Azealia Banks proves herself as one of the greatest innovators in music with her latest duplex of hard techno, spoken word slashers. She already delivered a half hour of pounding 150 bpm (plus!) industrial techno in her YUNG RAPUNXEL PT II mixtape, a feverish descent into cybernetic madness.
There’s nobody else in the world spitting rap (and the occasional primal wail) over that kind of production. Though she cut her teeth as a rapper, Banks often creates her own genre hybrids to cultivate the vibe of each new project or mixtape, choosing to work with producers who specialize in house, techno, and eighties ballroom-inspired sounds (the Fantasea mixtape is a shining example of this revival).
In her new track, “Tarantula,” produced by Owwwls, she restrains her characteristically theatrical delivery into something more gothic, channeling the eerily calm implicit threat of an almighty queen delivering stern warning to a disobedient courtier. What she says is unsettling, but bleached of the Tarantula’s venom, as ice-cold as one of her infamous online eviscerations. It’s in a similar psychic bandwidth as Bauhaus maintaining vampiric drama in Bella Legosi’s Dead, or if you could imagine Interpol debuting a live set at Berghain at 6 AM. The production hovers somewhere on the spectrum of Kobosil and De Witte, a deep and imploring kick cut, but with hats that descend like ticker tape to emphasize the aggression of certain lyrical passages.
A sense of anxiety or dread permeates the track, Sylvia Plath taking a final plunge to the dark side; complete with all the necessary references to decay and body horror; the creepy surveillance of insects.
“I walk across the ceiling at night, I see you through all eight of my eyes
I’ll zip-line, venom inside
Blood boils you awake, and you’re paralyzed”
Aside from a few producers, the lyrics in techno tend to suffer from a kind of shallowness, a lack of raison d’être beyond what they contribute rhythmically. They are equally effective whether you understand the meaning or not, and it’s generally understood that the lyrics are not the pulp of the track, but a kind of decor. That’s what makes Azealia Banks’s songs refreshing.
The second track “Wings of a Butterfly” is a different creature entirely. A rumble kick gallops sharply underneath a pitched arabesque of hats, framing and accenting the tertiary rhythm Banks lays down with her lyrics. Her voice is now inflected with a tongue-in-cheek British pastiche, like a spit-take on the usual rap bombast. As the tinny guitar melody winds up, her voice fractures, fried by overdrive into a near-drunken art rock verse that might have been delivered by Karen O. The track isn’t at all macabre like the A-side, but it is still somehow disorienting. Her accent then bends again, so far left of the anticipated phonetic system that it might be understood to represent a different perspective or character altogether within the track, a hard-on-his-luck boatswain perhaps, singing an old drinking song outside a nightclub.
Banks’ particular skill is encoding her rhymes into her bespoke pentameter made to interweave with the instrumentals of the track such that multiple rhythmic patterns emerge. The effect here, understandably, is like the sublimated rage of someone who has been a scapegoat for an entire cultural obsession with the personal perfection of the artist, delivered from behind an unpredictable procession of masks, and deceptively danceable production. Not only that, Banks is clearly having fun (and has always been, this is her show; not her critics’) and experimenting boldly in a musical landscape that is often comparatively stagnant.
-Winston Mann
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