Azealia Banks is tweeting up a storm. Within the past 24 hours, the prodigious “212” wordsmith and online lightning rod has weighed in on the potential overturn of Roe v. Wade, other musicians, crypto, the President of Ukraine, and men who're terrible at performing oral sex.
“If you still don’t know how to properly eat pussy In 2022, there is no jpeg which shall save you sir,” she posted around 2:30 a.m. “Beeple beat you all to the top of the NFT Alpha Male pile and I think it’s time we give him the crown, so the rest of you lot can finish finding the clitoris.”
Banks is referring to the artist who astonished the auction world last year when his NFT “Everydays – The First 5000 Days” sold for $69,346,250 at Christie’s, stoking widespread interest in non-fungible tokens.
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“This problem is older and more important than these deeply uncompelling and regurgitative arguments for late stage capitalism,” Banks continued. “American Men have still collectively failed to find the clitoris. This is an ancient social flaw. exponentially most threatening to conception itself.”
Unleashing virtuosic, sometimes astonishingly profane verbal symphonies upon a rapt digital audience is a pastime Banks has long been notorious for. Her feuds are the stuff of legend — she’s gotten into it with Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Lil’ Kim, Zayn Malik; you name it. But in recent years, her Twitter spark had been extinguished.
Rapper Azealia Banks.
Chelsea LaurenBanks’s account was suspended in 2020 after she called for the cancellation of “dumbass luxury transgender healthcare ‘rights,’” but last week, amidst news that former Banks foe Elon Musk had struck a $44 billion deal to buy the platform, she reappeared, and seems to be in fine form.
“I actually *have to thank Elon for buying twitter, I actually got back on,” Banks wrote in an Instagram Story post on Tuesday morning. “The amount of money I lost by being banned from twitter and not having access to the fans/consumer base I worked SO HARD TO BUILD SERIOUSLY MADE EVERYTHING SO MUCH MORE DIFFICULT.”
Banks ripped Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apart too, writing: “He knew it would effect [sic] my value as an artist because if I don‘t have access to these channels to promote new music/new merch/concerts etc.... He could effectively stop my bag which is miniscule as f*** compared to his.”
In 280 characters or less, Banks has the ability to be deeply offensive, witty, tender, furious and poetic, sometimes all in the same sentence. Between accusing Volodymyr Zelenskyy of failing to sufficiently train the Ukrainian army and deeming the average American man “an insufferable vessel of dry mouth and low sperm count,” Banks paused to pay a compliment.
“Collaborating with Mallrat was super cool and chill,” she wrote. “It was a genuine and sincere invite from one artist to another.”
Then she got right back to business, accusing the music platform Boiler Room of bad practices after booking her for two gigs that failed to materialize. The Daily Beast reached out to Boiler Room for comment.
In the midst of Musk’s acquisition, it’ll be interesting to see whether he publicly clashes with Banks on the platform. The Tesla and SpaceX billionaire, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” sees Twitter as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” Like Banks, Musk is also a notorious Twitter troll who’s used the platform to raise all kinds of slack-jawed hell. Plus, the two have history.
When a musical collaboration between Banks and Canadian pop star Grimes, Musk’s former partner, failed to come together in 2018, Banks once again took to Twitter to air out the dirty details. “I waited around all weekend while Grimes coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on twitter on acid,” Banks said. “It was probably some weird threesome sex shit to begin with.”
“I need to wash all this weird, like, alien-ass fucking weird white girl Wicca Urban Outfitters magic off of me,” she added on Instagram. “I need to go pray.”
Musk insisted to Gizmodo that he’d “never even met [Banks] or communicated with her in any way,” but for this reporter, the insults the rapper cooked up for Grimes and Musk all but guarantee she’d observed the couple up close.
“You smell like a roll of nickels,” Banks spat at Grimes in leaked texts.
And when news broke last September that the etherial songstress and the Mars-obsessed mogul had parted ways, Banks seemed contrite. “Ok girl, can we finally make those darn songs now that apartheid Clyde is out of the way?” she wrote. “We were really supposed to eat these bitches up.”
The Daily Beast reached out to Banks’ rep for comment.
