ggy Azalea won’t leave the room until she’s shattered everything inside.
The rapper is wearing big construction gloves and a hard hat with a protec-
tive plastic shield across her face, standing inside a space that looks like a
Law & Order interrogation room gone bad. Along the wall rest a sledgeham-
mer, two baseball bats, and two crowbars. She requests Outkast’s “Bombs
Over Baghdad” to blast over the speakers—“That’s a good smash song.”
She warms up by hurling some glasses (shot, pint, mason jar), one by one,
against a diamond-plated steel wall—until, apparently over it, she just
chucks a whole bunch at once. She attacks a clunky office printer, picking it
up and unceremoniously dumping it onto the floor. Then there’s a big flat-
screen TV. Turns out, breaking a television into itty-bitty pieces is way harder
than it looks. Iggy hits it with a crowbar several times
before she realizes it’s not going to happen. But it is going
to happen. She wedges the pointy end of the crowbar into
a crack on the screen, separating thin black layers of glass
until the display is totally, definitely gone.
From the neck down, Iggy’s wearing what she calls her
“airport outfit”: an oversize tie-dye hoodie in baby pastels
from Korean streetwear brand 99%IS over a vintage Ozzy
Osbourne T-shirt, light-gray joggers, and clean white
sneakers. Somehow this totally works with her glamorous
head, which is topped with a sky-blue wig tucked inside
her hoodie. Her makeup has an airbrushed Barbie Insta-
gram dream-girl effect—Kardashian lashes and extra-
pouty, nude-colored lips. In other words, she’s not exactly
blending in to our surroundings, a tidy, faux-gritty bar
ne a r Ne w York C it y ’s a c t u a l ly g r it t y P e n n S t a t ion. T he
place has a room in the back, The Wrecking Club, where
you can, ahem, work out all your issues.
Iggy isn’t angry, by the way. She smashed all that stuff
to make a point. “I’d have been so annoyed if we had just
left it lying there because we’re girls,” she says over pro-
sciutto and margherita pizzas in a private room usually
used for (what else?) throwing your glass against the wall
a f t e r yo u’r e done w it h you r d r i n k. “L i ke , Sorry, couldn’t
do it, that’s too hard for us to break.”
Speaking of seemingly indestructible stuff, remember
when Iggy herself was untouchable? Five years ago,
“Fancy” was the Grammy-nominated song of the summer
you couldn’t get out of your head. She was in a high-
profile relationship with NBA player Nick Young, himself
famous enough to get away with the nickname Swaggy P.
She starred in a Super Bowl commercial, fashion cam-
paigns for Levi’s, Forever 21, and Steve Madden, and one
of the year’s most-watched music videos on YouTube.“YOU GET AS MANYCHANCES AS YOU’RE WILLING
TO F
*C K ING
FIGHT FOR
TOOTH AND NAIL.”112
Cosmopolitan September 2019