Booking a ticket to see Azealia Banks is an inherently stochastic process. In the days leading up to her Halloween show in New York City, I received the news that the opener, Cleotrapa, would no longer be performing, and her Los Angeles concert date, scheduled the week after this show, was indefinitely postponed. Nevertheless, my friends and I (a fallen angel, a nun, and Hannah Horvath, respectively) arrive at Terminal 5 in Hell's Kitchen endlessly optimistic. Unfortunately, nun gets his poppers confiscated at bag check.
We place bets on how late she's going to be. The Azealia Banks experience, in our imagination, is arriving two hours late and delivering a sublime performance — or arriving two hours late, telling us she doesn't want to be here, getting booed to oblivion, which would lead to object-throwing-based warfare with the audience. We're pretty far from the barricade, so we would be safe in the latter case.
The opener DJ, river moon, concludes their fantastic set (the highlight being the LSDXOXO remix of Kelela’s “Sorbet”). The venue now begins to play music to fill the time ("Look What You Made Me Do") while I check Azealia’s Twitter. Her last post, from earlier that day, declares that white people get skin cancer because "a winged species of alien albino lizards came down and nutted in [their] moms." Outside of music, she's most known for her commentary on social media, which is considered equally prescient and incoherent. What matters is she hasn't canceled yet, so I'm still hopeful.
The venue transitions to Halloween music. I begin to suspect this is a Waiting for Godot moment. We gaze out into the crowd, where gay guys in brightly-colored bobs halfheartedly dance to the Ghostbusters theme in an attempt to keep the vibe going.
It's worth mentioning that gay guys and Azealia Banks have a fraught relationship: gay guys love her, and she reviles gay guys. It's also worth mentioning that under the logics of stan culture, "love" is dehumanizing, tantamount to panoptic surveillance and Chinese water torture. I'm reminded of an old thread of hers, where she writes: "No one EVER told me they loved me before you all did... and you guys REALLY love me. Sometimes I don't know how to handle that." I wonder if we could be the problem.
After around an hour, she arrives to raucous applause. She’s dressed in all-black as Katrin Quinol of Black Box. She tells us that this is the "largest crowd she's ever played for.” I’m skeptical, but flattered nonetheless. She’s accompanied by a drummer and DJ who seems absolutely geeked to be in Banks's presence. She opens with "The Big Big Beat," "Miss Amor," and "Liquorice." It doesn’t fully hit me until "Count Contessa," four songs in, that this is actually happening. We're in the 212, on Halloween, and not only is she here, she's really enjoying herself, and she sounds incredible.
The energy reaches new heights during "1991" and "Heavy Metal and Reflective." She leans into the campiness of her upbeat tracks, fully committing to an Italian accent on "New Bottega" and a British accent on "Wings of a Butterfly." To the delight of Fallen Angel, she requests the disco ball for "Treasure Island." There's no better place to jump and feel the cold sweat of the guys around you than on Treasure Island, where the moon twinkles on the watery horizon.
She doesn't talk much between songs. When she does, it's just to tease the next song through vocal riffs of a random verse. The room starts cheering by the second word without fail, like the world's gayest Quizbowl round. As a testament to this, when she finally gets to cult classic "212," the entire room shouts every word with perfect enunciation. We guess — nay, know — that cunt getting eaten.
The concert ends with no encore, which I believe should have been "Chasing Time." At her best, Azealia is performing for herself and herself only: delivering her lines with panache, doing vocal riffs just because she can, dancing her heart out to the sheer excellence of her decade-old songs. She doesn't care if we like her. She could do this, with or without us, and we were incredibly lucky to bear witness.
2025