The wins came quickly after that: offers “from nearly every label,” she says; a contract with Wilhelmina Models; placement on the cover of XXL magazine’s “Freshmen” issue; a now-elapsed relationship with rapper A$AP Rocky (she’s now dating L.A. Laker Nick Young); and, perhaps most important, the support of superstar rapper T.I., who threw her down with his Grand Hustle crew. The co-sign lent her credibility in a hip-hop world that’s still reckoning with Macklemore, one in which a white female rapper has yet to succeed.
T.I. laughs off any talk of his alliance with Azalea being out of the ordinary. “You mean her being Australian, me being American? Her hair being blond, my hair being black? Her being tall, me being shorter?” T.I. asks over the phone from L.A.. “I don’t get it: If we’re counting differences, I didn’t know.”
But Azalea’s differences came to the forefront in February 2012, when rapper Azealia Banks, who’s black, criticized a lyric in the former’s “D.R.U.G.S.” (“When the relay starts, I’m a runaway slave/ Master”) on Twitter. After a back-and-forth with Banks online and in the press, Azalea apologized for the line. But she claims the media’s treatment of their feud, combined with sexism in the industry, played a role in killing a deal with Interscope that seemed so imminent that she had jumped the gun and announced it publicly in 2012.