Azealia Bank’s Twitter storms have ranged from salient (she had some good things to say about Iggy Azalea, for sure) to provocative (her stances on the policing of language are far too monolithic, but sometimes questioning the power we give language by suppressing it seems quite valid) to purely ugly. Yesterday, a series of tweets embodied the latter. In a seeming mix of attention-grabbing, trolling to inflame the enemy she sees in PC culture, and who knows, perhaps some actual internal bigotry, the artist aimed a variety of exceedingly racist (and homophobic, but that’s nothing new for Banks) writing at Zayn Malik (before turning against 14 year old actress Skai Jackson, who came to ZAYN’s defense) yesterday evening on Twitter. Today, this has led the London Born & Bred festival to drop Banks as a headliner.
It all began with an Instagram post in which Banks claimed ZAYN’s just-dropped video for “Like I Would” — which references Tron — also referenced her:
Which is fine! Even endearing! She called him a cutie pie! But then ZAYN posted a pretty mild couple of Tweets that may or may not have been rebuttals, and from that relatively small dash of sass he’d served, Banks saw it fit to start calling him so many other things:
Malik replied:
Meanwhile, when aforementioned 14 year old Disney actress critiqued Banks, the rapper replied:
And later today she sort of apologized, but not for what she said as much as how it was perceived:
Anyway, amidst all of that, Rinse FM’s festival in London released a statement announcing that they’d dropped the rapper from their lineup, adding their own Tweet to the mix, saying, “Rinse Born & Bred is a celebration of rave culture and has been created for EVERYONE. We celebrate inclusivity and equality”:
