Azaelia Banks: Broke with bad taste

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: AZAELIA BANKS
There are a couple ways to describe Azaelia Banks' Broke with Expensive Taste; lyrical nonsense with a hint a try-hard.

Azealia Banks is a name you probably haven’t heard in quite a few years, if at all. The buzz has all but died out for this New York hip-hopper, but that is to be expected when you release little more than a single EP over the span of six years? In an attempt to revive her struggling career, Banks released her first full-length album Broke With Expensive Taste on November 6.

After listening to this album, I strongly believe Banks is going to remain broke with expensive taste for a long time to come.  

Let’s start at the beginning.

The first song, “Idle Delilah” opens with 30 seconds of nothing but drum machines. It is perfectly normal to open a song with two bars of drums, but going for a full 16 bars with absolutely nothing but synthetic drumming?

Azealia, you should have fired your producer right then and there, because every second of this album is a spiraling disaster.

When the first song picks up after about a minute, there is a faint glimmer of hope that this record is going to be listenable. Banks has some serious vocal skill, but then the song is blindsided by a horribly out of place guitar riff.

It isn’t even an authentic guitar. It’s a synthesizer playing guitar samples, and it sounds like garbage.

About halfway through the song, it appears a tribe of monkeys has ransacked the studio, and Banks just kept recording. If you want to create a tropical feel for your hip-hop song, there are better ways to do it than recording monkey hoots.

The second song “Gimme A Chance” starts with a clip of Banks singing the beginning of the chorus, but instead of playing through the chorus the song fades out after one line. It gives a sensation that the song is ending before it has even started. This clip is incredibly out of place, but not as out of place as the entire second half of the song.

“Gimme A Chance” starts out as a bass driven pop song with heavy DJ scratching and nice brass horns, but without warning it suddenly transitions into full-blown salsa, and remains that way for the rest of the song.

She wants to rap and sing, but it feels like she doesn’t entirely know what her genre is. Further evidence of this is given by her surf styled doo-wop track called “Nude Beach A Go-Go.”

This album clearly has no stylistic direction or care for genre conventions. It seems as if Azealia is just trying to cover as many genres as possible in an attempt to gain fans across the board.

Unfortunately she does a pretty crummy job of it.

Something that hasn’t been addressed yet is the lyrical quality. Most of the words in this album are made up of gibberish or are too vulgar to print in this paper. Lyrical highlights include gems like “rama-llama-ding-dong surfer billy-bing-bong” from the doo-wap track “Nude Beach A Go-Go” and “pump-shigga-pump-parrump-pump-pump-parrrrump-parrum-pump” from the song “Miss Amor.”

Azealia Banks deserves a standing ovation for being able to put out something so directionless and all around poor, after working on it for over two years. This album is the sonic equivalent of a grade-schooler’s papier-mâché project with an unhealthy dose of balderdash.

Rating: 1 out of 5