiliating then identity defining. A rapper that cant freestyle is kind of like a doctor who cant put an IV in a patient. Sure you have nurses to do that job, but you should really know how to do it yourself.
There are some doctors who hate seeing patients and have long since forgotten how to set up IVs. I bet some of them have finally become hospital CEOs and high end administrators. I guess this must be Iggy’s calling in life.
To sum up Iggy Azalea, a quote from rapper Jean Grea ” When did verbal Blackface become acceptable?”. Also there is also the question of access and promotion. While I will give Eminem and Beastie Boys much credit for their talent, I am sure you have to recognize they as well a Iggy had great advantage of being able to be played on wider array of radio and tv venues (“alt radio” and “college radio”) than most other rappers have. Meaning they were not relegated to the urban(black) market therefore hindering their potential profitabilty.
And one last thing. Could everyone please stop with the idea that freestyling is part every rapper toolkit? It is not. It is a skill, some rappers have it some don’t. If you you believe that, I guess Chuck D, De la Soul, Jean Grea, Madchild, Prev 1, Shad, K-os, Busdriver, Open Mike Eagle, EpMd, Run_DMC, Lady Soverigne, Charlie 2na, K’Naan, Roots Manuva, Gangstarr, Slick Rick and quite a few more are not rappers either.
Suat’s a doctor, Ian, which is why he took that analogy and ran with it.
I like both Vanilla Ice and Iggy; they’re both enjoyably empty-headed pop, I think, absent the authenticity claims. Of course, it’s the authenticity claims that make them popular…
I disagree with the notion that those who can’t freestyle are not rappers. While it’s true that freestyle skill matters to rappers a great deal today, this was not always the case. Jay Z’s near universal popularity during the mid-2000’s, coupled with his insistence that, like Biggie, he never wrote any of his flows down, imprinted a generation with the notion that written verses should be shunned. Eminem’s 8 Mile cemented this view.
In the meantime, hip hop lyricism in mainstream music plummeted to its lowest depths since the mid-80’s. Freestyling is a real skill, but rapping is more than just spur-of-the-moment verbal diarrhea with endrhyme.
“To sum up Iggy Azalea, a quote from rapper Jean Grea ” When did verbal Blackface become acceptable?”.”
Sort of tricky, because, when was it not acceptable? People imitate folks of other races all the time in American music, whether it’s Howlin’ Wolf lifting Jimmie Rodgers’ yodel or Eddie Vedder pretending to be Howlin Wolf. And for that matter blackface performance never exactly went out of style; people still love Mick Jagger, whose minstrel roots are at least as apparent as Iggy’s.
Iggy’s pretty blatant…but is that because what she’s doing is different in kind, or is it because her talent is limited?
As to the question about whether being able to freestyle makes you a good rapper, I believe it does, and here’s why: freestyle is rap’s version of improvise. As a performer, being able to improvise has a certain pragmatism, whether it’s to win over an audience that’s turning on you, or to adapt to the changes in tempo because whatever the drummer was snorting before the show is now starting to kick in (been there).
Being able to improvise isn’t just a line of defense, it’s also a path to greater creativity. It’s been said that Beethoven could sit at the keyboard an improvise for hours on end, and sometimes this would be the building blocks to something new. For rappers like Missy Elliot, who are known to be tightly attached to all aspects of the creative process, they have to be able to freestyle so they can explore different ways using of using rhythm, and of finding rhythms and cadences that work with the message they are trying to convey.
The racial essentialism fundamental to this argument is disquieting, if not completely unexpected. It’s really the only way the tool of authenticity turns.
But Noah, regarding the marketing of Azalea’s authenticity, that’s a different issue, and I mostly need to plead ignorance. But is this really how she’s marketed — or is marketing herself (i.e., as authentically “black” or “street” or “urban,” I suppose)? The only videos I’ve seen place her performances in a trailer park, a “Clueless” take-off, and a Tarentino pastiche. What’s the nature of the authenticity claims there, racewise?
Oh, I also heard — and this is really the last thing I know about Iggy — that she says she was influenced by reading Francis Fukuyama’s “The Origins of Political Order.” Now that’s some shameless hustling.
But no one would ever confuse Missy Elliot with one of rap’s premier lyricists, on her best day. Having freestyle skill is great, sure, but it’s not essential. Many great rappers achieved that greatness with written lyrics, bars honed through editing and revision. Freestyles don’t offer that, and the notion that freestyling was the only important skill is killing rap, as it structurally justified the banal topic rotation in the music.
You may not need lyrics that can actually compose a meaningful argument or narrative if everything’s extemporaneous about the same topic handful (money, promiscuous sex, weed, alcohol, the drug game). Rinse and repeat. When mainstream, commercially available rap focused on the prison industrial complex and the reduction of manufacturing employment opportunities from inner-city America and police brutality, freestyles alone couldn’t cut it.
Hell, even in gangsta rap/ bling rap, there’s a difference between guys who can rap like Raekwon and Ghostface, and guys who can’t like, say, G-Unit. No one would allow Lloyd Banks near a mic in NYC when I was young. Tony Yayo could play his position and hold the weed — silently. Real talk — freestyling everything is killing rap.
Well…Iggy is quite pop, but she does adopt this Southern black accent…it’s hard to see that as anything but a shameless plea for authenticity. It’s transparently fake and ridiculous…but that doesn’t exactly change the authenticity claim. She’s also associated with T.I.; that relationship is about him giving her cred.
I quite like the Clueless pastiche. There’s an Iggy not far removed from the Iggy we’ve got who could just embrace her artificiality…but again, that’s an Iggy who wouldn’t sell as well, given the importance of authenticity to rap marketing.
Melle Mel doesn’t freestyle. Is Grandmaster Mel of the Furious Five not a rapper because he writes things down first? What was he doing all that time onstage with Flash, looking pretty? Maybe he was just the lead MC in one of the most seminal groups of hip hop because it made the other members feel better knowing he couldn’t rap.
I don’t know about the rest of this article, and don’t much care one way or the other how Iggy’s career goes, but the claim that one must always be willing and able to freestyle in order to be a ‘rapper’ is stupid and wrong.
I haven’t read the rest of the comments yet. Somebody else has probably pointed this out, but the ignorance of that line really bothered me.
Ok. Read everything. Agree with Frank and J on freestyling. It is a skill. It can be very impressive (as, say, with Gift of Gab), but it is by no means necessary to be a rapper or an MC.
Also, freestyling is very rarely completely extemporaneous. . . that is a myth that many rappers reinforce (sorry if someone covered this above, but I didn’t see it) – frequently rappers have framing rhymes and ideas that used as a foundation for a so-called freestyle that have been pre-written (or at least through through and memorized
No fan of Iggy, but “authenticity” is way overrated in pop/rock/soul music.
‘Authenticity’ reads as a code word for ‘white’ is this write-up and comments. Drake is every bit as ‘inauthentic’ but happens to be black so never gets mentioned. There are two problems with this line of inquiry criticism 1) Authenticity is no longer central to rap and 2) more importantly, Iggy isn’t really a rap artist, she is a pop star so holding her to ‘rap standards’ is a flawed at best and the internet straw beatdown at worst.
Should read ‘straw man beatdown’
Hero, I disagree. Authenticity is quite important to rap, and Iggy is straddling the line between pop and rap in part by making certain kinds of authenticity claims.
Also, it’s not “in this write up” that blackness and authenticity are somewhat conflated. It’s within basically all of American/British/Western popular music, I’d say. There are lots of reasons for that, and you can argue back and forth about what it means. But in this case Iggy’s inauthenticity is most succinctly expressed by saying she adopts a black accent that isn’t hers. Not sure how you talk about that without discussing race.
If you call yourself a rapper and can’t freestyle, you might as well call it quits. Rapping some written verses is just basically a poetry recital… actually freestyling is improv, extemporaneous art.
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