All the Girls Standing in the Line For the Rap Show: Iggy Azalea's Sudden Rise:
Iggy Azalea almost wasn't Internet-famous. Last summer, the native Australian was living in Los Angeles, and after what was supposed to be two weeks in Miami at age 16 had turned into five years spent in four cities throughout the states, she was down to the last of her savings. She had one shot left, and so she used that money to film the music video for "PU$$Y," a song off of her first mixtape.
It was a desperate act. "I thought, this is my last money, this shit better work," she recalled, sitting on a basement couch at Manhattan's SOBs nightclub before her sold-out show last month. "Because otherwise I'm gonna have to go home. I thought, this is the video, it has to work. It will work. It has to work."
The video went live on YouTube in late August. It was shot on Slauson Avenue, on the Rollin 60s Crips turf. Iggy wore a striped tube top and tight yellow pants meant to accentuate her ass, which is, objectively speaking here, pretty big for a white girl. She and her girls licked at ice pops in such a way that one does not generally lick at ice pops in public, and there was also an adorable young boy doing the Dougie. It went viral soon after.
Now, at 22, Iggy has a management deal with Grand Hustle Entertainment, the label owned by the rapper T.I., a modeling contract with Wilhelmina, and a space in that strange new precipice of fame that now exists when very young artists earn scale-tipping internet buzz nearly overnight.
