She’s the Rap riot hailed as one of the best performers to rock Pop’s scene in well over decade.
Now, as she readies the release of her debut album ‘Broke With Expensive Taste‘, Azealia Banks has given a shocking interview to Martin Ivens‘ ‘The Sunday Times‘, detailing a past that’ll spell the words ‘soap opera’ for any who peep the excerpts waiting for you below.
Surprising content below…
On her affair with an older married man:
“At one point, she was so poor, she worked at a strip club and had her boyfriend pay the rent. He would drop by her house while she “smoked weed” all day, until one day she noticed a man sitting in a car outside, “and I’d be like, who is this? What is he doing there? He’d just stare at me.” The man was a private detective, hired after his wife found out about their relationship.
“My boyfriend had started on me, like, ‘I don’t love you any more’, just hurtful stuff, and, of course, my young dumb-ass started sending his wife emails. And I was psycho, and all of a sudden the same man popped up at my door with $10,000 and was like, ‘If you want this $10,000, you need to give me all your phones and computers.’ ”
He wanted to get rid of “anything I could send his wife”. She was so desperate for money, she took “two seconds” to say yes. “Being young and in love is crazy,” she shrieks. “Being young and in love with an older man is crazier. It was just a mess.”
On sleeping with old men:
“She loves white men. She has written songs about how much she likes “marshmallows”. She is also frank about her “daddy issues”. She was constantly pestered for sex by older men when she started out, responding, she says, by having sex with “some of them”. And did she enjoy it? “Of course I enjoyed it. Girl! That is the best thing, you already know.” Sometimes she cries if she hasn’t had enough sex. She has slept with “like, 25 or 30” people in total. “I’m not even ashamed of it,” she says. She thinks about sex “all the time. Like, oh, please.”
“The oldest man she has dated was 56. He used to come in and flirt with her when she was working in Starbucks, “and he was really rich, of course. When I was little, I had a radar for that.” He would take her to dinner in Chelsea, “and we’d be in some fancy restaurant and I’d be there with my sweat suit on”. He thought it was “the funniest thing ever. He really got off on it.” What was it like, being 17 and sleeping with a 56-year-old? “It’s like f****** an old man,” she says.”
On losing her father:
“Banks grew up in Harlem with her mother and two sisters. Her father died of pancreatic cancer when she was two, “from red meat, coffee, cocaine and Courvoisier”. He was a cokehead, she says with a note of pride, “till 63”. Her mother “lost her mind” a few years after he died. Banks claims she became physically and verbally abusive.
She had fistfights with her daughters, sometimes attacking them with baseball bats, Banks says. She once beat up a Mexican limo driver in the street after he hit Banks with a bag of rubbish. When her mother found out one of their boyfriends had cheated, she went round and hammered on his door, saying she would “cut his dick off and put it in a pan with some onions and peppers”. “She’s crazy,” says Banks.
“As a child, she would dream of escape, “that I would become famous and be on Nickelodeon and have all these handlers and then I’d never have to deal with my mother.
She would beat me and abuse me, but then buy me stuff.” Her room was filled with “parakeets and hamsters” and games consoles, “but I was such an unhappy kid”. She was sent to an expensive Catholic girls’ school because her mother “didn’t want me to go to a school with all the dirty kids on the block”, but when she turned up, she was the only black girl and “all the Dominican girls were bitches”.
She got into fights “all the time, whipping people’s asses”, and eventually had to leave, enrolling at a performing-arts high school instead. The plan was that she would become an actress, but she was often too stoned to read scripts.“
Then, in what moved to the Rapper to tears, she was quizzed on her mother:
“She started smoking at 15 because she was “sad”. She was “always a sad little girl”, and is in many ways “still sad now”. She bursts into tears. “A lot of the time, I feel really attacked by the world,” she wails. Even when she got famous, her mother couldn’t be happy for her. She is “jealous”, says Banks, “but she can’t act weird with me now, because she’s going to ask for stuff. You want a new TV, you want a new washing machine?” She cries hard for two or three minutes. “It suuuucks,” she sobs.”
On losing her MAC Cosmetics endorsement:
“She is sorry she called Perez Hilton a “******”, because she lost her deal with Mac. “Thirty minutes of laughter cost me my contract,” she sighs.
The truth is that she “can’t be a homophobe” because of a) her “**** sister” and b) the fact that her typical fan is “a gay boy between 10 and 25”. She was booed recently, because “I had a boy on my stage with his ass out”, she says, “and you know black men ain’t going for that ****. They were like, ‘Come on, you need to be going back downtown with that.’ ”
On her debut album and ‘fight picking’:
“The new album, she promises, will mark a transition from “loud girl running her mouth” to something, she claims, more grown-up. “I want guys to think I’m sexy. I want guys to think I’m someone to take out. I am a pretty lady and I want people to know I’m a pretty lady. No one knows I’m a pretty lady.” So why does she pick fights? “I can’t look like a P*ssy,” she says.”
sigh, this is the kind of stuff u keep to yourself. It won’t aid sales
I understand her so much better now.
had to change my email address since the trolls had access to it
Lovebird we know its you smh
I love this girl, a true artist is someone who is not afraid to grow, shes gonna be around for a long time, it must of took a lot for her to share that side of herself, and she must have wanted people to understand her more, shes very talented god bless her
hummm some of that getto drama that she lived should have been left unsaid who manages her ? O_o ….. Now i hope that she’s learned from her twitter drama with perez cause that s*** made her lose her colab with Gaga & Beyonce and so much more…. Girl this ain’t the hood anymore , u need to get it together and know that as an artist trying to make it, u will have to keep your opinion in your throat and lick asses to get there* wether you like it or not.
You miss that beyonce post LOLOLOL it was a mess especially Lovebird aka Cake like lady gaga
Girllll they told me about it on twitter ! but i was so busy ! lmao LoveBird aka Cake Like lady gaga omg….
It all makes sense why she acts the way she does…she is indeed talented but being that young sleeping around with men looking for love you can’t get home is a serious issue..which still goes on in some households with young girls! During this interview you can tell she’s still kinda hurt..but I think she professional help! But I’m glad she’s learning from her mistakes..
This bish needs new management. Fame Rule #17: interviews are for promoting your work, not oversharing your hot mess of a childhood. Even a publicist from craigslist coulda told her that
…this b**** is crazy.
Between Twitter and her Magazine interviews she really and truly does not want to have a career. I can’t even figure out which out of all that mess was most damning but props on admitting you were/are a HO who’s hot for older white Daddy men…that’ll help impress the rap community for sure.
So many people both male and female can relate to her story sans the sleeping around with old married men part. It sucks that she burned so many bridges so soon. She was a promising talent. Azalea you will never pop off and it’s all your fault
I will say I feel genuinely sorry for her after reading her story. It sounds like a story of exploitation and abuse that she hasn’t fully escaped from. I especially hated how the white guy got off on seeing the young black girl in sweats at the fancy restaurant. F*** that dude.
I don’t agree that she can’t be a homophobe. You can hunny. The same way the guy who slept with you and took you to fancy restaurants was likely a racist and many blacks can bs self-hating. It’s just the irony of life.
She needs to quit Twitter because going around calling people f*** will take a lot of opportunities from her just like with MAC.
I actually feel really sorry about her up bringing and her experiences in the life, I’m starting to understand why she reacts in the way she does.
I just hope she can put it all behind her and start to rebuild the bridges she burnt down, because she really is a talented performer.
I thought Azealia said she was bi? so now her sister is gay now, too, huh ?
She has one hell of a life-story. She deserves a movie. I’m still over her…..
WHo the hell wrote this, I mean it switches from first person to second person I can’t even tell who’s talking
I can tell that this explains the root of all her issues and why she seems so angry and mean. She is certainly a mean girl. But, she seems to need a therapist to help her sort through it all. The ways she decides to self heal is doing nothing but destroying her. She’s too cute a girl and too good an artist to have so much hate before her debut album even comes out. And if she thought that taking the Chris Brown route of saying and doing literally anything to sell her album, this just maybe only opened her up to cyber attacks and media scrutiny. Chris has been called a glorifying r*** victim and now she’s going to be a called a little w****. I will say this much though, it seems Azealia’s issues stem from the classic case of being a motherless child.
chiiiiile….
Really heartbreaking… I really believe every word of what she said because I was in a similar situation in my early teens.
Girl you could have kept that all to yourself! I mean the public don’t need to know all that! Kind of disturbing.
Awww poor azealia.
Shut up and release your album.
I feel bad and yet happy for her that she was able to get out of the situations of her past. With that said, she needs to realize that now is she wants to advance in this game that they call celebrity she needs to leave that hoodrat/nonsense back in the hood. Oprah, Jay Z, Will Smith and others came from bad situations also but they didnt allow it to dictate how they live in the public eye. Instead, they did a 180. I’m not big on Azealia’s music but I will say that she is indeed talented and a smart, young lady. She just needs the right people around her to tell her when to not overreact or completely put her foot in her mouth and say dumb crap. She can refer to people like Keyshia Cole, Khia and others who can never get very far because they still havent let go of that hood mentality.