Hip-hop's tallest underdog arrives onstage fashionably late at a tiny west London club. Backing her are a DJ, the bow-tied, excitable WizKid, two singers, and four matching dancers, whose perinea swiftly become a familiar sight. Rapper Iggy Azalea – a model who stands 5ft 10 when not wearing knee-high boots – looks upon their jiggling posteriors and smiles a smile somewhere between the Mona Lisa and a madam.
"I'm the first of my kind, you ain't seen any," she raps on Murda Bizness, the second of 10 attitudinal tracks aired tonight. Although self-aggrandising bluster is hip-hop's default mode, technically, this is correct. When Azalea first appeared on the cover of XXL, the hip-hop bible, back in February 2012, she was the first-ever woman to be featured on the cover of the magazine's annual survey of new talent. She was also the first white female Australian.
Her selection proved highly controversial, even in a hip-hop landscape changed for ever by Eminem. Debates on Azalea's admissibility raged. Her fellow florally inspired rapper, Azealia Banks, was one of the first to cry foul. As Iggy Azalea's profile has risen – through various mixtapes and guest spots, her ear-catching debut single proper, Work, its top 20-charting follow-up, Bounce, and the expectations surrounding her debut album (now delayed till 2014) – she has also had to put up with accusations that she slept with her mentor, rapper TI. This has put the 23-year-old in the intriguing position of immigrant girl underdog operating within a genre entirely premised on its own aggressively maintained outsider status. For that reason alone, her career has been worth watching.
The fact that Azalea can turn a phrase or two helps, of course. Her best-known zing occurs in the middle of Work, Azalea's autobiographical theme tune: "Valley girls giving blowjobs for Louboutins/What do you call that?/Head over heels?" It's chanted back to her by everyone here.
This intimate gig marks the release of Azalea's most commercial single yet, Change Your Life, which riffs on aspirational themes – Iggy's prowess as a rapper again, and the allure of international travel. It's perhaps the only hip-hop proto-hit (5.8m YouTube hits and counting) yet to contain a reference to crumpets.
This gig, though, should have been a launch party for Azalea's debut album, The New Classic, a record that was due out last spring. It was pushed back to October, and now, once again, to early 2014. (Azalea is on tour in Australia this autumn, supporting Beyoncé, and Mercury, her latest label, felt she could not promote it sufficiently from Down Under; the whole farrago is an interesting insight into the workings of the major-label-release mind.) As a result, Azalea's set tonight is mostly made up of older material, rather than the fresh tracks the crowd were anticipating.
Her career may be a thing of fascination, but live, Azalea is not all that aurally impressive. Many female rappers have tended to balance a hyper-sexual presentation style with bellicose verbosity live. Tonight, Azalea's wordplay is visually drowned out by all the winding and grinding of her dancers; the rapper limits herself to squat thrusts and a brief twerk. (Last week, supporting Robin Thicke at a BBC 1Xtra gig, she strategically placed a hoodie around her waist when twerking, saving the Beeb's blushes.)
Pop music is currently undergoing something of a crisis in female hyper-sexualisation, a tendency it has imported from R&B and hip-hop. Indeed, Azalea has said that she believes Miley Cyrus copied her twerking. With the possible exception of Missy Elliott, whose turn-of-the-millennium reign brought a huge influx of visual creativity and humour into hip-hop, the majority of successful female rappers have long had to peddle smut alongside their linguistic abilities. T&A is nothing new here; indeed, Azalea's breakout track from last January was called Pussy. But there is an aggression missing in Azalea's performance, and no sign of the sense of humour sometimes displayed in her videos. These would go some way to offsetting the impression that we are all in a gentleman's club, rather than a gig.
