Head Over Heels

Iggy Azalea “Work”

Iggy Azalea is a good rapper, but I can’t listen to hear voice without feeling like I’m listening to someone do an impression of a badass female emcee. She always seems to be concentrating very hard on getting the affect just right, to the point that her performances feel more stiff than they probably should. And this makes sense – as a white woman from Australia, she probably feels like she has a lot to prove to a mainstream rap audience in America, and she clearly has no intention of being a niche act. She puts a lot of effort into telling her unique origin story in “Work,” but it’s undermined a bit by a delivery that feels a lot more generic than it should. I don’t think she even needs to abandon this affect, I just wish the mask slipped a bit more, or that she had more vocal quirks that you just couldn’t hear anywhere else.

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