iggy azalea and the reality performance
THE NEW REAL

by
TARA MORRISSEY

___________________________________________________

Tara Morrissey is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Her doctoral thesis on "Hip-Hop and Whiteness in Post-Race America" is currently under examination. Her research interest lies in African American Studies and American Cultural Studies, with a specific focus on race and gender in the negotiation of the American 'self.?'

I’m the first of my kind,
You ain’t seen any?
Iggy Azalea,Murda Bizness’

Hip-hop is a site of simultaneous representation and creation, reflection and revision. The well-worn hip hop mantra of ‘keeping it real’ simultaneously points to retention (‘keeping,’ maintaining) and the elusive ‘real’ in which the culture has remained invested since its inception in the 1970s. Hip-hop realness should not, however, be confused with realism, but rather understood as a performative gesture. Likewise, the twenty-first century proliferation of the reality television genre celebrates the performance of the hyper-real in a way that deliberately complicates traditional distinctions between fiction and reality. In his manifesto on our contemporary infatuation with reality, David Shields argues that “realness is not reality, something that can be defined or identified. Reality is what is imposed on you; realness is what you impose back.” Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, whose positionality as a white female in hip-hop’s problematically black male-centric space immediately troubles her bid for hip-hop authenticity, presents a particularly interesting case for the ways in which twenty-first century performances of the hyper-real in both hip-hop and reality television converge.

Although the particularities of what constitutes real-ness or authenticity in the hip-hop context have in the years since the culture’s documented beginnings been subject to a continuous process of revision and redefinition, the ethos of being real and representing oneself authentically remains an important part of hip-hop’s politics of performance. The advent of reality television, another pop cultural form transfixed by the space between performance and reality, has, in turn, contributed to the proliferation of the ‘real’ as a contested cultural space. The phenomenon designated by Geoff King as ‘the spectacle of the real’ particular to reality television thus provides, I argue, a contemporary framework through which to revise and re-envision realness and performance in twenty-first century hip-hop. Hip-hop culture’s persistent preoccupation with the real, and what Misha Kavka describes as the distinctly queered instantiation of the real upon which reality television is hinged, converge in the unlikely emergence of incredibly popular (albeit polarizing) hip-hop reality shows such as Run’s House, Flavor of Love, Love and Hip-Hop, and T.I. and Tiny: The Family Hustle, amongst others. The correlation between these seemingly distinct genres may then, as Kevin Young suggests, aid in understanding what hip-hop actually means when it invokes the real:

Is it any accident that the rise of hip-hop realness precedes and parallels that of ‘reality television’? . . . The very term ‘reality show’ is a paradox of the highest order, but does describe the mix of mask, role-playing, and personae found on these forms of television —complete with literal and societal scripts — and in far more subtle form in hip-hop.

Notwithstanding Young’s insightful contemplation of the concomitant explorations of real-ness in reality television and hip-hop, however, the relationship remains unexplored by scholarship from either discipline. Hip-hop, a popularly masculinized space in which female performers must negotiate and legitimize their presence, and the disparagingly feminized realm of trash television and, by extension, its ‘trashy’ viewers, merge in this account in a way that highlights the necessary constructedness of the real in both genres.

Throughout the 1990s, hip-hop realness was predicated primarily on conformity to a certain class-based, racial, and autobiographical authenticity. Although these factors still contribute in a superficial way to the aesthetic of hip-hop and its ‘cool’ marketability, contemporary hip-hop culture evidences a more self-conscious approach to realness and its paradoxical limitations, of which scholarship on black music has long been aware. The problem of authenticity in pop cultural performance is an intrinsically racialized one, whereby, as Gilbert B. Rodman expounds,

mainstream rock, folk, and country musicians have much more liberty to use the first person to utter violently aggressive, sexually provocative, and/or politically strident words than do artists working in genres like dance or rap. Which means — not coincidentally — that the artists most frequently denied the right to use the fictional ‘I’ tend to be women and/or people of colour.

Michael W. Clune also gestures to the inherent paradox at work in hip-hop’s ethos of authenticity, namely that “the ascendant performance conceit is that there is no performance going on.” Hip-hop authenticity is therefore always already destined for failure, wherein “the attempt to resolve the tension between the formal ‘you’ of the rap lyric and the ‘you’ of the audience thus has the unexpected effect of turning the once-celebrated figure of the rapper into rap’s ritualized object of scorn.” Authenticity becomes the open secret of hip-hop discourse, an acknowledged implausibility but an omnipresent factor in the hip-hop performance. Young, too, understands this performed real as part of a black American tradition of counterfeit — the difference between ‘truthfulness’ and ‘troofiness’ that has proven to be a worthy tool for both the literal and the figurative survival of black America. “Since previously conceived notions of truth have often oppressed black people,” Young writes, “the counterfeit is a literary tool that fictionalizes a black ‘troof.’ Such a black, vernacular-based reality proves quite different from a white-dominated historical, factual, and authenticated one.”

That Iggy Azalea is Australian renders her not only distant from this cultural background to hip-hop’s investment in the real, but also immediately ineligible for U.S. hip-hop’s traditional neighbourhood-based channels of authentication, or what Murray Forman terms the “extreme local upon which [rappers] base their constructions of spatial imagery.” Based in Atlanta, Georgia, signed to U.S. hip-hop label Grand Hustle Records, and marketed within the Dirty South subgenre of hip-hop with which the city is associated, Azalea complicates hip-hop’s crucial investment in place of origin. Her disinclination to identify as Australian hip-hop artist rejects essentialisms of selfhood and self-representation and violates one of the mainstays of hip-hop authenticity, the declaration of allegiance to the rapper’s particular ‘hood. Indeed, in her 2013 song “Work,” the refrain of ‘no money/no family/sixteen in the middle of Miami’ firmly establishes the genesis of Iggy Azalea the rapper as ‘after’ her relocation to the U.S. Solidifying this erasure of Australian influence is the fact that, unlike many other successful white Australian rappers such as The Hilltop Hoods, Bliss n Eso, or 360, Azalea does not rap in an Australian accent. Instead, the American twang of her delivery is most consistent with the Dirty South tradition.

Australian hip-hop, especially in its most commercially successful Anglo-Australian incarnation, focuses its process of authentication on an imaginative space in which hip-hop, as freestanding entity, is organically and intuitively more real to the hip-hopper than mainstream Australian cultures. Ian Maxwell’s important work on Australian hip-hop practices presents a thorough and theoretically considered analysis of the phenomenon of, in particular, white Australian men in the outer Western suburbs of Sydney and their engagement with the imaginatively evoked Hip-Hop Nation. Given the antipodean absurdity with which the very existence of a flourishing hip-hop community amongst white Australians might be interpreted in the U.S. context, Maxwell’s study focuses on the steadfastness and conviction of the subjects claiming allegiance to a Hip-Hop Nation that is believed to supersede ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and, indeed, nationality. “In no way,” he argues, “might these processes [of authentication] be seen as being (merely) culturally promiscuous, as celebrating a postmodern valorization of the pastiche, a privileging of the playfully eclectic for its own sake. On the contrary, the use of the term ‘community’ precisely bespeaks a concern with ‘the authentic,’ with tradition and the fixing of values.” Maxwell points to this imagined Hip-Hop Nation as crucial to the Anglo-Australian hip-hopper’s perception of authenticity. In the absence of viable claims to ethnic or experiential kinship in the “geographically discontiguous, isolated, and multicultural” context of Australian hip-hop, legitimacy of Australian hip-hop “largely turns on the possibility of ascribing to local performance an authenticity that had to be articulated to a discontinuous, geographically remote narrative of origin.”

The Hip-Hop Nation and its ability to mobilize those who hear its call resonates with a diverse spectrum of Australian society — the recent work of Australian-born rapper, activist and academic Sujatha Fernandes, for example, testifies to hip-hop’s multi-ethnic appeal as well as its international mobilization. Further, Maxwell’s description of the self-authenticating process of hip-hoppers in the Australian context resonates with Azalea’s own account of her connection to U.S. hip-hop culture. In the words of Maxwell:

an individual in Sydney, Australia, in 1992, could, they claimed, get Hip-Hop Culture from a television video clip, and . . . what they understood as being the essence of that culture is so pure, so transcendent, that the being-ness of an African American was seen, in effect, as an expression of that transcendent ground, rather than the other way around.

Azalea in turn describes her induction into hip-hop through a narrative of self-alienation and online access to performance. “Sometimes I would not go to school at all. I would be at home writing raps, trying to be a rap star. I thought it was so cool. I would see all the rap videos and watch them on YouTube,” and, later, “Australia doesn’t have radio stations that play hip-hop. You had to go on Google or look on Billboard to see what was going on in America. I would go on MySpace to see what other kids were listening to. I was just manning the internet trying to find stuff that was cool.” The instinctive gravitation towards Maxwell’s Hip-Hop Nation that Azalea describes echoes Fernandes’s own narrative of hip-hop discovery while viewing Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” music video: “There was something fitting about my close identification with a fabricated product that revealed so many truths.” The Hip-Hop nation forms part of an important fable of hip-hop authenticity, a broader marketing of the real that is mobilized not to enact stringent guidelines as to who or what is real, but rather to incorporate diverse hip-hoppers into a rudimentary shared mythology of sameness.

In an interview with Australian hip-hop journalist Boss Lady, Azalea can be seen to navigate simultaneously the twin imperatives of Australian hip-hop and broader hip-hop authenticity. In an attempt to justify her involvement in hip-hop and downplay the incongruity of a white Australian woman in a culture dominated by iconography of black masculinity, Azalea insists that although hip-hop is, in her understanding, a black cultural product, it has become, over time, “more than what it was before and more than the main elements of it, you can have places for other people to fit in.” Azalea’s attempt to account for the evolution of hip-hop’s racial politics and thus validate her claim to legitimacy — her right to hip-hop — reveals two significant assumptions about race and its relationship to hip-hop. First, the aforementioned problematic myth-of-origin that hip-hop is black culture and second, that her ability to speak both for and from hip-hop is determined by a social performance of deference that underpins her responses to the race question throughout this and other interviews. Indeed, Azalea’s evident hesitation and the circumlocution of her response typify awareness, rather than transcendence, of her white positionality. Indeed, although Azalea suggests that the importance of race in hip-hop’s process of authentication has lessened as hip-hop culture has been diffused around the world, she is, at the same time, eager to align herself with blackness. In particular, Azalea’s body becomes the signifier through which she is implicitly marketed as a hip-hop woman.

In an interview with hip-hop magazine Complex, Azalea offers the first of her embodied connections to blackness, and one that is constructed as distinctly Australian. In a section of the interview titled Growing Up in Australia, Azalea recounts that “lots of the small towns in Australia have Aboriginal names,” and that her town, Mullumbimby, is one of them. She goes on to make more direct her association with Indigenous Australia, asserting rather problematically that “if your family’s lived in Australia for a long time, everyone has a little bit of [indigenous blood]. I know my family does because we have an eye condition that only Aborigine people have.” The seemingly casual reference to possible indigenous ancestry aims to do two important things. First, to indicate blackness, and thus hip-hop authenticity, on a level distinct from yet adjacent to U.S. blackness, and second, to lay claim to an essential Australianness that irrevocably undermines accusations that Azalea has rejected her Australian identity or failed to authentically embody it, perhaps most notably through her accent. She is also, importantly, distanced from whiteness as understood in the U.S. context by association with an exoticized image of Australia and connection to non-white indigenousness.

The second, and more apparent means through which Azalea physically aligns herself with blackness is through the shape of her body. Boss Lady cites an apparent rumour as to Azalea’s modeling career, asking her, “I read that you were rejected as a model at one point because you were too thick, is that . . .?” Azalea responds that “it’s weird, though, because I so don’t feel like I’m thick, I really feel like people think I’m, like, bigger than what I am! I’m not that big!” Focus on Azalea’s body shape typifies not only the way in which popular culture emphasizes female sexuality and sex appeal in its evaluation of female performance, but also the particular lens through which hip-hop scrutinizes and authenticates its female practitioners. Boss Lady’s nod to the size of Azalea’s posterior is, indeed, an authenticating gesture readily interpretable by hip-hop audiences long-accustomed to hip-hop’s fixation with ‘bootylicious’ imagery. Like Nicki Minaj, and rappers such as Lil’ Kim and Trina before her, Azalea’s videos are dominated by close-ups of her buttocks and showcase a variety of suggestive dances, techniques that unequivocally situate the female hip-hop form within the stripper-sex kitten-seductress paradigm already prevalent in male hip-hop videos. Reference to Azalea’s thickness thus helps to sanction her participation in hip-hop alongside her black female contemporaries by endowing her with a dormant, interior blackness. Hip-hop’s interest in the proverbial big butt, however, also complicates simplistic understandings of realness in that the surgical enhancement of the historically sexualized exotic female buttocks has become an increasingly popularized and culturally recognized phenomenon. Physical blackness, specifically black femaleness consistent with hip-hop’s particular brand of realness can, in this sense, be manufactured, as Imani Perry argues in her critique of hip-hop videos and their unrealistic portrayals of black femininity. “Colour is aligned with class and women are ‘created’ (i.e. through weaves, pale makeup, and camera filters) and valued by how many fantasy elements have been pieced together in their bodies.” Azalea’s self-promotion as a white woman with the desirable curves of hip-hop’s fantasy black woman is thus incredibly loaded.

Reality television, unlike hip-hop, is a genre that is explicitly feminized both in its promotion and in critical and popular evaluations of its worth – or lack thereof. Kavka interprets the feminization of reality television as part of a broader cultural imbrication of televisual pleasure with the domestic sphere, explaining that “during the nineteenth century the consolidation of domesticity and consumption as ideological patterns occurred specifically in reflexive relation to femininity, with the result that the twentieth-century apparatus of television easily became associated with, and devalued as, feminine practice.” That a particular realm of televisual pleasure is relegated to the demeaning category of trash “suggests that it perverts the host medium by planting ‘trash’ as a literal parasite on TV.” “The criticism,” Kavka continues, “that reality TV is not in fact ‘real’ because the shows are heavily manipulated (read: nobody actually lives like that) is also dependent on the construct of a dumbed-down viewership that conflates what plays out on one side of the screen — framed as spectacle — with what happens on the other — grounded in the experiential world.” The scorn with which aficionados of underground or conscious hip-hop interpret audiences of commercial hip-hop is similarly grounded in a logic of intellectual inferiority at best, and gullibility or naivety at worst. What dismissive readings of both reality — trash — television and mainstream hip-hop’s discourse of the real misinterpret, however, is that the un-realness of the real is precisely the point, or, in Kavka’s words, “the appeal of reality TV lies precisely in its performance of reality in a way that matters.”

Indeed, if the premise of reality television is its distinction from fiction-based television, it is only superficially so. Ardent fans of reality television understand and appreciate the manipulation and editorial intervention at work in the production of televised reality in the same way that soap audiences fully expect deceased characters to resurrect, passionate affairs to perpetually begin and end, and child characters to rapidly and inexplicably mature. The same suspension of disbelief at work in traditional narrative television remains a constant; what distinguishes the reality genre is less its plot (scripted drama) than its setting (the real world). As Shields elaborates, “we have a thirst for reality (other people’s reality, edited) even as we suffer a surfeit of reality (our own — boring/painful).” The common line of criticism with which reality television is derided, nonetheless, is framed as a kind of ‘outing’ of the manufactured or manipulated aspects of a given show —a n exposÈ of the ostensible deception at play in the use of the reality tagline. In short, the notion that reality or the real can be performed, or can coexist with performance, proves to be the sticking point for reality television’s critical acceptance. Kavka’s interpretation of the reality TV performance as “less a matter of “acting” in the sense of simulation than of ‘acting out,’ a performance of the self which creates feeling” presents a more workable understanding of the performance of authenticity that correlates, in turn, with Maxwell’s description of the freestyle rap practices of Australian male rappers. In both scenarios, an external accusation of inauthenticity — or, if not in so many terms, performance as the antithesis of realness — is seen to destabilize the medium and, in so doing, expose its fraudulence and concurrent ineffectiveness. In Kavka, the scripted dimension and/or mediation of reality television “is all television and no reality,” and in Maxwell, the illusion of spontaneity in freestyle or battle situations is its own undoing: ‘“But,” another informant warns me, ‘you realize that none of them are really improvising . . .’”

Surgical cosmetic enhancement and the increasingly commonplace presence of the plastic in the realm of the natural (much like the previously discussed enhancement of assets in hip-hop) are coterminous in reality television such as the Real Housewives franchise with the fabrication and exaggeration of wealth and assets, as well as the framework of gossip and back-stabbing from which much of the dramatic appeal of the series is derived. The real on offer, the audience comes to understand, is a constructed real, mediated not only by the editorial tools of televisual production but also, increasingly, by the housewives themselves. Veneers become the open secret of the series that facilitates our relation to and understanding of the show’s participants and, concurrently, provide a space for intimacy between the audience and the participant in the form of the promise of divulgement or confession in the one-on-one cutaway sequences in which the participant reveals her real response to the show’s dramatic events. The openness of the franchise and its participants towards surgical enhancement offers an unapologetically mediated interpretation of the real, the premise being along the lines of, ‘I’m not real but I’m real about it; I have nothing to hide.’ Within this framework the real becomes synonymous with transparency and, as such, is negotiated not between the show’s participants themselves but between the audience and each individual participant. Real, in the culture of the series as a collective, is thus dependent upon this reciprocal intimacy. What can it mean for the frankness of artifice — real-ness — to replace the truthfulness with which authenticity is traditionally configured?

In her music video “Murda Bizness ft. T.I.,” Azalea enacts a performance that interpolates the iconography of hip-hop’s Dirty South with the markers of whiteness made luminous by the explosion of reality television in popular culture. In effect, Azalea incepts the reality television real (plastic whiteness) within the real of ghettocentric hip-hop authenticity and, in so doing, offers a conscious performance of realness that both acknowledges her superficial incongruity in the masculinized black space of U.S. hip-hop and suggests that performance of a hyper-real authenticity of self is germane to hip-hop realness. The video lampoons child beauty pageantry, an American subculture that at the time of the video’s release was enjoying mainstream attention as a result of reality television’s gonzo-style explorations of its participants.

Pageantry, itself obviously a performative practice, is rendered ludicrously so in its pre-adolescent form: the aesthetic of the high-glitz pageant, in particular, demands that the participant be appropriately presented in full make-up, fake tan, hairpiece, false eyelashes, acrylic nails, and the flipper, a removable veneer that gives the appearance of adult teeth. The glitz pageant stands in opposition to the lesser natural pageant, a binary that makes perfectly clear the necessary, indeed compulsory, un-naturalness or constructed-ness of the former. Lyrics such as,

These other bitches think they’ hot?/Not really./She a broke ho’/That’s how you know she’s not with me,’ ‘I’m God’s honest truth,/They decide to lie/They just divide they’ legs/I divide the pie’ and ‘Shit, I’m IMAX big/You’re poster size’

mark but a few examples of the rivalry by which “Murda Bizness” is characterized. Teamed with images of glitz pageant children that recall the dramatic rivalries enacted in Toddlers and Tiaras, the performative nature of Azalea’s boast is exposed at the same time as the very real effects of rivalry are nurtured, developed, and deemed necessary to the successful performance of femininity. The common thread of rivalry throughout hip-hop and reality TV is similarly noted by Young in his argument that the genres share particular interpretations of realness:

Nor is it a coincidence that participants in both rap and reality TV — even when it is seemingly for love — refer to their respective genres as the Game? If for rap it’s called that because of the business (as well as its symbolic relationship to the ‘drug game’ or the ‘fight game’), both genres are highly aware of the parameters (which are few) implied by the idea of a game, and refer to realness and gaming in nearly the same breath, without irony (which is otherwise rampant).

Rapper T.I., whose own work – in particular his family-oriented reality show T.I. and Tiny: The Family Hustle – has chronicled his evolution from drug dealer to platinum-selling rapper and self-professed family man, also appears in the video with his stepdaughter Zonnique Pullins. The duo’s over-performance of a pageant father and his diva-like daughter is of particular interest in that it serves to distance hip-hop (via T.I.) from the overt performance of pageantry at the same time as it troubles the credibility of T.I.’s gangsta rap persona throughout the remainder of the video. Indeed, the video presents a palimpsest of real performance: the official performances on the pageant stage; the cutaway interviews characteristic of reality television in which participants play up their personalities in hopes of making an impact on the show’s audience; the performance of Azalea, T.I., Zonnique, and the rest of the cast in the pageant roles; and, finally, the hip-hop performance by which the entire work is framed.

Hip-hop’s preoccupation with the real is compelling precisely because of its instability, its constant recalibration and, importantly, its awareness of the distinction between (per Young) the ‘truth’ and the ‘troof.’ Contemporary fascination with what Shields terms “the extraordinary drama of lied-about ordinary life,” crystallized in the increasing proliferation of reality television, brings the long-discussed real of hip-hop into a newly valorized position of prominence in popular culture. Kavka’s assertion that discussion of the real is ultimately invested in “value judgments that operate in binary relations” whereby “inevitably, what is real is good, - a judgment that works colloquially in its obverse, what is good is real — while what is mediated is bad, and bad for you ‘ effectively summarizes the devaluation of reality television’s performed real. Within its broader analysis of reality television as a feminized and concurrently disparaged cultural space, however, it may also prove useful in shedding light on the ways in which realness is performed by hip-hop’s women. If, as Mark Anthony Neal suggests, “ultimately all concerns about authenticity in hip-hop begin and end with the fear of the proverbial white rapper,” the recent emergence of the female white rapper in mainstream U.S. hip-hop surely marks a crucial turning point in hip-hop’s ongoing mediation of the real. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether Azalea’s particular mobilization of contemporary experimentation with realness in its various pop cultural manifestations affords her longevity in a hip-hop scene still skeptical of both white and, arguably, female performance.