AZEALIA BANKS, a 20-year-old rapper from Harlem, has a filthy mouth. Very few lines, and not a single verse, of her hit song “212” can be reprinted in this newspaper.
The song’s stark black-and-white video, shot before a plain brick wall, has been viewed more than three million times on YouTube. It shows off a thumping reggae-spackled beat, her lyrical prowess and, perhaps most important, her unique fashion sense.
In the video, she’s in pigtails, denim cutoffs and a vintage Mickey Mouse sweater. And in the coming months, you can expect to see Ms. Banks and her anti-glamorous mix of Harlem swagger and downtown cool reinterpreted in numerous fashion magazines.
She has been photographed by the Dutch photo team Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for V magazine, by Matt Irwin for GQ and by Nicola Formichetti for Elle. And in early January, Terry Richardson shot her for a spring fashion spread in T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
Fashion designers, in particular, seem to be drawn to her street-meets-chic look. Mr. Formichetti, of Mugler, played Ms. Banks’s unreleased track, “Bambi,” during his men’s wear show at Paris Fashion Week last month, and is directing the video for her next single “Licorice.” Ms. Banks even performed “212” at Karl Lagerfeld’s home in Paris last week at a party celebrating Karl, the designer’s new budget line.
No wonder some fashion bloggers are already calling her the next Nicki Minaj. But unlike Ms. Minaj, Ms. Banks still takes her cues from the street. On a recent afternoon, Ms. Banks arrived at a bustling Latin restaurant in Washington Heights wearing black spandex tights and a pink long-sleeve T-shirt, looking as if she had just left yoga (which she had). There was no Rolex on her wrist, no LV logo on her leather motorcycle jacket.
Despite her recent globe-trotting, Ms. Banks insists that she is still the girl from Harlem. “Life is the same,” she said, a sly smile forming between her churlish lips. “It would be the same thing if I were still working at Starbucks, having to deal with a manager, and a shift manager,” she said, along with customers that elicited language fitting of her lyrics. “This is a job.”
Ms. Banks grew up on 152nd Street, between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway. Her father died of pancreatic cancer when she was 2. Her mother, who worked as a sales clerk at an art supply store, and who Ms. Banks said could be physically and verbally abusive, devoted herself to putting Ms. Banks and her two sisters through school.
Performing was always a passion. She attended private and Catholic schools in Harlem, where she danced with the National Dance Institute, a nonprofit arts group. Once, she performed at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, the so-called “Fame” school, which Ms. Minaj also attended.
The school changed her life, artistically and stylistically. She was no longer required to wear a school uniform. “That’s when I discovered Urban Outfitters, but it was so expensive,” she said. “So I would go to Forever 21 and the Spanish stores and I would put it together and make it look kind of hipster.”
To this day, Ms. Banks wears her neighborhood on her sleeve (and feet). “I wear a lot of clothes that’s going to get dirty and look cool once it gets dirty,” she said.
She took a similar approach to her rapping, which she began after failed attempts at acting. Friends were impressed by her short rhymes, so with money earned from working at Starbucks, she paid an acquaintance $30 an hour to lay down tracks in a bedroom recording studio. Her streetwise crassness and clever wordplay were evident in early tracks like “Gimme a Chance,” where she raps “Even white fellows wanna jump in the hot choco’lit/ Like marshmallows, get it?”
Her youthful exuberance turned heads. At a Nike basketball event in the East Village, Ms. Banks caught the eye of Vashtie Kola, the hip-hop tastemaker and video director. “She’s 17-year-old emcee, and she spits pure fiyah!” Ms. Kola wrote on her blog.
Early fans also included Dante Gonzales, who runs conceptual parties in New York and Los Angeles called Dante Fried Chicken, where he pairs food with up-and-coming artists. “We were all freaking out over her,” said Mr. Gonzales, who introduced her to producers like Machinedrum and Diplo. “She’s so versatile, and so hyper-intelligent, but a teenager from Harlem.”
In 2009, with her music career starting to bud, she dropped out of high school and signed a development deal with London-based XL records, but early tracks failed to take off. A year later, she was looking for new label when she met Mike DeFreitas, a manager from Montreal who had a small roster of up-and-coming beatmakers including Machinedrum.
Mr. DeFreitas oversaw a club-friendly mix of “212,” shepherded the video and cultivated radio play in London. The song, which could be heard on BBC 1 in the fall, was included on the NME 2011 Cool List and the Pitchfork “Top 10 Tracks of 2011.”
It had a celebrity following as well: in December, Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted that she was “obsessed” with the video. Soon after, Ms. Banks became one of five people whom Kanye West follows on Twitter.
The aggression in “212” is palpable, not just in the beat but also in the crass lyrics, in which she asserts her dominance over a male opponent. Ms. Banks considers herself bisexual, but, she said: “I’m not trying to be, like, the bisexual, lesbian rapper. I don’t live on other people’s terms.”
Now, her budding star power has landed her on a major label. Two weeks ago, she signed a deal with Universal Music and she plans to put out her first album this spring.
Ms. Banks takes it all in stride. “I’ve been out for three years,” she said. “I’ve been around.”
