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So That Was a Fun Week of Only Talking About Azealia Banks For Her Music

Azealia Banks; Broke With Expensive Taste; Guardian; Gay Slurs

A week ago today, Azealia Banks caught the music-listening world offguard with the surprise release of her long-promised, forever-delayed debut LP, Broke With Expensive Taste. The album was a barnstormer, a genre-hopscotching, hour-long bumper-car ride through her career to date, reminding us all why we found the singer/rapper so compelling in the first place, and earning back a ton of the public goodwill she’d squandered some with two years’ worth of petty Twitter feuds and eyebrow-raising quotes about gay-slur usage.

Today, British newspaper The Guardian published a new interview with Banks. We truly hope you enjoyed that week of only talking about Azealia in the context of how awesome Broke With Expensive Taste is, because now it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming of recounting all her controversial, explosive comments made about fellow celebrities, gay people, and herself.

A representative sampling: 

  • On Disclosure: “I want to punch one of them in the face — the little one [possibly Guy Lawrence]. The ugly one. I want to hit him so bad. I saw him at the airport in Australia and I came over to him and I was like: ‘Hello? Like, what are we going to do with this song?’ And he was just being a dickhead. I started crying, I was so angry. I wanted to hit him. I cannot stand that little boy with all those pimples around his mouth. I love their music, though.”
  • On the Stone Roses: “I was dating this tour manager, and we stopped dating,” she explains. “I didn’t want to fire him, but I wanted to bring my new boyfriend on tour. So he did something really stupid where he had dinner with the Stone Roses and he made a pact with them to have one of their roadies come on my stage and soundcheck during my set. Whatever. I broke his heart and it was unfair. I kind of deserved it. But don’t fuck with my stage or I’ll kill you.” [Guardian: “She followed that up by wishing ‘nothing but excrement and death’ on the group, calling them ‘old saggy white niggas.'”]
  • On gay men and the use of the word “faggot”: “A lot of gay men are way more misogynistic than straight men…the shit they say about women behind their backs, it’s like: ‘Wow, oh my God!’ You can be a straight faggot, you can be a gay faggot. A faggot is anybody that hates women. It’s like, y’all sing along to my words when I’m saying ‘nigga’ and ‘cunt,’ but as soon as I call this one white man a faggot the whole world exploded. Listen, I didn’t say all gay men are faggots; I said Perez Hilton is a faggot, so don’t try and bring the rest of the gays down with your faggotry.”
  • On her taste in men: “I love Drake. Drake’s cool…But I like really older white guys. Not, like, really old, like 50s and 60s, but late 30s, 40s. Maybe early 50s. I did date a guy in his 50s. That’s, like, my thing. You just like what you like. I was telling my sister Lakimba [who is gay]: ‘It’s just like being gay. When you’re gay, you’re gay.’ Why am I black? I don’t know. I’m black!”

While her comments don’t signal the end of the world — and it’s not anywhere near the end of our enjoyment of the work done on Broke With Expensive Taste — it’s probably the end of it feeling so refreshing to have Banks back in our lives again. Bummer.