Teenage fanclub

As I entered the O2 Academy in Oxford last Saturday, something felt strange. The air was thick, the bar was crowded and the DJ was already playing in anticipation of the headline act. It all seemed perfectly normal. Yet, something was amiss.

And then my friend turned round to me; her face pale, a mildly disturbed look in her eye.

‘Why is everyone here aged 12?’

Oh, yes.

While 12 is possibly a slight exaggeration, it was clear that a substantial portion of the audience at Azealia Banks’s seventh UK show in her 2012 Fantasea tour were teenage girls, all dressed in Banks’s signature style: wool hats, cut-off shorts, dark lipstick. In many ways, it made perfect sense. Azealia Banks, who exploded on to the music scene in 2011 with her single ‘212’, is as much a brand as an artist. It is easy to see why her self-consciously controversial lyrics, brash confidence and distressed-cartoon style would endear her to a gaggle of 14-year-old girls. At the same time, her distinct energy and creativity as an artist and her eschewing the increasingly fashionable ‘trap’ genre of her rap contemporaries, in favour of slick 1980s and 90s house-oriented style, has put her on the map for a more serious musical crowd.

So who exactly is Azealia Banks? The 21-year-old rapper grew up in Harlem and, after leaving stage school, chose to pursue a music career. Adopting the name ‘Miss Bank$’, she released her first recording in 2009 and slowly began to get recognised by niche music producers such as Lunice (with whom she collaborated on her track ‘Running’) and Machinedrum. And then, in 2011, Banks erupted into the mainstream through YouTube, when her first single ‘212’ went viral.

The rest is, of course, history. Banks, now signed with Interscope/Polydor, has become famous worldwide, her name synonymous with ‘cool’ after being nominated for the BBC’s Sound of 2012 and topping NME’s ‘Cool List’ in 2011.