“First things first: I’m the realest.” This is the first line of “Fancy,” a single that has dominated the hip-hop charts since June. “Fancy” is by Iggy Azalea, a white woman from Mullumbimby, Australia, whose self-presentation—Barbie-doll tresses, callipygian glamazon physique, perfectly placed beauty mark—dares us to wonder what about her, if anything, is real. “I’m still in the murder business,” she continues, though this is clearly meant to be figurative. (Before she was in the rapping and modelling businesses, she was in the house-cleaning business.) The music video for “Fancy” is an homage to the movie “Clueless,” which was an homage to “Emma,” a comic novel about a calculating young gentlewoman. In interviews, Azalea speaks with her natural Australian accent; in “Fancy,” she raps the phrase “hold you doooown” in a bad pastiche of a Southern African-American twang, all pinched vowels and vocal fry. If this person is “the realest,” what can “real” possibly mean?
Like the "reality" in "reality TV," or the "hedge" in "hedge fund," realness in hip-hop has a slippery definition, related to the everyday sense of the word but not synonymous with it. In the nineties, during the heyday of gangster rap, realness was often conflated with a familiar set of tropes—accounts of drug sales, intimations of violence. "I got you stuck off the realness," Prodigy, of Mobb Deep, rhymed in 1995. "We be the infamous / You heard of us / Official Queensbridge murderers." Realness was related to verisimilitude but not reducible to it. Prodigy really was from a rough neighborhood—but he was also a ballet dancer from a family of accomplished artists, and his threat to "stab your brain with your nosebone" was surely hyperbolic. Persona is supremely important in hip-hop, and Prodigy was able to pull off a menacing one, whether or not this aligned perfectly with his biography.
Artists of all kinds feel obliged to establish authenticity. Bob Dylan was a refugee from middle-class Minnesota, but his gnomic responses to interview questions allowed him to brand himself as a rambling countercultural troubadour. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s reputation as a formerly homeless autodidact helped endear him to gallerists who prized edginess. But the problem of authenticity was particularly acute in early hip-hop, which had a dual mandate—fictional in some ways, journalistic in others. “Rap is CNN for black people,” Chuck D is often alleged to have said. What he actually said was, “Rap is black America’s TV station. It gives a whole perspective of what exists and what black life is all about.” A TV station might show the news and medical procedurals and cooking competitions; in the same way, some rap songs act as White House press briefings and others are more like episodes of “Scandal.” These contradictions were never fully teased apart, leaving listeners justifiably confused as to whether a given lyric purported to be fiction, nonfiction, or, somehow, both. The result was that m.c.s had to work especially hard to gain their audience’s trust. They could not afford to be elliptical. Boasts grew bolder, metaphors more crass and colorful, details more specific and self-incriminating.
Tupac Shakur made his acting début at the age of thirteen, in a production of “A Raisin In the Sun,” at the Apollo Theatre. Later he became a rapper and adopted the role of the thug. In 1993, during a freestyle performance at Madison Square Garden that has since become legendary, Tupac rhymed about a hypothetical “high-speed chase with the law” before calling himself “the realest motherfucker that you ever saw.” A deeply felt boast and a cinematic car chase—realness and realist fiction— coëxisted convincingly, buoyed by Tupac's skill and charisma. The audience that night couldn’t have known whether Tupac’s allusions to MAC-10s and bulletproof vests were drawn from his memory or his imagination; what mattered more was the hoarse urgency in his voice, and the way that, as the d.j. muted the beat for the final two measures, Tupac’s sinuous, syncopated flow suddenly gave way to the pointed eighth-note salvo of “the realest mother_fuck_er,” the accented syllable coinciding precisely with the downbeat like a Max Roach rimshot. The line was a performative utterance: in that moment, Tupac became the realest.
In the past twenty years, hip-hop has expanded rapidly, infiltrating all popular music from country to E.D.M. Rap is no longer just “black America’s TV station,” if it ever was. (In the near future, black rappers might even be a minority.) Realness’s definitional axiom, “real recognize real,” has always been intentionally flexible, because hip-hop is a quickly evolving form. These days, some m.c.s redefine realness to suit their needs. Kendrick Lamar, hip-hop's current pacesetter, does not glorify gang conflict; on the song “Real” he wonders, “Should I hate street credibility I'm talkin' bout / Hating all money, power, respect in my will / Or hating the fact none of that shit make me real?” Last year, Mac Miller, a young white m.c. with a metaphysical streak, released a song called “I’m Not Real.”
Pusha T was once a cocaine dealer, and he has rhymed about this experience for two decades, in increasingly belletristic ways (“I move ’caine like a cripple”; “Two ways of gettin’: either rap or unwrap”). He is now a highly paid musician, and it is almost inconceivable that he has kept up his illicit second career. Last year, when he claimed, on the song “Hold On,” to have “sold more dope than I sold records,” it was hard not to imagine his tongue in his cheek. That song featured a guest verse from Rick Ross, who rhymes from the perspective of a drug capo with a taste for crab legs. A few years ago it was revealed that Ross had actually been a correctional officer. No one seemed to mind. If a Jew wrote “White Christmas” and a prep-school graduate wrote “Scarface,” why shouldn’t a former cop make the best narco-trafficking anthems of his generation?
And then there is Azalea, who apes clichés about realness without either expanding or subverting them. Realness, for her, is just another hip-hop tic, like throwing one’s hands in the air or staying on one’s grind. In June, at the BET Awards, the two lead contenders for Best Female Hip-Hop Artist were Azalea and Nicki Minaj, another theatre kid turned rapper. When Minaj won, she gave a crowing acceptance speech, insinuating that Azalea employs ghostwriters. “I hope and pray that BET continues to honor authenticity,” she said. She drew out the word for emphasis: “au-then-ti-ci-ty.” Minaj has not always been on the side of purism, but lately she has found it useful to act as a hip-hop traditionalist. She currently has the No. 1 single on the Billboard hip-hop chart. No. 2 and No. 4 belong to Azalea.
To me, nothing about Azalea feels real, in any sense of the word. I might be more drawn to her music if she rapped in an Australian accent about her middle-class roots; or perhaps she could find a counterintuitive version of realness by trying something even more campy and artificial, like Lady Gaga or Riff Raff. As it is, her persona leaves me cold. Listening to Rick Ross feels like flying business class over a war-torn city; listening to Young Thug feels like watching a slapstick comedy in a language you don't quite understand. Listening to Iggy Azalea feels like nothing at all. But I am only one consumer. Apparently, millions of people are prepared to buy the kind of realness that Azalea is selling.