Azealia Banks's Bonkers Playboy Interview: Sex & a Stunned Kitty

Azealia Banks is on the cover of the April issue of Playboy with a cat—and inside, more cats! In this interview, she offers her thoughts on, among other topics, sex, love, religion, racism and her hairy vagina.

Writer Rob Tannebaum sat down with the rapper/singer for a profile that’s very Azealian in nature. What we learned: Old guys have better houses, and Azealia Banks wants to be like Jay Z. “What would happen if I couldn’t sing? Then I’d just be another black bitch to y’all,” she says. Below, a few excerpts from the mouth of this very frustrating, entertaining human being.

On the birds and the bees talk growing up:

“My mother was always making inappropriate jokes. We had sex books in the house. She never tried to hide it from me. When I got my period it was very much like, “Boys are going to want to touch your body, but you can get pregnant now, and we not playing that shit. My mom scared me off of getting pregnant.”

On her longest relationship:

“Four years. It started when I was 17. He was 43. There’s something very wrong with a man that age who wants to date a 17-year-old girl. I didn’t know how to shave my bush and shit like that. I had a hairy pussy. I didn’t know how to wear perfume. I had neon pink barrettes in my hair. And as “212” started to pop off and my career started to happen, he became jealous. He choked me and beat me up, and of course you should not be fucking with a man who puts his hands on you, but I was stupid and young.”

On whether this turned her away from older men:

“No, I love older men. The things in an older man’s house are better—his furniture, even his knives and his pots. And they smell better. Young guys, they may skip a shower and shit like that.”

On wanting a career like Jay Z’s:

“That’s the only person I have my eye set on. The race thing always comes up, but I want to get there being very black and proud and boisterous about it. You get what I mean? A lot of times when you’re a black woman and you’re proud, that’s why people don’t like you. In American society, the game is to be a nonthreatening black person. That’s why you have Pharrell or Kendrick Lamar saying, ‘How can we expect people to respect us if we don’t respect ourselves?’ He’s playing that nonthreatening black man shit, and that gets all the white soccer moms going, ‘We love him.’ Even Kanye West plays a little bit of that game—’Please accept me, white world.’ Jay Z hasn’t played any of those games, and that’s what I like.”

On her Twitter shenanigans:

“It’s always about race. Lorde can run her mouth and talk shit about all these other bitches, but y’all aren’t saying she’s angry. If I have something to say, I get pushed into the corner.”

On which religion she practices:

“I don’t want to say, but I’ll tell you about one form of the religion. It’s called 21 Divisions. When they brought the slaves over to the Caribbean, they syncretized all their African gods with Catholic saints. So in 21 Divisions there are black gods and goddesses, and my mother practiced that when I was little. Whenever problems happened, we turned to 21 Divisions to fix it. It’s funny, because my friends on the block in Harlem, their mothers would be like, “Oh, you fucking with that witchcraft. You working roots.” You can cleanse people with root work or do bad things to them. But 21 Divisions is celestial.”

On deserving respect:

“I get upset when people are like, ‘Why don’t you just make music?’ What would happen if I couldn’t sing? Then I’d just be another black bitch to y’all. It’s really fucking annoying. Black people need reparations for building this country, and we deserve way more fucking credit and respect.”