Maeve McDermott|USA TODAY
By all standards, summer 2019 has been a huge season for female rappers. Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, Lizzo, City Girls, Megan Thee Stallion and Saweetie alllandedsongs in the Billboard Hot 100.
Five years ago, another woman dominated the hip-hop charts. Back then,Iggy Azalea's“Fancy” held sway at No. 1 for seven weeks, with Ariana Grande’s “Problem,” on which she was featured, at No. 2. Thebreakthrough songs were widely seen as the start of a superstar career.
Then, a string of personal and professional woesstopped her momentum.
On Friday, after years of delays, her second album finally arrived, without a high-charting lead single orthe momentum of her debut.
"In My Defense"
The title of her sophom*ore release, “In My Defense,” readslike a response to the years of delays and drama that preceded it.
As a white, Australian woman rapping in a Southern drawl,Azalea has been controversial since her first days in the U.S. spotlight.Even so, few could’ve predicted the rocky road ahead for her career when she was earning song-of-the-summer accolades for “Fancy” in 2014.
Azalea still has a dedicated fan base, and the rapperearned cheers on the internetfor decrying the recent murders of transwomen of color, speaking up about a topic that's been greeted with silence by much of the rest of the music industry.
And yet, Azalea has been lapped by her hip hop peers, many of whom — from Megan Thee Stallion's status as a writing/rapping/dancing does-it-all-herself phenom to Lizzo's flute-playing, body-positive, jaw-dropping live show — are putting out work and performing live shows that set the bar higher than Azalea's latest output has been able to meet.
AndAzalea’s relatively quiet release week, without a hit on the charts, shows just how much has changed for the rapper since her big breakout summer.
What happened to Iggy Azalea?
The rapper’s past few years have been a whirlwind of personal and professionalwoes.
Azalea courted drama even before her debut, “The New Classic,” dropped in April 2014,feuding with similarly named rapper Azealia Banks and notoriously botching an attempt to freestyle rap at a 2013 “Sway in the Morning” appearance.
In the months after her big No. 1 run, Snoop Dogg mocked her as being albino, Eminem disgustingly rapped about assaulting her on his song “Vegas,” Q-Tip schooled her on Twitter about rap’s intersection with race relations, and Macklemore indirectly accused her of not “knowing (her) place in (her) culture.”
In 2015, she endured a winlessGrammys ceremony — she was nominated for four awards, including record of the year and best new artist. She hada baffling Twitter feud with Papa John’s Pizza, after a delivery boy reportedlygave out her phone number. Sheeventually quit social media, handing over her accounts to her management and calling the internet"the ugliest reflection of man."
Her May 2015 single with Britney Spears, “Pretty Girls,” failed to match the heights of her previous releases. Then, her careerdevolved more.
Her planned “Great Escape” arena tour with Nick Jonas and Tinashe wascanceled.
She had a string of underperforming song releases, which prompted Azalea tolash out at her record label, Virgin EMI, claiming she was “not allowed” to make a music video for one of her singles and that her management “doesn’t want to see me shine.”
After granting several interviews in early 2016 about themental health struggles she’d encountered since her rise to fame, she went through an ugly public breakup with her basketball-player fiance Nick Young after claiming she caught him cheating via security footage from her home, later saying she torched his clothes in her fire pit as revenge.
Unsurprisingly, the personal dramadidn’t put Azalea in the mood to record. Talking toPeople in 2016 about her delayed album, then titled “Digital Distortion,” she said, “I mean, you wake up one morning and your fiancé is having a baby with someone else, you’re going to need some time, right?”
Azalea largely stayed quiet for the next few years. Sherevealedshe was signed and then droppedfrom Island Records in 2018, then announced that she signed a new deal that put her in control of her master recordings and kept her “100% independent.”
“Before it was like, ‘We’re at the top of the mountain, and we have to stay at the top,’” she told Billboard, seemingly humbled by her rocky past few years, in a 2018 interview. "I slid down the mountain a bit.”
Can she rise again?
Down the mountain, while not exactly in the lowestvalley, is where fans are finding Azalea in 2019.
It's another year with personal dramafor the star, who deleted her social media again in May after topless outtakes from a GQ Australia photoshoot leaked online.
But “In My Defense” arrived Friday withan album cover showing Azalea soaked in blood, which she characterized on Twitter as "a statement about women not having the ability to defend themselves under public gaze.”
While Azalea certainly has a point about the unfair treatment of female celebrities, a quick look at this week's charts reveals plenty of women in Azalea's genre who have been able to overcome the pitfalls of fame with meaningful releases.
Meanwhile, the buzziest news story to come out of Azalea's "In My Defense" release week was the singer's fake, tongue-in-cheekfeud with the children's character Peppa Pig over Peppa's "My First Album" release, also out Friday.
The exchange was amusing, yes, but also darkly indicative of the rapper's diminished stance in hip-hop currently -- that in 2014, at the height of her fame,she was feuding with the genre's greats, only to be trading Twitter jokes with a fictional pink pig five years later.
