Still as nutty as a loaf at a lesbian potluck.
______
zealia Banks made a Hanukkah song. It’s called Queen of Sheba, features a klezmer beat, and is, she says, “hot as fuck”. Not that it’ll see the light of day yet. Kanye West (AKA Ye) “fucked it up” by spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories, she says.
We’re speaking in mid-December, ahead of a new single that marks Banks’s return to a major label. By extension, it’s also a return to commentary – an art form the New York City-raised rapper has mastered as much as her diamond-hard and jaw-droppingly dexterous music – if a conflicted one. “I feel like Kanye has made it so garbage to be an entertainer with any opinion,” she says, before teasing her detractors: “If anybody was ever praying for Azealia Banks to finally shut the fuck up, Kanye has provided the platform.”
But over the course of two hours on Zoom this, naturally, turns out to be far from the truth. Banks speaks, with a charming and destabilising mix of irony and earnestness, about everything from her new home in Florida, to her one-time friend and collaborator Ye, to her place in the music industry – and why she has decided to return to a major label after splitting from Universal in 2014 and independently releasing some of her best singles ever.
Those songs – among them 2018’s glamorous self-confidence anthem Anna Wintour, the simmering 2021 Galcher Lustwerk collaboration Fuck Him All Night – supercharged a gen Z-led reappraisal of Banks as an innovator and prophetic commentator who had been unfairly pilloried. They set the stage for comeback single New Bottega, a booming, stylish house track and the launch of Banks’s second round in the spotlight. She’s bullish about its prospects: “I genuinely feel like, 13 years in, New Bottega might be my Hot 100 debut,” she says, sounding sanguine. Then she adds: “Even if that bitch debuts at 99, I’mma be like ‘A-ha-ha-ha-ha, bitch!’” (quote)