The Singles Jukebox

What we gon’ do when she appears? When she premieres? Review her, duh.

[Video][Website]
[6.33]

Patrick St. Michel: I’m not really proud of this, but I really want to dislike Azealia Banks. Her Twitter escapades and beefs have been well documented, and in those situations she always seems like the in-the-wrong person. But her music always manages to keep me liking her. “Yung Rapunxel” might be my favorite song from Banks yet because it actually finds her indulging her evil side — this song sounds menacing. From the witchhouse-ish production to her screamed “chorus” to the spoken-word bridge, everything here blows up pop-in-2013’s hater baiting (see “Bow Down” and “Q.U.E.E.N.”) into something sorta terrifying. Whereas Beyoncé sits on the Iron Throne a kind but forceful queen, Banks rules as a mad leader surrounded by people asking “when’s the album dropping?” as she lights them on fire. Banks found a way to channel her at-times off-putting personality into a hell of a song.
[8]

Anthony Easton: The first 30 seconds of this — how the vocals are buried down in the mix underneath all the electronic percussion — are genuinely uncanny. The rest of the song does not add to the otherworldly nature of the introduction or completely repudiate it. This unsettling aggression makes the song a little more frightening than it would have been otherwise. Even the spaces of rest are waiting for something monstrous. I wonder what the situation exactly is. 
[8]

Alfred Soto: How shrewd of Banks’ producers to bury a voice that’s pissed off a few people the last year behind distortion and percussion (they couldn’t bury her Twitter account, I suppose). 
[5]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Yung Rapunxel” is not supposed to work. It is in its design to blast bluster and sneer scornfully on those unwilling to process its choppiness. It is the sound of the following: leather-bound Hackers darkwave, Berghain-dweller techno, stream-of-consciousness rap, spurts of post-club ambience, intermittent house diva parody. It is the sound of too many bad drugs and too many bad decisions and too much ugly art. Everything else is Banks indulging her worst impulses, a challenge issued to the casual listener, its bullishness masking her art at its least challenging.
[4]

Ramzi Awn: This song would not be good for a hangover.  But its sheer lack of sanity earns it at least a 5, and it should fit right in this summer in gay ol’ Brooklyn. 
[5]

Ian Mathers: Well, it wouldn’t be the first time a near-impenetrable howl of disdain and rage was starkly compelling just on the basis of icy technical control and a refusal to make any concessions to anything ever. Funny though; she doesn’t sound “so tired of all this drama” at all.
[7]

Brad Shoup: That’s the tough part, now: can you summon danger when we’ve pricked you a thousand times? Or: after that ridiculous first verse, who gives a fuck about persona? The tiny second carries the “212” cadence; the first does the obvious, but for the chorus? She throws the table into the wall. Keep your communities close; the next wave of thinkpieces is nigh.
[10]

Katherine St Asaph: Azealia Banks has yet to release anything truly bad; even her throwaway diss tracks are at least compelling. (It’s just the beats she hoards, you might argue — and then the near-demonic chorus here will prove you wrong, loudly.) What’s missing, I think, is context. People dwell so much on Banks’ extramusical antics because of prurience, yes, but also because she keeps releasing these one-and-done chunks of music: overdense with stuff, yet underdone somehow; missing beginnings and ends and really any external structure at all; immediately recognizable and gnashing with personality, yet lacking any sense of continuity as an artist. There are ways to fix that: something like a hype cycle, or a fixed setlist, or a debut album. (Ah, there’s the rub.)
[7]

Will Adams: For a while I’ve wondered whether it’s fair to hold Azealia up to the standard of the still-golden “212.” On one hand, if she’s done it before, she should be able to reach that benchmark again. On the other, a perfect song can only come around so often, and subjecting an artist to produce two is unreasonable. Good thing that “Yung Rapunxel” mostly reaches the bar. The beat is relentless – almost nightmarish – her performance is pure precision, and the self-reference in the second verse is well-earned. It’s missing the multiple voices that Azealia dipped into on “212,” but the force is all there, and it has me as excited to hear more from her as I did that fateful day in November 2011.
[8]

Crystal Leww: This is just a mixing problem, but the vocals are turned down way too low for me to discern anything that Azealia’s saying. It doesn’t really matter anyway because the cadence of it sounds flat and dimensionless, even during the yelled bits. I can’t help but wonder what this might sound like as just an instrumental. I think I might like it more. Is the girl from “212” all but gone now?
[3]

David Lee: One menacing cumulonimbus of metal-inflected yelps and hi-hats refashioned as war drums. Thank goodness for the sheer loudness of it all, because it diverts attention from the weaknesses in Banks’s verses – the 212 rhyme schemes, in particular, strike me as an unnecessary reminder of that track’s greatness. Nevertheless, I can’t help but love the theatrics on display here, especially because of the way they contrast with the warmed-over, soulless vocals so pervasive in the popular EDM/dance scene these days.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: That one about the lunch being eaten was good.
[4]