MUSIC REVIEW: The New Classic

Album: ​The New Classic
Artist: Iggy Azalea
Music: Junglee
Rating: 3
Pop: Iggy Azalea has cut a confident debut album but it’s definitely no classic. The rags-to-riches Australian rapper started off making underground mixtapes to touring with Beyoncé. Although she makes many pop culture references and crosses genres from rap to pop to EDM and trap, the album is too overproduced to make an impact. ‘Bow down to the goddess,’ she says in Goddess, which is like a blast of rock. Her biggest hit Fancy is a highlight, more for the infectious hook and collaborator Charlie XCX than the rapping. The ‘90s nostalgia in early 2014’ thing works well here. Katy Perry has written Black Widow, a sort of sequel to the popular Dark Horse; it also features Rita Ora but has too many things going on. Iggy digs into her personal past in Impossible Is Nothing and makes a post-feminist stand on New Bitch (produced by Timbaland and The Invisible Men). She vents about the flipside of fame in Don’t Need Y’all and goes all out on Lady Patra and the dance-y F**k Love, where a line goes: ‘F**k love, gimme diamonds. I’m already in love with myself.’ Well said!