Last week, someone uploaded a song and accompanying music video to YouTube entitled, “Iggy Azalea – Nothing Like Me (Official Music Video).” It’s a terrible track and a shoddy music video, but worst of all, it’s pop music. As if that’s going to chip away at Azalea’s street cred or something.
YouTube user P O P, who posted the video, claims that the song is from some time before Iggy signed up with Grand Hustle Records in 2012, and that the song/video was with “an label record that Iggy was almost signing.” I must admit, the song is pretty terrible, a derivative of Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” as many have pointed out, but aside from its authenticity, I’m not so sure why it’s so controversial.
Are we really all that surprised that a white Australian woman who has made a name for herself in the rap world had an interest in pop music first? Katy Perry started out singing gospel. Lady Gaga started out playing pop/rock in NYC clubs as Stefani Germanotta. The fact that Iggy Azalea, who is enjoying immense popularity right now, tried out another genre shouldn’t be all that surprising. Popular music is about finding what fits and what works, and that’s exactly what Azalea did. Her rap persona might be jarring and problematic, but 1) it’s a persona and 2) it doesn’t really matter for the millions of people that are keeping her at the top of the charts.
It may be a hilarious yet sad reminder that Azalea blurs the lines between pop and rap, that she probably benefits from the transferable “skill” of being white, and that her singing voice isn’t all that wonderful (if that is actually her singing), but again, not shocking. Not shocking, that is, if you never truly bought into her “I’m the realest” thing in the first place.
