Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Azealia Banks: "Ice Princess" |  |
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Posted: 12 Nov 2014 09:45 AM PST
Azealia Banks has always been good at playing dress up. Though her star-making breakout single "212" flaunted the raw lyricism of a brash Harlem art schooler, she soon constructed a persona that was something like a character from one of that student's class projects: a globetrotting, but still sharp-fanged, MC who rapped over dance beats ready for European runway shows and manifested visually as an aqua-haired mermaid. On "Ice Princess", a standout on her redemptive new album Broke With Expensive Taste, Banks is again playing dress up, but this time the pendulum swings back in the other direction.
Here, Banks slips into the costume of a mainstream rapper, spitting knotty rhymes about her diamonds—"Winter wonderland body so frosty in that Bugatti," she says at one point, cribbing imagery from two decades worth of flossed-out rap. The beat, supplied by AraabMuzik, further drives the point: though Banks loves to recycle house songs wholesale, the production on "Ice Princess" hollows out a dance track until it has the unmistakable rattle of Chicago drill, America's purest form of street rap. It's unlike anything she's ever rapped over, but right when "Ice Princess" begins to feel like a simple genre exercise, Banks pulls the ripcord, revealing an interpolated chorus that mimics the breezy lilt of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head". This is Banks at her best: doing something unexpected simply because she can. Azealia Banks: "Ice Princess" on SoundCloud.  |
