FEATURE:
Second Spin
Azealia Banks - Broke with Expensive Taste
__________
THIS is a curious case…
of a promising and amazing artist releasing an album after a lot of speculation, build and interest. That was eight years ago. Azealia Banks put out her debut album, Broke with Expensive Taste, in 2014. In 2011, Banks started working on the album despite not having signed to a record label at that time. She signed a contract with Interscope and Polydor Records to work on the album. Unfortunately, she was unhappy with the labels' representatives, so she ended the contract with them in July 2014; Banks then signed to Prospect Park. Broke with Expensive Taste arrived on 7th November, 2014. In terms of its styles and genres, the album mixes House and Dance-Pop with Hardcore Punk, Punk, Trance, Trap, R&B and U.K. garage. Many felt the album was worth the wait and definitely lived up to any hype. Recognising Banks as a huge talent with a promising future, Broke with Expensive Taste was successful in the U.S. It didn’t fare as well in the U.K. I think it is an album that is still underrated and underplayed. Maybe Azealia Banks has gained more attention for Twitter feuds and controversy rather than her brilliant music. This is a case of separating the artist from the personal, as she does have a Morrissey-like streak for controversy and unwise racial stereotypes and slurs. I am just focusing on her album and its worth – even if I am not fully on board with Banks as a person and her opinions.
I am going to get to a couple of reviews for Broke with Expensive Taste soon. One is very positive, whereas the other is a little more mixed. Before that, there is an interview from COMPELX. Azealia Banks was asked about her new album, and what life as a child was like in N.Y.C. It makes for an interesting read:
“What have the last three years been like for you leading up to the release?
They’ve been really hectic. I've been doing a lot of traveling. I’ve been here, there, here, there. I’ve been more places in the last three years than I’ve been my entire life.
People kept saying you did a "Beyoncé release," but it wasn’t a Beyoncé release. You were working on this for so long, and now a lot of reviews say, “It’s surprisingly great.”
The music has always been great. [Laughs.]
Did it feel like an "I told you so"?
It’s good to do that, but nobody wants to hear me do that. I’m obviously a very strong woman. It’s not to say that I’m at all trying to seem weak to make people like me or anything like that. I’m not going to say, “I told you so,” because you know so, and I know you know so. So we’re just going to leave it at that, and I’m going to go on and do my other things. One thing I can say, I distinctly remember what publications stuck by me and which ones shitted on me. Complex was definitely one of the ones that shitted on me.
In what way?
Just lots of ways, a lot of the times those things would happen...
—the headlines.
I feel like you guys at Complex, it’s more like it’s a boys club kind of thing. I get shitted on by Complex a lot, like a lot. Yeah, in terms of headlines and in terms of when I put stuff out, the comments have always been shady. You guys have all of these little small bloggers there that tweet really disgusting things. I almost feel like Complex is part of that group of urban media stuff that I just you know….
It’s an interesting dynamic because it's a men's hip-hop magazine.
Yeah. I feel like Complex Magazine has done a really good job in exaggerating a lot of things that are happening in the media, and Complex has played a really great hand in putting the sour taste for Azealia Banks in the public’s mouth.
What topics in rap do you think are over-sensationalized? Maybe a lot of people also really don’t know what anyone is talking about in the industry.
That’s because I feel like hip-hop isn’t really talking about anything right now.
I feel like hip-hop isn’t really talking about anything right now.
At all?
Not really. Like not really that I know of. On the mainstream, OK, Kanye, he’ll do “Black Skinhead.” That’s talking about something. I’m not even saying that I’m talking about shit. I’m not talking about shit in my music. I’m bring more styles of music, ideas, and themes to you. In terms of that whole hip-hop with a message, no one is really bringing a message right now.
No one is conscious?
Or conscious in just bringing a message. I’m consciously trying to bring you new things and new feelings and trying to move you in that way.
Well, speaking of Kanye, years ago, you guys did some work together. What happened to it?
[Shrugs] At an earlier point in my artistry, the idea of working with someone like Kanye West, Beyonce, or Lady Gaga was very glamorous to me. It was such a glamorous idea, but once I started to delve deeper into my music it was like, “OK, this is really what it’s about.” It’s about being the best you can be and not linking up with everybody else.
Who was the first person you played the album for front to back?
The first person to actually sit and listen to the album was [my manager] Jeff Kwatinetz. This guy right here, this is the first person I actually played it for and was paying attention to what was happening. I played it for lots of people. He got it right away.
What was there to get that other people weren’t getting?
I felt like everyone I was playing it for was listening to it in a very opportunistic way. Like, "How am I going to make money off of this? What is the single?" Rather than like, “OK, just listen to the fucking music.” Like forget about me, forget about Azealia Banks, listen to "Idle Delilah," "Give Me a Chance," or "Miss Camaraderie" and see what you think about this. Can you sell this album? I didn’t ask if you can fucking sell me. Can you sell this music.
You're not supposed to do anything with it. Put it in a fucking display case. If somebody wants to buy it, they will buy it. I need you to stock the shelves. Can you stock the fucking shelves, please? Just stock the fucking shelves. Just put it out, and if people want it, they’ll take it.
I remember reading about you growing up, sneaking on the train, getting dollar slices, really just being a normal NYC kid.
Yeah! I really wanted to be so much more. I wanted like purses and shoes, and I wanted to have my own apartment. As time went on the meaning changed into something more along lines like, there's always more to learn, there’s always more to be. You’re always broke striving for more. It’s like a life motto for me now, rather than like a joke. Like, oh you’ve got champagne taste with a beer budget, it's not that. It’s kind of humbling in the sense that…not to say you’ll never see God, but you know what I mean. It makes you happy with your day-to-day existence. It makes me feel really content when I say “broke with expensive taste.” Rather than wanting, you’re happy with what you have. Of course you want to know more. I’m making it more of knowledge and wisdom thing than a material thing.
No matter how much you know there will always be more to know.
Exactly”.
It is time to come to some critical reaction to 2014’s Broke with Expensive Taste. It is an album that should be more widely heard and played. Maybe Azealia Banks’ relative retreat from the spotlight means many are not aware of the album. There are some fantastic tracks on it that need to be heard. I will come to a positive review from Pitchfork:
“It’s been three years since Azealia Banks sprung up from the New York underground fully formed with "212", her confrontationally profane lead single. "212" was the seed for all of the triumph and adversity that followed—the prodigious rap skills, the casual genre-bending, and the bratty disdain for authority. In its wake, Banks charted a career path typical of a budding rap talent. She dropped the promising, beat-jacking pre-album mixtape (2012’s unrelenting Fantasea) and the compact retail EP of brash originals (2012’s nostalgia tripping 1991). She navigated through mettle-testing beef with her peers. The tiffs were negligible as long as the music was nourishing, and for a while Azealia’s war on the rap establishment was excitingly disruptive.
But as work on her Interscope Records debut commenced, Banks hit a tight spot. The deal soured as her new tracks were met with indifference from label liaisons. Her uncompromising social media demeanor landed her in quaffs both hysterical (See: her merciless ribbing of T.I. and Iggy Azalea) and injurious (that time she defended her right to call Perez Hilton a gay slur), but vocal criticism of Baauer, Pharrell, and Disclosure began to cost her profitable collaborators. Her early career goodwill nearly spent, Banks finally caught a break: Interscope let her out of her deal with the rights to all the songs she’d recorded during her tenure there. Broke With Expensive Taste arrived this month with very little fanfare, its release announced with a simple tweet. Its lengthy gestation is, of course, its chief foible. Older material accounts for roughly half the tracklist, and some of it doesn’t mesh well with the fresher, weirder stuff around it. It helps to see Broke With Expensive Taste, then, as an anthology, The Portable Azealia Banks.
Three songs in, it’s clear why Interscope didn’t know what to do with the thing. Opener "Idle Delilah" bursts in effortlessly crossing elements of house, dubstep, and Caribbean music. It’s followed by "Gimme a Chance", a bass-heavy post-disco romp that takes a hairpin turn into smooth merengue halfway through, as Banks flits from rapping and singing in English to perfect unaffected Spanish. "Desperado" borrows a beat from early 2000s UK garage whiz MJ Cole’s "Bandelero Desperado" as Banks puts on a rap clinic, flaying adversaries in a flow so neat you might miss the fact that every piece of every line rhymes. Her voice is often the sole unifying force from track to track here, and it’s easy to see a label’s trepidation about pushing this thing on listeners who haven't followed her every move. "Nude Beach a Go-Go", for instance, a late album collaboration with Ariel Pink, is every bit the what-the-fuck moment it sounds like on paper.
By the end of Broke With Expensive Taste you’ll come to see Azealia Banks as a dance pop classicist underneath the flailing. The capable but unfussy approach to melody on deep cut confections "Soda" and "Miss Camaraderie" as well as Fantasea holdover "Luxury" and the massive "Chasing Time" showcase Azealia as a singer who’s studied her Robin S. and Technotronic. Coupled with her bullish rhyme skills, Azealia’s chops as a house vocalist make for a true rapper-singer double threat. (Credit is due to Drake and Nicki Minaj, but both sound like they picked up singing on the job.) She’s an angel on the choruses, but for the verses in between, she’s a formidable spitter whose flash and flow are unmistakably Harlem.
The party line among hip-hop aficionados is that New York rap currently lacks a distinctly New York identity. There’s some truth to it. The city’s biggest success stories of late involve locals breaking out by spicing Big Apple grit with outside flavors, from A$AP Mob’s Texas screw fixation to French Montana’s trap circuit traction to Nicki Minaj’s day-glo EDM daze. But the scene in 2014 can’t look like it did in 1994 or even 2004, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Statlers and Waldorfs pining for a new age of rappity boom bap wouldn’t notice a new New York if it came up and offered them molly in a Brooklyn bar bathroom.
Well, Azealia Banks is it, and Broke With Expensive Taste is a reminder that the corner of Harlem that she claims is walking distance from both Washington Heights and the Bronx, where you’re as likely to hear hip-hop booming out of apartments and passing cars as freestyle, reggaeton, house, or bachata. It’s a quick subway jaunt away from the landmark clubs where ball culture persists, as well as perennial dance parties at Webster Hall and the glut of eclectic Lower Manhattan concert venues. Broke With Expensive Taste glides through all of these, just like the faithful 1 train sampled on "Desperado". Both album and the artist revel in the freedom of a New York City where divisions between these sounds and scenes have ever so slowly ceased to exist”.
I am going to finish up with an AllMusic review for Broke with Expensive Taste. One of the best albums of 2014, let’s hope that Azealia Banks has more music in her - and there is a great second album soon enough. A very talented (if controversial) figure, there will definitely be demand and an audience waiting:
“Broke with Expensive Taste, the official debut album from rapper/songwriter Azealia Banks, finally appeared in late 2014, despite originally having been scheduled for a 2012 release and well after several songs showed up as singles many months and sometimes years before an album surfaced. Various delays and major-label red tape ultimately saw Banks walking out on her contract with Polydor/Interscope and independently releasing the album digitally with no press notification or promotional lead-up. This surprise-attack release followed a similar approach as Beyoncé's late-2013 self-titled album, which simply appeared online in full without notice about a year prior to Broke with Expensive Taste. Finally a reality, the strengths of Banks' debut are incredibly strong. Aforementioned long-available singles like "212," "Chasing Time," and "Yung Rapunxel" showcase aggressive production that winds together dubstep's relentless bass pounding and Banks' talents as a fluid, sometimes vicious MC as well as a serviceable R&B vocalist. Production assistance from underground dance figures like Lone, AraabMuzik, and Lil Internet, among many others, gives the album an incredibly varied feel, sometimes losing focus and spilling into confused territory.
The Spanish-sung rhymes, Latin breakdown, and funky horn sections of "Gimme a Chance" sound like a different artist when held up to the harsh minimalism of "Heavy Metal and Reflective" just a few tracks later. Likewise, the commercial rap routines and haunted trap beat of "Ice Princess" make the kitsch-heavy faux-surf nonsense of the Ariel Pink-produced "Nude Beach A Go-Go" sound even more out of place, both tunes on the same album making it harder to take either at face value. While the time-tested singles are highlights and several other tracks hit similar highs, the album ultimately goes in too many directions that feel like filler, leaving this debut coming across more like a piecemeal collection of tracks that spike and dip in terms of quality and intent”.
There has been music since 2014 from Banks. The E.P., Icy Colors Change, was released in 2018. Her long-delayed second and third studio albums, Fantasea II: The Second Wave and Business & Pleasure, still await releases. The lead singles from each respective album, Anna Wintour and Black Madonna, were released in April 2018 and June 2020 respectively. I guess we will have to see whether there is going to be more news or updates regarding Azealia Banks and a follow-up album! She is a fantastic artist who we definitely need to hear more from – in terms of music, rather than Twitter feuds and misjudged remarks! If you have not heard it before, then go and listen to Broke with Expensive Taste. It is an album that is…
WORTH another spin.