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Thursday, June 14, 2012

Kevin Costner Beats Stephen Baldwin in Oil Cleanup Trial


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The Trick to Eating Healthy When You're Eating Out, Beyond Common Sense

June 14th, 2012Top Story

The Trick to Eating Healthy When You're Eating Out, Beyond Common Sense

By Thorin Klosowski

The Trick to Eating Healthy When You're Eating Out, Beyond Common SenseEating at a restaurant and eating healthy are rarely complementary activities. In fact, eating out is often cited as the primary reason for an unhealthy lifestyle. But with a little knowledge and preparation, you can turn a restaurant meal from a death threat to a healthy choice.

We're big proponents of the occasional culinary splurge, but whether you're on a diet or you just don't want to pack on extra pounds when you're on vacation, eating healthy at a restaurant is as much about common sense as it is about preparing yourself (and your stomach) to make life easy.

We'll cover the common sense rules you probably already know and should follow when we're eating out, but we'll also try to tackle some of the less obvious ways to make a restaurant meal healthy. To help out I talked with nutritionists and registered dietitians Allanah DiBona and Andy Bellatti.

With that, let's get the common sense rules out of the way.

The Common Sense Rules You Probably Already Know

The Trick to Eating Healthy When You're Eating Out, Beyond Common SenseJust because eating healthy should be common sense doesn't mean we actually abide by it. In fact, most of us probably throw our common sense out the window the second we plop down with a menu filled with spectacularly described food. Here are a few reminders for the simple ways you can keep a restaurant meal healthy.

  • Don't leave portion control up to your willpower: We are all pretty terrible at self control, and when you see a plate of tasty food in front of you, it's easy to keep eating until you can't eat anymore. According to Andy Bellatti, your best option is to order half portions whenever possible. Allanah DiBona adds that you might try considering an appetizer as a meal.
  • Order dressing and sauces on the side: A restaurant can make something as healthy as a salad unhealthy by covering it in dressing. For dressing or other dippable sauces order it on the side so you can regulate—and easily understand—how much you're using.
  • The sides are often the worst part of a meal: Most sides you get at a restaurant are fried or at least covered in some type of sauce or cheese. Choose them wisely by going with the simplest option. This is often a side salad or a mixed vegetables.
  • Not all healthy food is healthy at a restaurant: Bellatti points out that a number of foods we think of as healthy aren't at certain restaurants. Sushi, for instance, is often supersized to twice the normal proportion and filled with mayo or fried fish.
  • Seriously, skip the soda: We're all aware soda isn't healthy, but it's worth repeating just to make sure we're all on the same page. If you're in need of caffeine see our tasty and healthy alternatives to soda.

The simple rule for eating out is: If it sounds like it's unhealthy, it probably is. With that in mind, let's move on to some of the ways you can customize almost any meal to make it healthier. Photo by Alpha.

Eat Healthy at Any Sit-Down Restaurant

You can certainly try to hit up healthy restaurants but you aren't always in full control of the restaurant choice. Perhaps you're on vacation with a large group of friends and you're roped into heading down to the Super Fatty Butter Palace for a meal. You can still make healthy choices and here's how to do it.

Give Your Willpower a Break and Eat a Snack First

The Trick to Eating Healthy When You're Eating Out, Beyond Common SenseIt might seem counterintuitive, but one of the best things you can do for yourself before eating out is to eat a little snack before you go. Bellatti explains:

Eating something an hour before you get to the restaurant is one of the best ways to avoid cravings and impulse decisions. Some ideas: half an apple and a tablespoon of peanut butter, vegetables and hummus, a small banana and a square of dark chocolate. The idea is not to get to the restaurant already full, but to avoid that famished feeling that leads to "eating with the eyeballs."

Essentially, eating a snack gives your willpower a rest and makes a healthy decision easy. When you're not starving those two appetizers followed by a burger the size of your head won't be nearly as appealing. Photo by jrsnchzhrs.

Navigate Any Menu Like a Nutrition Pro

The Trick to Eating Healthy When You're Eating Out, Beyond Common SenseFinding a healthy meal on a menu is hard at a lot restaurants, but all you need to know is where to start. DiBona offers a pretty simple tip for this:

A good rule of thumb is to make protein and produce the basis of your meals. It's easier to navigate a menu when you're looking for large servings of protein (chicken, fish, beef) and any sort of produce that appeals (salad, veggie sides, etc.). If you're aiming for health, most people find these parameters the easiest way to operate.

Once you've made your protein choice start looking for the simplest sounding food on the menu. Bellatti explains:

The idea is to eat simple food. Anything smothered in five types of cheese is not "simple." An edamame appetizer? Simple. Nachos with sour cream, beef, and cheese? Overload. Corn tortillas with black beans and sauteed vegetables? Simple.

With these choices you can usually find something on the menu that's both appetizing and healthy. If you're still stuck then it's time to start asking your waiter questions. Photo by Orin Zebest.

The Questions You Should Ask

The Trick to Eating Healthy When You're Eating Out, Beyond Common SenseIf you're anything like me then you probably have no interest in asking questions about menu items and instead order blindly without worry for the repercussions. This is great for an adventurous night out, but if you want to keep the meal healthy you have to ask questions. DiBona offers this reasoning:

Shelve your pride and ask some questions. Often we avoid seeking information in restaurants in order to avoid being the high maintenance table. Servers memorize the menus for a reason, and you're purchasing a product. [Asking a question] ensures you're getting something you really want. You should always know precisely what you're putting into your body.

Bellatti echoes those statements but adds a few concrete questions that are good to ask in nearly every circumstance:

  • What can I get instead of fries?
  • What vegetables can I get with that?
  • Do you offer half portions?

Asking questions will only get you so far. At some restaurants you might also need to make substitutions. Photo by Jeffrey Beall.

Tweak the Menu with Substitutions and Requests

Even with knowledge of a menu you still might not find a super healthy option. When that's the case it's time to make substitutions and requests. This is surprisingly easy and only requires a few tweaks:

  • Hold the butter: Restaurants often use more butter in your single meal than you probably do at home in an entire week. Asking them to hold off on it will cut the fat content.
  • Skip the extras: Cheeses, bacon, or mayonnaise are all pretty enticing when you're ordering but most restaurants pack on more than a single serving which can add unneeded fat to your otherwise healthy meal.
  • Find the best dips: Bellatti recommends sticking with dips like guacamole or hummus when you have the option. If you're not into stuffing up on bread he suggests asking for cucumbers in place of pita bread for dipping.

Bellatti adds that some menu change substitutions are pretty useless and you're best bet is to concentrate on cooking methods:

You're better off getting items that are cooked healthfully (i.e.: grilled, broiled, etc) and then substituting healthier sides than trying to get someone in the kitchen to use 1 teaspoon of oil to cook your dish instead of 2 tablespoons.

For the most part you can apply the same rules above to fast food joints, but fast food is more about research (which is easier because they're all chains) than anything else.

Find the Best Options for Fast Food

The Trick to Eating Healthy When You're Eating Out, Beyond Common SenseSince fast food isn't made to order (at least not entirely) it's not always easy to ask for substitutions or different cooking ingredients. Instead, you have to know what your best options are and what to avoid.

Picking what food to order is as simple as knowing the facts. A Calorie Counter's breakdown of the best and worst menu items at fast food joints is the easiest place to start.

One of the key tricks with any fast food restaurant is to avoid the sides and just order an entree. Most of the extra calories in typical fast food come from the nearly unlimited soda refills and the default order of fries.

For everything else you can heed the same advice as a sit-down restaurant: skip the extra sauces, look for healthily cooked foods, keep your order simple (for instance, a Bacon Sundae is not simple), and if your food is prepared right in front of you ask for lighter portions (restaurants like Chipotle, for example, pack on way too much rice for a normal human). Photo by William F. Yurasko.

Don't Beat Yourself Up for the Occasional Indulgence

The Trick to Eating Healthy When You're Eating Out, Beyond Common SenseWhether you're eating out once a week or you're on vacation and doing it every day the key point both Andy Bellatti and Allanah DiBona stress is that you shouldn't always beat yourself up for overindulging.

One way DiBona suggests dealing with this is by applying the 80-20 rule. Focus your choices on nutrition 80 percent of the time and use the other 20 percent as wiggle room when you just need to indulge. She also suggests the best way to deal with shame is to walk it off by taking a stroll around the neighborhood after your meal. If nothing else, just let go a little when you're eating out. Bellatti sums it up nicely:

They should stop turning every meal into a guilt-fest. Nothing is more irritating than a dinner companion who has to make some negative comment after every bite ("Ugh, there goes my diet!" after taking two bites of bread or "I shouldn't have eaten that!" after having a few bites of dessert).


You can find healthy options on nearly every menu if you know what to look for. This is key when you're on an extended vacation or if you eat out for a lot of your meals. For everyone else the real takeaway is to let yourself relax a little: find the good options on the menu but don't worry about any indulgences you might make. Just try not to eat yourself into a food coma. Photo by Alpha.

Have your own tips for eating healthy when you're eating out? Share them in the comments.


Andy Bellatti, MS, RD is a Seattle-based Nutritionist and the author of the nutrition blog Small Bites. You can follow him on Twitter at @andybellatti.

Alannah DiBona, MA, MS, is a Boston-based nutritionist and wellness counselor, and the woman behind mindbodysportconsulting.com.

Both graciously volunteered their expertise for this story, and we thank them.

Title image remixed from Yuri Arcus (Shutterstock).

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Nintendo's Top People Are Discussing Ways To Make Their New Games More Like Their Old Ones

June 14th, 2012Top Story

Nintendo's Top People Are Discussing Ways To Make Their New Games More Like Their Old Ones

By Stephen Totilo

Nintendo's Top People Are Discussing Ways To Make Their New Games More Like Their Old OnesThere was something magical about Nintendo's earliest Mario and Zelda games. Something simple. Something pure. Something Nintendo has gotten away from.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the man who led the creation of those first games and is still the chief game design force at Nintendo knows this.

He's noticed that Nintendo's big games have been slow-starters, that it takes ages now for a good Zelda game to become really fun. He knows Nintendo's games are now often gummed up with tutorials. He's not exactly down on Nintendo's games, but if you thought he hadn't noticed what longtime Nintendo fans have noticed, you're wrong.

Miyamoto and I discussed some of this last week in Los Angeles at E3 after I told him that I didn't care much for the little bit I've played of New Super Mario Bros. U, one of the launch window games for this fall's Wii U and a thoroughly traditional Mario side-scroller. I told him that the game felt "unusually safe and conservative for you guys."

I asked Miyamoto if he noticed that Nintendo's franchise games feel formulaic and how his teams are dealing with the problem of being too formulaic with their longest-running series.

"This is a hard question," he said. "Specifically with regards to the New Super Mario games, Takashi Tezuka is the producer on both of the new Mario games, and is working on the Mario series and New Super Mario series for quite a while now, and he is the main developer on those games and is in fact the one you would want to ask specifically about that."

Fair enough. I was unable to interview Tezuka, who has been helping lead the creation of Marios since he worked with Miyamoto on Super Mario Bros.

But on the formulaic problem thing, I was talking to the right man.

"With something like Zelda," Miyamoto said, "we're in the process of now of discussing what is the right form for the next Zelda game. What should that be?

"One thing I should point out is that the New Super Mario Bros. series in particular exists as a way for the traditional Super Mario Bros. game style to remain in a relatively traditional state. And that's done specifically because there are certain players for whom that style of games is really what's best suited for them. So that sort of series is designed to retain those traits and retain that safeness that you described.

"But, at the same time, we're continuing to look at different ideas and different ways we can bring Mario to new experiences, for example, with something like Super Mario 3D Land we'll continue to look at new ideas and maybe as a new experiment or idea comes up maybe we'll find that Mario is the right character to pair with that."

Nintendo's Top People Are Discussing Ways To Make Their New Games More Like Their Old OnesThe Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011)

Earlier this year, the website Gamasutra published a fascinating comparison between old Zelda games and new ones. I told Miyamoto about it, though I mis-remembered its exact contents. The actual article compared the amount of time it took to reach and complete the first dungeon in the old Zelda games to the new ones (2 minutes, 20 minutes for the first one on the Nintendo Entertainment System; 70 minutes, 100 minutes for the most recent one, Skyward Sword). I mistakenly described it to Miyamoto as a comparison of how long it takes to get your sword in these games, but the point still stood. And he got it.

Basically, I asked him… well I'll just quote my own question: "The theory that began to be developed in this particular article was that these games can become a lot of fun—I finished Skyward Sword and thought it was fantastic—but there might be an issue there that a lot of video games from Nintendo and others take much longer to be fun and to get into than a lot of others. And then I think about Angry Birds. That's fun within seconds. Have you noticed that is at all an issue? Is that something you've noticed that some games take a long time to become fun? Is that a problem with modern games?"

Nintendo's Top People Are Discussing Ways To Make Their New Games More Like Their Old OnesSuper Mario Galaxy (2007)

"This is actually a topic that has been a big discussion internally for us lately," he said. "I think there a couple of things going on. One is that, often times we're creating games where you're doing a lot of different actions. Zelda is an example of one of those. And, particularly with these types of games, you have to first learn the action and then you have to master the action and then you have to have more actions added in and master those. Then, when you have a lot of actions you can do all at once is when the game really becomes fun. And with a game like Zelda, on top of that, you have the story elements that also take additional time to tell.

"So one of the things we're talking about internally is how can we get people to that point of fun more quickly, and 'How do we balance the need to teach them how to do something with the need for them to be able to master it and feel they can do it well?'—and also tell the story—and 'What is that overall balance and how we approach it?' That's one of the key things we're talking about with Zelda right now."

This made sense to me, but there was just one problem. The first Super Mario Bros. and the first Zelda had no tutorial text. Their fun started right away. "Is it something that was more natural back then that you guys got away from?" I asked. "Is that what you're saying that you want to go back to that?"

"That's the exact topic that we're discussing," Miyamoto said. "It used to be that actions [in older games] were very simple and you could do them very quickly and easily. Now we're making games that have so many more actions that you have to learn how to do them.

Nintendo's Top People Are Discussing Ways To Make Their New Games More Like Their Old OnesSuper Mario World (1990)

"I think back and actually was discussing Super Mario World with Tezuka-san and how that was a game where, for the first time, you would run along and hit blocks and these text messages would pop up and they would have a little bit of tutorial information in them. That worked very well for that game and we thought that was a great idea, and then, gradually, that type of tutorial sort of became rather commonplace and now we're starting to have these games where it is taking longer and longer to sort of get to that core fun. So that's precisely what we've been having discussions about."

One more thing, he added, playfully: "Even Angry Birds has quite a bit of messaging" in it. They do tutorials, too.

But forget Angry Birds. The good news here is that Nintendo hasn't forgotten its first games. And maybe, just maybe, they've recognized that they've gone down a path too far. Their games used to show; now their games often tell. Their games used to leave you more free to discover and learn on your own. Their games are now full of helping hands and friendly lectures.

Their oldest games were magical and phenomenal (and also some of the best-selling things they ever created). It seems that they are discussing that. I look forward to playing the results.

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All the Girls Standing in the Line For the Rap Show: Iggy Azalea's Sudden Rise

June 14th, 2012Top Story

All the Girls Standing in the Line For the Rap Show: Iggy Azalea's Sudden Rise

By Emma Carmichael

All the Girls Standing in the Line For the Rap Show: Iggy Azalea's Sudden RiseIggy Azelea 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.

"It's fucking scary," Iggy says now, on the evening of her first big New York show. "I remember the day that video went viral, because it happened really quick. And I was sitting with my friend Peezy, and we went and sat at a café underneath my house. And I was like, holy shit, I don't know if I can cry or fuckin' scream of happiness right now. Because this shit is like a snowball and I can't stop it.

"I feel like I opened up a box. And it's like, did you fucking want to open the box or not? I don't fucking know. I thought I did. Did I?"

***

Last week, a white New York hip hop DJ threw shade at rapper Nicki Minaj and the "chicks" who listened to her music and started a long discussion about realness, intention, and origin in hip hop, and where female artists fit in. It was only a couple of weeks earlier that Iggy, a white female rapper from halfway around the globe, sold out her first show in New York City. Of all of the self-reflective periods that hip hop has endured over the years, this one might be the most muddled: a culture that has spread far enough to reach a female teenager in Mullumbimby, Australia, and produce a viral video and an inevitable record deal is still doing its best gate-keeping job on a growing force of female rappers.

More than Minaj, though, it is a story like Iggy's that should have us thinking and talking about authenticity in hip hop. Iggy is a twofold outsider to the game: she's not only a white woman, she's a white foreigner. She's the girl you never expect to see at a rap show, let alone selling out one. She shouldn't be here.

In February 2006, when she was just 16 years old, Iggy left her mother's house in Australia and moved on her own to Miami. It was only supposed to be a two-week vacation, but she ended up staying for 10 months. Miami was the first stop in what essentially became a five-year crash course in southern American hip hop. From Miami, she went on to Atlanta, and then to Houston, and finally to Los Angeles, where she ended up recording the mixtape (Ignorant Art) and taping the music video ("PU$$Y") that put her on the internet mindscape. In Atlanta, she caught on with the Dungeon Family, and specifically the rapper Backbone. She also befriended DJ Unk and Big Unk of the label Unk Camp, and they'd let her record in their studio.

"I was like, whoa," she says now, some five years later, "these are legends, teaching me how to rap."

Azalea's breaks came in quick succession in L.A., where she recorded Ignorant Art in a garage studio on Slauson. She and her close friend Peezy started a hair company together on the side, and the business helped Iggy get a green card, but she was running out of money. She'd grown close to the rapper Pusha-T (formerly one half of the Clipse, now of Kanye's GOOD crew; Iggy says "he's like my fucking mentor"), and he encouraged her to do something drastic.

Click to view
"PU$$Y."

Soon after, she shot "PU$$Y." The video had nice direction and a nearly six-foot tall Australian girl squatting in a belly shirt. It had to work. Kreayshawn had already proven that a white girl rapping in a pretty music video could lead to a $1 million record deal, and for all of her weaknesses, Iggy's ability was just a hell of a lot more compelling than the rapping we heard in "Gucci Gucci." Iggy had an accent, an ass, and a song that said the word "pussy" over and over again. It took off.

Ten months have passed, and now Iggy Azalea finds herself in a kind of post-viral purgatory. She is signed with T.I.'s Grant Hustle Entertainment, and on the day we met, at her stylist's parents' apartment on the Upper West Side, she was about to finalize a contract with Wilhelmina Models (that deal was finally made official today). She plans on releasing a second mixtape, Glory, this month; her first album is still in the works. She and Peezy want to continue running their hair company, and they even redesigned their website last month. She has options, and a lot of new music to release. She doesn't see herself as a "viral" star without any staying power.

"I don't know if the ride to success is like this," she says, charting out a flat graph with a shot upwards at the end. "Sometimes it's like this." She draws out a gradual rise. "This didn't just happen off of luck or something that maybe people think is undeserved. That's how it's sort of portrayed. And sometimes perhaps it is. But I feel like, I ate a lot of Ramen noodles for this shit. So I'm not about to fall into nothingness, you know what I mean? I'm not going back there again."

Before her show at SOBs, Iggy spent four hours at a sprawling Upper East Side apartment, planning her outfits for the next five days with her stylist, Andrew Mukamal. She would be in New York overnight, and then fly up to Montreal for a media junket, and then back down to the states for a set at the Bamboozle Festival in Asbury Park, N.J. After that, she'd head back to L.A. She seemed exhausted, and slightly perturbed by the hassle of it all.

After Iggy and Mukamal had selected her outfits for the next week ("Your ass looks fucking amazing in this, by the way." "That's 'cause I have an amazing ass."), she sat in a dining room chair, looking out a wall of windows at the high-rises around us. Also in the room: her publicist, her hairstylist, her makeup artist, and her stylist-stylist. Iggy pulled up the free Family Feud app ("It's like four dollars! I just need the free version") on her iPhone as her $600 ponytail was finalized. We played as a group.

"Things that get backed up," the makeup artist, Portia, read to the room.

"An ahss," Iggy said, straight-faced. The stylist-stylist picked up an issue of W and flipped through it. "Iggy, did you know you're in this?" he asked. It was a spread featuring Iggy, Kreayshawn, and the rapper Dominique Young Unique, who was put on by Kanye West last fall. All three, W wrote, are in the "court of Minaj." Iggy hadn't seen the issue, or heard of Unique.

The publicist's phone rang. It was Iggy's manager, inquiring about sound check, which was scheduled to start in 20 minutes. There was no way we'd make it, especially with Iggy's incompetent driver who, she said, kept interrupting her phone calls to tell her about his paintball league. The publicist tried to arrange for a later time, but the rapper Yo Gotti had a 7 p.m. set.

"I'm not performing without a sound check," Iggy yelled from the background, "so I hope he heard that."

"Sometimes," she said quietly to Portia, "you have to be a bitch."

Ten minutes later, Iggy was on the phone with her manager. She was unhappy.

"I don't want Stix to do sound check, I want to do sound check… Guess what, I'm doing shit right now… tell the motherfucker to figure it out… well tell him I'm not doing it, then... Well, did Yo Gotti sell out his show?"

By the time she hung up, she'd arranged for a 9:45 p.m. sound check—just after Yo Gotti left the stage and just before the doors opened for her.

"See, that's what you gotta do sometimes," she said to the room. Portia nodded: "They wouldn't do a dude like that."

"Exactly my fucking point! If I had a dick, first of all, I wouldn't even be fighting for it. And it wouldn't be unreasonable to ask."

Later on, at SOBs, I ask Iggy if she's having any fun. The day, even from my perspective, has seemed stressful; each decision has come across as a chore. Iggy thought about it for a beat.

"Sometimes you have good days and sometimes you don't," she said. "It's a rollercoaster, and it's hard to stay afloat. And I don't feel established yet, 'cause I'm not. So it definitely feels like a lion in your back.

"I'm just trying to keep a job. My job is rapping. If you look at my visa for what the fuck I'm here to do, that's what it will say. So I have to keep this job or I go home. It's important to me."

***

Iggy's arrived at a time when a lot of women are rapping, and it would be dishonest to pretend that the competition hasn't helped a bit. We are now at a point in hip hop—possibly fleeting, who knows—in which a new female rapper is not immediately labeled "the next Lil' Kim" (that was Nicki Minaj) or "the next Nicki Minaj," (that was Azealia Banks), simply because there's too much competition to do so. At the very least, the laziness in those alignments has never been more apparent: we only stack female rappers against one another because they are female. Three years ago, I interviewed a Detroit rapper who goes by the name Miz Korona. She's in the movie 8 Mile, briefly, and she released The Injection in 2010. In Detroit, she's a part of hip hop's old guard.

We talked for an hour or so about her life and career, and about what Nicki Minaj—she was well on her rise to fame at the time—could mean for other women who rap. Korona was optimistic.

"I see a really big surge in stuff," she told me. "There are women who are standing up and speaking out and saying, 'You know what? Whatever. I don't care what y'all say, I'm a do my thing.'

"In the next three to four years," she added, "everything is going to flip and females will dominate this game."

Three years later, here is where we are: Nicki Minaj's Roman Reloaded debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200; Azealia Banks, while separating herself from the "rap game," is the darling of the Internet, the high fashion world, and Gwyneth Paltrow; Kitty Pryde, a teenager from Florida who works at Claire's, is the current obsession of the New York blogger set; and Rita Ora, a British Albanian woman hailed as the "next Rihanna," is sampling Biggie in her radio-ready, tween-friendly party jam. Somewhere within that jumbled spectrum, there is Iggy Azalea.

In the last month alone, I have seen all of those women sell out New York City venues. None of them, really, are releasing what Peter Rosenberg might consider "authentic" hip hop right now; none of them, really, are immune to the industry pressures that bring about songs like Nicki Minaj's "Starships" that he and others so strongly resist. Two, somewhat improbably, share half of a stage name. Some of them are white, some of them are not from here.

And Iggy, for all of her efforts, is still trying her damnedest to sound like a good rapper. She described the the process of learning to rap as "time-consuming—it took a long, long time."

This is precisely where much of the criticism Iggy received thus far has fallen: there is a studied nature to her flow. She sounds very much like someone who learned to rap by listening to other (black, male) rappers and mimicking them. There isn't a "wrong" way to go about learning to rap—and in a time when a free computer program can yield a hit track in under an hour, it's almost quaint that we still cling to artistic process here—but Iggy's own route, compelling as it may be, just doesn't align with the usual script.

Click to view
"Murda Bizness."

Rappers' flows are called flows because they are supposed to sound natural. Though she says she now feels as if she's totally found it, Iggy's sounds practiced. In conversation, her voice is high and light, her Australian accent unmistakable. When she raps, though, her voice lowers a near octave. She growls, sneers, and takes on an accent that is decidedly un-Australian. "White girl team full of ba-yad bitches," she raps on "My World," with a near southern twang: "Ha-yands in the a-yer, this is for the bitches getting' money up in he-yere." On tracks with particularly hard instrumentals, such as "Murda Bizness," her first collaboration with T.I., it can almost sound like she's straining to match the assertiveness of the beat. You can hear the effort in every rhyme.

In the New York Times, Jon Caramanica wrote that she "sounds as if she learned to rap for a part in a Movie of the Week"; on his blog Cocaine Blunts, critic Noz called her flow "forced and rehearsed to the point of being grating."

"In short," he concluded, "she lacks soul. Because she is white."

Iggy says, with an appreciable amount of self-awareness, that she's felt like an outsider since she's arrived. She is an outsider, and that likely has something to do with her unease with sudden fame. She first heard a hip hop song when she was a teenager in Mullumbimby, when two boys down the street, one of whom she had a big crush on, played 2Pac's "Baby Don't Cry" for her. She bought his album Still I Rise soon after and listened to it "over and over and over again." After that, she says, she started "researching" the music.

Over time, and even with the endorsements and the signings and the relative fame, she's started to think of herself as a guest in someone else's house. There's a "responsibility," she explains, to recognize hip hop as a black art form.

But she's stumbled a bit. In April, when Iggy became the first woman to be named to XXL's "Freshman Class," Azealia Banks took the opportunity to spearhead their inevitable beef.

"Iggy Azalea on the XXL freshman list is all wrong," Banks wrote on Twitter. "How can you endorse a white woman who called herself a 'runaway slave master'? Sorry guys. But I'm pro black girl. I'm not anti white girl, but I'm also not here for any1 outside of my culture trying to trivialize very serious aspects of it."

The lyrics in question came from Iggy's "D.R.U.G.S." freestyle, which opened with the line, "When it really starts I'm a runaway slave... master/Shittin' on the past gotta spit it like a pastor." Iggy responded with a 450-word apology and explanation.

"I don't ever want to be the person that takes something and doesn't give homage to where it's from," she explains now, in a room full of black people at a Manhattan nightclub. "It's like if you went to your boyfriend's house for Thanksgiving and you were like, acting disrespectful. I feel like in a lot of ways I'm a guest, sort of. And I think a lot of it is because I'm from Australia, too. I didn't grow up in this, I kind of dropped in it. And sometimes I do feel like a visitor and I feel like I have to be respectful like a visitor would be—to not just go dusting my feet on everyone's couch."

The sentiment that comes across here is one that plenty of white hip hop fans can likely relate to, including me. Whether or not that culture wants anything to do with you is another story, and that's likely why Iggy feels so much pressure to prove herself. It's "always" been there, she says, "whether I wanted it or not." And for all of her efforts, and for all those Ramens, she still comes across as play-acting, or at least like she just happened to stumble into the game at the perfect moment. Iggy's spent a long time learning the ropes here, though, and if she is playing a part—subconsciously or not—it says much more about hip hop's expectations for female behavior and an aspiring artist's willingness to adapt accordingly than about any personal flaw or intentional disrespect of a culture. Backbone had a southern twang, so Iggy has a southern twang. Nicki Minaj licked a lollipop, so Iggy licked a popsicle.

Before too long, she'll probably have her own version of "Starships," too.

***

At SOBs that night, there was a line down the block, and the bouncers outside were turning people away at the door. The crowd was racially diverse but predominantly female, and there were certainly more white girls than you'd see at your average rap show. Some of them proudly proclaimed that they were "Azaleans," a title reserved for Iggy's most dedicated fans. Angel Haze, one of the most talented female rappers who is not a white Australian out right now, was in the crowd with a friend.

Iggy emerged, as all artists at SOBs do, from the back of the venue and walked through the packed crowd. She wore a black, floor-length Michael Kors dress and Versace platforms that she and Mukamal had picked out, and that $600 ponytail. She was surrounded by cameras. She could just as well have been on a runway.

Onstage, she opened with "Backseat." Everybody in the first ten rows or so knew every word of every track. Iggy looked utterly confident in her heels, and her face took on a near-permanent grimace. She was posturing, but by now, she's comfortable doing it. Halfway through the set, she called five girls up onstage and set up a twerk competition. Two men threw dollar bills at their shaking asses while Iggy observed from the side. When the song ended, she stepped in to judge herself: "Wait, wait, just 'cause I'm a girl I don't get to pick a girl?" she yelled. "Just 'cause I'm a bitch I don't get to pick a bad bitch?" Even with the power switch in play, it came across as the most rehearsed, formulaic part of the show. It seemed as if Iggy, along with her two male judges, were doing what the form called for. They weren't necessarily wrong.

The set ended with "PU$$Y," and all of the girls screamed the word along with her on the hook, and finally "Murda Bizness." "Kinda feel like I'm goin' to a funeral," she said. She made a pistol symbol with her hand and holding it over the crowd. "Like I killed some bitches."

The beat dropped, and so did Iggy's voice. "I'm the first of my kind," she rapped, "you ain't seen any?" The pout on her face, as it happened, looked a lot like T.I.'s sneer.

Photo by Ericka Mitton.

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