Iggy Azalea Talks ‘Digital Distortion’ & Her Fall From Grace On Beats 1
Iggy Azalea relaunched today (March 23) with a catchy single called “Mo Bounce.” The track premiered on Beats 1 and the rapper sat down with Zane Lowe to talk about it. “It’s probably the most fun record on my album,” she confides. “I’ve thought a really long time about what I’ve wanted to put out… I was going to say something super serious and then, I don’t know, I’ve been in such a good mood lately.” There are other reasons too. “It’s summer and I just wanted to twerk in a video! Like I’m single. I wanna have a good time.”
The 26-year-old also shed a little light on the direction of sophomore LP, Digital Distortion. “I think I was definitely a little more influenced by EDM music and those kinds of sounds at the beginning and, on my last record, I really took a step away from that and I wanted to bring that back.” It seems the new album was heavily influenced by her mixtapes. “I executive produced this second album entirely and I just feel like it’s a much better reflection of me. In a way closer to the mixtape stuff that I had total control over as well.”
Why is it taking so long? Well, Iggy scrapped an entire album. “I promise you I had my whole record done and I scrapped the entire thing,” she reveals. “It was good stuff, it’s not even that it was bad.” The main reason was her break-up with Nick Young. “I was talking about a lot of stuff on there and I ended up having a big break up and I just had a lot of life changes right before I was supposed to drop my album and I just felt like, ‘you know what? This is no longer reflective of what I want to say or what I want to talk about or who I am.'”
Interestingly, the Aussie hitmaker also spoke candidly about that backlash. “I think the first album, that I scrapped, was definitely very aggressive and angry and abrasive and that’s how I felt at the time… it was when I was in the pitfalls of controversy and my career was fallen off a cliff and I didn’t really know what was going on with that or if I felt like I wanted to make music. I felt angry about certain things and it was in my music, which is good, but I just don’t feel that way any more.”
Iggy admits she didn’t deal with things particularly well because she wasn’t ready for fame. “I didn’t expect to get a number 1 hit, I never thought I would have that level of success as a female rapper because it’s really, really hard… and I just kind of thought, if I could skate by and make a living of it and do a few shows, that was kind of my expectation,” she confides. “It ended up being way, way bigger than that… and that level of attention is very claustrophobic and it kind of makes your decision-making sort of whacked out.”
The “Team” rapper has now decided to embrace the controversy. “I like being polarizing,” Iggy admits. “I came out the gate with a song about my vagina, you know, so you can’t expect to not be polarizing and that’s always what I’ve like to do, I’ve always liked to push the limits and I think I got to a place where I felt scared almost to piss people off or that I was pissing so many people off that I wanted to tame it… but in doing so, I feel like what people like about me then there was nothing even for them to like.” Listen to the interview in full below.
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