Good article about her. It's too long to post so I posted the most interesting parts. Polow needs help...why do these fragile women keep falling for the mess he says....he's looking for a pay day.
https://jezebel.com/the-making-and-unmaking-of-iggy-azalea-1797030869
https://jezebel.com/the-making-and-unmaking-of-iggy-azalea-1797030869
During the summer of 2010, Iggy Azalea lived free of charge in a guest house in Los Angeles, courtesy of Polow Da Don. As the producer behind Fergie’s biggest hits, he saw Iggy as the second coming and wanted to groom her into a pop star. But Iggy had a much different vision—she wanted to be a hardcore rapper.
Polow had met her earlier that year, when he hosted a party for the LA Lakers in his Atlanta home. Iggy stood out in the room, a tall white blonde among basketball players and music industry figures. Polow remembers the scene.
“She just looked exotic,” he says. “She looked like a star. If she was in entertainment, I wanted to work with her. If she wasn’t, I wanted to talk to her, try to take her out on a date or something.”
Within months, Polow flew Iggy from Atlanta to LA. For a few weeks, she shadowed him in the studio, meeting icons like Timbaland and Dr. Dre and superstars like Chris Brown, who saw her and, according to Polow, wondered, “Who the **** is that?” By then, Iggy had cycled through a series of mentors who pushed her toward pop. They also taught her how to rap. Polow was just about last in the lineup before she met T.I., the rap star who would help her create the “super hood ****” Polow says she envisioned.
Then suddenly, her fast-track American success story turned into a cautionary tale. Iggy became a punchline and went from being hailed as a white rap savior—a potential salve in the lineage of bad white rappers—to, three years later, being a digital-era Vanilla Ice, reduced to a viral talking point. It didn’t matter that she’d made a perfect pop song. She was buried in public beefs (with Azealia Banks, Q-Tip, Papa John’s Pizza), and drama that proved more stressful than entertaining, to the point of annoyance and then indifference. In a June interview with The Guardian, Halsey, who sang on the Chainsmokers’ hit “Closer,” summarized Iggy’s career in a flippant nutshell: “She had a complete disregard for black culture. F*cking moron. I watched her career dissolve and it fascinated me.”
Iggy, of her own admission, cracked in the thick of the outrage, thinkpieces, and nonstop controversy, partially riding that turbulent cycle into fame. A textbook problematic figure, she found herself at the center of debates about authenticity in hip-hop and cultural appropriation—conversations that intensified amid continuing national discussions about privilege and race. Her delayed sophomore album, Digital Distortion, is now a shot in the dark after an expected 2016 release and a June 2017 date that’s come and gone. In the past year, Iggy has brought her frustrations about the delay to the public’s attention by venting about it on Twitter. Her label, Def Jam, declined comment on the album’s status, as well as requests for an interview or comment from Iggy. (In a June interview with Variety, Def Jam CEO Steve Bartels called the album rollout a “building process” and said, “The most important thing is getting her back to a place where she’s hot.”)
In the meantime, Iggy’s fans have grown anxious, T.I. has professionally disowned her, and her critics want nothing to do with her after one too many offenses—the racist tweets, the blaccent, Twitter feuds—and not nearly enough good music.
Around her 18th birthday, Iggy met with Lee at the headquarters of his label, Yippee Records. He introduced her to his crew, then took her to Saltgrass Steakhouse, a Texas-based family style chain. Later that night, in Lee’s home studio, Iggy showed off her rap skills. It was clear that she needed work. “I didn’t buy into her because of the rapping. A journey had to be taken to get her to be a good rapper,” says Lee. “What I saw was a model, an entertainer, an actress.”
Over the course of a year, Lee taught Iggy the basics of flow and how to harness her natural charisma. She credits him for also teaching her “how to rap like a girl,” despite her desire to be more like 2Pac. This presented a slight challenge—a white girl who wanted to be hard, but rapped like Alex Trebek reciting lyrics on Jeopardy.
Networking around Atlanta led Iggy to Polow, who figured that as a pop-rapper, she could lure a broad base—more specifically, black men. “You’re gonna attract the black guys, when you got an ass that big,” he told her. At the time, Iggy had been working out furiously, up to four days a week, and taking performance training as part of consultations with Atlanta’s Marvelous Enterprises Artist Development Center, a service that promotes itself as “a superstar-training site.”
At face value, the accent, a product of Iggy’s teachings in the South, seemed like a callback to a familiar, grotesque costume. In a 2016 article, “How Iggy Azalea mastered her ‘blaccent,’” the Washington Post cited a paper by linguists Maeve Eberhardt and Kara Freeman in which the authors contend: “Linguistic minstrelsy is a form of ‘figurative blackface’, in which white users of African American English (AAE) do not literally darken their skin with make-up as in turn-of-the-century minstrel shows, but in essence perform in blackface, drawing on linguistic and other symbolic elements that signify racialized ideologies to a wide US audience.”
