If you don't get cancelled, you're not cool: rapper Azealia Banks lets rip

In a freewheeling interview with Evgeny Lebedev, the controversial and outspoken star takes aim at big tech and the culture wars and tells him why she'll be voting for Trump

- Evgeny Lebedev

AZEALIA BANKS is ready for the apocalypse. Even if the rest of America is not. It is crazy, she says, how the United States allow “an economy to exist within an economy that it has no control over”. She’s talking about tech — and the new technocratic class she says is taking over. The rate at which that class is accruing wealth “versus what that wealth will actually be worth in the event of a nuclear fallout, or a meteor hitting earth” has got her paranoid. “You absolutely need guns,” she says.

Banks, 32, is the world’s most controversial female rapper. Her music has won her plaudits, and her feuds notoriety. From Cardi B to Lana Del Rey (whose house she threatened to burn down using witchcraft), Banks has pulled no punches. Her latest target is the pop star Troye Sivan. He said last week that 212 — a thumping electro-pop romp about cunnilingus which Banks released in 2011 — was his go-to pregame song. The rapper replied by calling him an “expired twink” and said this was “white kids’ way of apologising for bandwagoning”. He clearly had “no clue” what was happening to her behind the scenes.

Banks says she hasn’t earned due royalties on 212, or its parent album Broke with Expensive Taste, since 2020. It traces back to a deal she struck with her former manager, the attorney Jeff  Kwatinetz, when she was 23 and he was 49. He sued for her extortion during the pandemic; she countersued for breach of contract, fraud and deceit, claiming that he groomed her. Kwatinetz's lawsuit hinges on Banks' "caustic" personality and weaponising her outspokenness to present her claims as "the rantings of a lunatic", the complaint reads. It is, in many ways, free speech that is on trial.