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.”