Iggy Azalea

Iggy Azalea’s Background

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Iggy Azalea’s Background

History

Iggy Azalea's birth name is Amethyst Amelia Kelly in Sydney Australia on 7th July 1990. She grew up in a small town in the countryside called New South Wales of Mullumbimby that has a population of approximately 3,000 individuals. In early 2001, she decided to join her grandparents on a road trip to the United States where she visited Los Angeles and Las Vegas. During the tour, the idea of life outside Austria became appealing to the young girl. In her teens, her love for music grew strong, and it was hip-hop that captured her attention with rappers like 2 Pac and Missy Eliot becoming her role models (Morrissey, 2014). Since she was halfway around the world, she felt isolated from the music industry and hence turned to the internet hoping it would bring her closer to what she loved.

It was on the web that she bonded with another teenage rapper named Derek who was in the Bahamas, and she considered him as her only friend. She would record rap songs and send them to Derek as she was seeking the opinion of someone who was much closer to the action. As time went by, she was planning another trip to the United States. Before her 16th birthday, Iggy was on a plane to the USA to visit Derek, a person she had never met in person. During this time, he was residing in Miami, and he picked her up at the airport. Since Miami is the homeland of hip hop, she felt at home and before long she was calling her parents to inform them that she would not be returning to Australia (2016, Biography.com. para 4).  

She moved from Miami to Huston before finally ending up in Atlanta. In 2011 she was relocating again this time to Los Angeles and released her first known mixtape ignorant art an album that was infused with trap music. Many people refer to trap music as a descendant of southern rap. Things rapidly became right for her because, in 2012, she signed with a large firm Wilhelmina Models International, and she quickly rose to become the ‘new face of Levis jeans’.

By the end of the year 2011, featured on the cover page of XXL magazine this placed her on the annual list of the top ten freshman issue (Checkliste XXL Rheumatologie, 2011). This made her the first non-American female rapper to appear on the list. The publicity was enough to capture the attention of Diplo, who worked on her next mixtape trap gold. When it hit the airwaves, it got the attention of Mercury Records, which eventually released her official debut in 2014, named the classic. The classic featured several songs that were released internationally but it was the track fancy that got the audience, and it became the song of the summer in the US. It also placed Iggy in the same category as the Beatles since she was a foreigner in the US. The song also occupied the number one spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. A Collaboration with Arianna Grande ‘problem’ held the number two spot making her the first artist apart from the Beatles to hold those positions simultaneously at the same time with her first two singles. She later teamed up with Britney Spears in 2015 and did the track ‘pretty girls’. In June 2015, she found love and was engaged to a pro-basketball player named Nick Young, and the couple had been dating since 2013.