Azealia Banks: ‘I’ve realised you’re not keeping it real by being a crazy girl’

For someone who repeatedly stresses that she has way too much drama in her life, Azealia Banks has certainly ramped up the dramatic tension ahead of our meeting.

The Harlem-born rapper and singer, 25, has bid me drive to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery for a conversation among the graves: Johnny Ramone, Rudolph Valentino, Jayne Mansfield, Toto from The Wizard of Oz.

She postponed three times — she was signing a record deal with the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA in New York, and things overran — and yesterday she had a high octane row with Russell Crowe, who made her leave a private party.

When we meet she arrives in a demure straw hat and funeral-black gloves.

“I love this place,” she says as we walk among the white marble tombs and pomegranate trees and hummingbirds. “I believe in spirits. Not necessarily ghosts. But spirits.”

Within minutes we’re sitting on the grave of a 1930s director named Irving Cummings (the word CUMMINGS looms above our heads, which makes her laugh) and Banks is trying to explain how she became the most loathed woman in pop.

“My mother has never reprimanded me but she reprimanded me after the thing with Zayn [Malik] happened. She was like, ‘Azealia, you hurt a lot of people’. I was like, ‘f**k’.” And pretty soon she starts to cry.

The “thing with Zayn” was perhaps the craziest episode in a career that has been overshadowed by craziness. Banks first came to wide attention in 2014 with her filthily brilliant single 212 (aka the c*** song).

Her debut album Broke with Expensive Taste and recent Slay-Z EP (in which she freestyles over Jay-Z songs) have proved she’s one of the sharpest female rappers out there — fresh, raw, unpredictable.

But that’s all too often overshadowed by her social-media presence. She’s often hilarious, sharing icy put-downs with her fans (whom she calls The Kunt Brigade).

But she has also wished gang rape on Sarah Palin and has a long-running feud with her bête blanche, Australian rapper Iggy Azalea (whom Banks accuses of cultural appropriation for stealing her ideas).

Oh, and she announced she’d be voting for Donald Trump for the presidency — only recently changing her mind — while her unkind comments about grime (“UK rap is just a disgrace to rap culture in general”) prompted Rinse festival to cancel her headline appearance back in July.

So London, she’s sorry about that one, she didn’t mean to offend anyone. “What can I say, UK rap is not my cup of tea. But Dizzee Rascal I love. Skepta I love.”

Less easily dismissed are the racism and homophobia charges. It began when she used her Instagram account to compare stills from her videos and Malik’s Like I Would and accused him of stealing her ideas (“Damn Zayn be moodboarding the f*** out of me”).

When Malik asked why she was being nasty about him, she launched into an extraordinary rant: “U.S.A IS ABOUT TO TEACH YOU WHO NOT TO F--K WITH!!”

She then called Malik (who is British-Pakistani) a “sand n*****r” and a “curry-scented bitch” — and was ultimately banned from Twitter for contravening standards.

She has apologised; the episode seems to have affected a change in approach. “It finally reconciled these two conflicting thoughts I had about being real and being professional,” she says.

“I realised you’re not keeping it real by being a crazy girl. You don’t lose anything by keeping your mouth shut. So maybe it’s time to stop being a crazy girl.”

When I push further, she adopts the “locker room” defence. “You know sometimes you get carried away when you’re joking. There’s this crude, ignorant, mixed-up New York City humour where people call each other all kinds of f**ked-up s**t.

"I use the N-word all the time. I was being stupid, not trying to be hurtful.” It was messy, she says.

“But there was a point to be made about being stolen from and then having to be the black person defending your blackness. Sometimes you just lose it.”

There are two themes that Banks returns to again and again. Her own brilliance. (What were you like at school? “I was talkative. I was eager to learn. I was creative. I was popular. I was like the cool funny girl.”)

And how much everyone dismisses her, exploits her, hates on her. “Geminis are the most hated people in the zodiac but when the s**t goes down everyone always calls their Gemini friend.” Trump is a Gemini, I observe. “Uh-huh.” So is Iggy Azalea. “Who?”

She is hilarious company but there’s a real vulnerability there. She grew up in Harlem with her mother and sister, who was lesbian and has recently undergone gender-reassignment surgery; Banks never knew her father and admits that she has “issues”.

Then there is her turbulent relationship with former boyfriend Dave Holmes (Coldplay’s manager). They had an affair around the time she signed her first record deal.

He was 43, she was 18. “That s**t is like a thorn in my side. I can’t get over it. There’s all that rejection, the father s**t. That’s what I’m talking about on my album in Idle Delilah. But nobody cares. The past five years have been really rough on my head.”

So Banks sees herself as a true original who has watched as white musicians claim credit (and Grammys) for watered-down versions of her ideas.

“I’ve been making some really phenomenal music and I’ve been initiating some really important poignant conversations, and I’m always stolen from or forgotten about, or have someone come and Christopher Columbus my s**t,” as she puts it. And she’s not wrong — white musicians repurposing black music has been the dominant trade in pop since Elvis Presley stole the blues — but she finds it hurtful on an intensely personal level.

“How many times have you seen me get stolen from? People have even stolen my name. Sometimes it makes you lose your f**king mind.”

It’s at this point she begins to cry. “There I was again in that position, being stolen from and then being called crazy for saying something about it.”

It’s the Twitter ban that draws the sobs, however. “They basically cut off my connection to my fans. That’s my livelihood. Like I can’t express myself unless it’s put through this white-normative filter?”

One of her most famous Twitter flames was Eminem, whom she advised to “go back to his trailer park and eat his microwave hotpocket dinner and suck on his sister’s titties”. This was in response to Eminem rapping that he was going to punch Lana Del Rey (a close friend of Banks) in the face, only she received far more opprobrium than he did. “Exactly! It was a joke!” she cries. “And then you go on Twitter and there’s all these white racists still there. Trump, he’s still there.”

Ah yes, Trump. We’re talking soon after the second presidential debate. (“That was a shade fest. Oh my God, y’all look like two drag queens throwing mud at each other.”)

She recently revoked her endorsement for Trump. Was it the “grab them by the pussy” comment? “I’ve said some f*****-up s*** like that too. It doesn’t make me think anything different other than he’s being mad messy.”

She is now voting for Jill Stein, the Green candidate, and maintains that while Trump is bad, Hillary Clinton is worse. (We argue on this point for an incredibly long time.)

“Everything he says out loud is all the things she says behind her back.” But he’s sexist, racist… “You don’t think Hillary Clinton is racist? She just wants to be in that white feminist book with Eleanor Roosevelt and, like… Sylvia Plath.

That’s what corporate white feminism does.” (Sylvia Plath, corporate white feminist?) She has a near-apocalyptic view of American race relations and feels things have got worse for people of colour under Barack Obama.

“I pay a lot of money for Obamacare. Especially with the money I’ve made.”

Aren’t you proud of that? You’re a successful person (she’s always boasted that she saved most of the money she made from 212).

Can’t you can afford to help less successful people? “America is not the same as the UK! Y’all come over here and tell us what we should do with our poor people. But we have a lot of moochers here. We are addicts. Popcorn, baseball, McDonald’s, WWF, Gatorade, Xanax. We’re addicted. It’s nobody else who’s doing this to us. It’s not Mexicans. It’s America. It’s our culture. The future is very dark from here on out.”

She says she’d like to run for office — “hell yes” — and the first thing she’d do is reform New York’s public schools system.

But when I ask if her next album will be more political, she’s dismissive. “That s**t takes all the joy out of it. Everyone’s like, ‘Put it in your music’.

And I’m like why? I don’t want to make some conscious rap song so all the white people can bump to me and then not give a f**k.”

Still, at least the new deal with RZA should allow her to concentrate on music. “After this controversy I’m gonna need a real leg up. RZA was like, ‘you need a break’.”

How is she going to come back? “You don’t come back, you move on. I don’t have any more time to lose. I’m 25. For a woman in the entertainment world, that’s like being 40. I need to marry some super-powerful man so I can be like, f**k everybody, the world is mine.”

Ah yes, I’d noticed that her Facebook posts (she’s decamped there post-Twitter) have been getting rather winsome of late.

She tells me she’s a romantic — “I’ve written so many poetic love songs” — but really she just wants someone who will give her the space and means to create music. “It costs money to make records and videos and all that s**t. But if I had someone who would let me do that, I would just make music and not put it out and I’d be so happy.”

She has also developed a nice side-line in leisurewear, which she sells on the e-commerce site Depop. “I posted all these things on Depop and they all sold out in a month. There’s one cap that says ‘Be Nice to Azealia Banks’.

And another in production that says ‘Make Azealia Great Again’.”

You’re like the black female Donald Trump! “But not really. OK, I kind of am. I’m more like the black female Larry David.”