Iggy Azalea was one of the few female voices in mainstream rap culture in the 2010s, and since her debut album, The New Classic, she’s sold 70 million records worldwide, garnered 3.4 billion views on her official YouTube channel, and released three award-winning studio albums. With the announcement that she would be taking a break from music after her latest album, The End of an Era, Twitter went into meltdown. The album comes full circle as it looks back both lyrically and sonically at the last decade of her life, through an evolved, yet non-judgemental perspective. It’s a time capsule to her early adventures in Miami, the sexual escapades of her twenties, and her youthful confidence, all tied together with an electronic, upbeat sound. Basking in the energy of female sexual power, the album turns misogynistic tropes and references on their heads - even the artwork is a play on the ending of Scarface. Iggy’s second album cover showed her beaten and bloodied, but here she is determined to come out as victor. Her sex-positive confidence underpins each track - she is unafraid to own her sexuality, and unapologetically take up space.
Speaking to Rollacoaster, Iggy said, “I have to fight for that confidence every fucking day if I'm being honest with you. Sometimes I don't feel confident, I have to fake my confidence some days, and that's normal. The thing is, I don't think there are enough bold, confident, powerful, unapologetic voices - there are a lot more than there were - but I still don't feel there's enough. And because I don't think there's enough, throughout my career, I've always made a point to not show the cracks when I'm not feeling confident.”
Iggy sat down with Rollacoaster to reflect on the past ten years, and discuss what’s next in store. She might not be releasing more music, but this is a woman driven to create new worlds for escapism - whether through writing and directing videos, or her “Totally Plastic” makeup collection for BH Cosmetics. That’s what, she explains here, she most needed when she was a young girl with a big personality, feeling alone and misunderstood in a small town. That’s what she wants to create for her fans. She may be working in different mediums, but “End of an Era” is not, rest assured, the last we will see of Iggy Azalea.
Interview and words by Octavia Akoulitchev
