The greatest cultural appropriator of our time, Iggy Azalea, has cancelled her Great Escape US Tour.
After already being delayed earlier this year due to “production delays”, the female emcee has cancelled her tour amid rumours of a management fall-out. Ticket holders allegedly received an email on Friday announcing that, “The Iggy Azalea Great Escape Tour scheduled for this fall has been cancelled and refunds are available at point of purchase.”
The Great Escape Tour was meant to start on September 18th in San Diego, after being pushed back earlier in the year due to what a statement described as “production delays”.
Here is a tweet from the horse’s mouth herself:
As u may know, the tour is cancelled. I’m so sad and sorry to let my fans down…we’ll be back out on the road when the next album is done.
— IGGY AZALEA (@IGGYAZALEA) May 29, 2015
Apparently, “There will be a new tour planned around Iggy‘s new record to be released in 2016”. Goddamn, we can’t wait…
While the demise of the tour won’t be great disappointment to genuine rap fans, here at H&E we’ve hypothesised the four REAL reasons for Iggy’s concert cancellation.
4. Low Ticket Sales
Let’s be honest, it was a little overambitious for Iggy to assume that she would have an enormous stadium turnout on the level of someone like Rihanna or Beyonce. She’s relatively new to the A-list, only finding fame with her hit Fancy. The tour was supposed to stop at arenas like Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and LA’s Staples Center. The two venues cater to 15,795 and 18,118 spectators respectively, a far cry from the 1000 plus concerts she’s put on previously.
3. A shitty playlist
Unlike real rappers who rely on, oh I don’t know, SKILL, experience and culture to craft and buffer a song out, Iggy goes straight for the ‘I’ll-make-a-rap-song-and-insert-a-pop-chorus-somewhere-in-there-to sell-records’. This is evident in her most recent string of ‘hits’: Fancy ft. Charli XCX, Black Widow ft. Rita Ora, Trouble ft. Jennifer Hudson and Pretty Girls ft. Britney Spears.
Although I’m pretty sure an auto-tuned queef played on repeat would sound better than auditory farce that Pretty Girls is, most of the people featuring in these songs are big stars in their own right, and big stars have, like, shit to do you know? So I doubt any of them would be making an appearance at one, let alone any, of the Great Escape shows.
And when the the structural support of some of your biggest hits are missing, well, that really detracts from the entertainment factor of your performance. But I suppose that’s what happens when you aim for the charts and not the hearts.
2. She’s not really actually that talented
When you sound and talk like someone from the northern coast of Australia, but rap like someone from the southern USA, there is going to be something a little questionable about the level and authenticity of your talent.
There is something quite off-putting about hearing Iggy’s strong Australian drawl when she speaks as proposed to her American rap style. But that’s not the most off-putting thing you hear from her she she goes on air. Just look at this video of her below trying to freestyle on Sway.
Painful, painful stuff. Even Iggy herself is reluctant to freestyle, which she awkwardly fumbles through, before picking up a little steam towards the end.
If you think that’s bad, check this video out of one of her performances live, which was so incoherent, that it required a ‘translation…
Is it any wonder she can’t fill stadiums?
1. She is a repeat perpetrator of grossly insensitive cultural crimes
You’d have to be living under a rock, or at least without internet access, to not have heard even a smidgen of the cultural appropriation debate (which we discuss here) being waged against Iggy Azalea. To quickly surmise, Iggy is being accused of putting on a cultural ‘blackface’, in which she pantomimes all the musical attributes of a Southern American rapper.
Being a white, Australian female, who has essentially absorbed the style of another culture’s (being the African American culture of the US) background into her musical style without proper acknowledge to that said culture, Iggy Azalea is able to capitalise on the palatability of her whiteness to reach a wider audience, without the fallbacks of actually being a marginalised black person in a country where systemic racism is heavily institutionalised.
Being an Australian myself, it is hard for me, or anyone in my position, to understand how grossly offensive this could be to an African American. But imagine this: A white person, from another country, rolls in and pick and chooses whatever she likes from your musical culture, a culture based on a history of systematic oppression and suffering, the only outlet for the gross injustice you face on a daily basis, and appropriates it into her own music without any acknowledgment of where it came from. How would that makes you feel? I don’t imagine it would be good.
And Azalea’s debut album The New Classic, did not debate to critical acclaim on the ‘Urban’ (i.e. Black) charts, let alone the mainstream one. Why would any genuine rap/hip hop fans want to go see her make a mockery of a genre that is uniquely African American in origin?
So there you have it. And if you ever feel a little bit upset that Iggy won’t be going on tour, just remember, she and Britney recorded this atrocity.