Azealia Banks - Broke With Expensive Taste

It's been three years since we first heard of Azealia Banks and, honestly, it feels like she had gone on hiatus before she even had an album. Like M.I.A., she was a breath of fresh air in the urban and hip-hop genre, but with a sophisticated sense in her music. And then the twitter came. And her nasty mouth. And her attitude. And her unprofessionalism. Because one thing an artist has to know for sure, before he/she decides to pursue a music business career, is to be smart. And she wasn't.

Eventually, all those just postponed her album a couple of years. And - kaboom! - "Broke With Expensive Taste" has arrived! And, I have to say, it's all the things an artist like herself can provide today to the charts - electronic production, rap/sung vocals, salsa attitude. A good girl gone bad, gone good again in order to have an album, gone bad again for the recordings, gone good again so that she can promote the songs (she started with a tweet, oh well...).

Like Missy Elliott, Lauryn Hill, M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj, she sings. She is not as soulful as Missy and Lauryn, not as pop as Nicki, not as discreet as M.I.A. She is purely aggressive and she does her own caribbean hip-hop thing, as you can identify in the first two tracks, "Idle Delilah" and "Gimme a chance". She is rapping her heart out in the middle of the hearing ("Heavy Metal and Reflective", "Bbd", "Ice Princess") and just before it turns out to be all about hip-hop, it's all about witch hop and dance music again.

Azealia Banks is a versatile artist and she is, hypothetically, just begining to understand this. Her debut sounds like everything you would bargain for. So maybe next time she is smart enough not to waste another two or three years to release an album and thus (probably) she can be the pioneer she has always wanted to be.

p.s. "Nude Beach a Go-Go", masterpiece.

AnArtCalled... 8,5/10