Azealia Banks, Lana Del Rey, Mark Foster — Are You Happy Now, Google?

Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 04/27/2012 at 2:38 PM News

The Popdust Files: azealia banks, blue jeans, foster the people, lana del rey, remixes, the internet

POP QUIZ! Which of the following best describes the Lana Del Rey/Azealia Banks/Mark Foster remix of “Blue Jeans”?

A) An exciting collaboration between three hot, talked-about artists with highly anticipated singles
B) The Internet, having imbibed too many keywords too fast, ralphing
C) An unprecedentedly shameless piece of pandering that came out of nowhere and is symptomatic of the decay of music
D) Standard, unsurprising and inevitable

The answer is D. Here’s why, putting aside everything you know about their music and Internet optimization:

* Azealia Banks’ rise to fame has paralleled Lana Del Rey’s in almost every way except backlash, which mostly doesn’t exist. She already did a Scissor Sisters remix and is doling out press and tracks with roughly the same frequency and ado as Willy Wonka’s golden tickets.

* Lana Del Rey, meanwhile, has enough history with a certain Internet-friendly strain of hip-hop to already have hook-singer duties and Tyler, the Creator cosigns. And she’s quickly going or being shunted down the Cassie route: once-dismissed major-label singers (both with infamous performances, even) getting new Internet/underground/viral musical lives by having voices being chopped, remixed and turned into background instruments. The similarities pretty much end there, mind. But they’re still similarities.

* Foster the People just put out a highly plotty video in which they get killed and reanimated as hollow robot musicians by mysterious overlord-types.

There, I solved the mystery! We can all go home now. We don’t even need to hear the song.

(Oh, right, the song. It is like totally whatever. It has one of those infinite-staircase club buildup/breakdowns. You can guess the rest from that.)

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