Categories: The Column

17/03/15 – Azaelia Banks, Kanye West, Dolce and Gabbana

By Charlotte Hope, Lifestyle Editor @TLE_Lifestyle

Dolce and Gabbana are pretty offensive

When I think of Dolce and Gabbana, I think of ‘My Humps’by the Black Eyed Peas. Or, I mean, I used to. Now I’ll probably just think ‘ah those two designers who chose questionable words to articulate how they feel about something’. But ‘My Humps’is shorter so it’s likely I’ll go back to that in due course.

Hey, what are you talking about? OH yeah I need to explain – basically Dolce and Gabbana, who design clothes/shoes/accessories/lifestyles, allegedly said that IVF babies are ‘synthetic’. The designer duo have, previously, spoken out against same-sex marriage and have extolled the virtues of the more traditional family model, but this is the first time they’ve raised this particular issue in public. Naturally many people are outraged and have called for a boycott of the brand. Most notably, Elton John. Elton and his husband, David Furnish have two babies conceived using IVF and have, obviously, taken offence at the poor choice of words used by D&G. I’d love to see if this has a genuine impact on their sales – I definitely think that the opinion is dated and stupid – but I’d be surprised to see a full boycott of their synthetic products anytime soon.

Kanye Kanye Kanye

 Kanye West, designer, genius, rap artist, black Jesus – whatever nomenclature you use when referring to him – is going to headline Saturday night at Glastonbury 2015. This excites me far more than perhaps it would ordinarily, because I have a ticket for Glasto this year. In fact, if I didn’t, the likelihood of it having Column space at all is slim. But have a ticket I do, and Column space is made.

Emily Eavis announced the booking via her Twitter on Monday and, at time of writing, it has over 1000 retweets. So I guess people are quite excited? If it’s anything like his Brits performance, the BBC are definitely going to have to pre record and bleep out a heck of a lot of it. Yeezy himself hasn’t commented on the event yet, preferring instead to use his Twitter platform to post eight nude photographs of Kim Kardashian. This is, ostensibly, to congratulate her on season 10 of Keeping up with the Kardashians/having 30 million Twitter followers, but also seems to be congratulating himself on having a hot wife. So weird, because he’s normally so introverted and quiet?

Azaelia Banks

Speaking of rappers who just hate attention and love the quiet life, Azaelia Banks has done a shoot and an interview for culturally irrelevant magazine Playboy in which she has declared that (of America) “I hate everything about this country”- going on to say that she hates “fat white Americans”. I don’t want to generalise, here, but is this not potentially alienating all of Playboy’s readers? Surely it’s middle America, big ol’fat hicks lookin’at the pictures with a piece o’hay stuck between their teeth? As I said, I don’t want to generalise. So maybe it’s not.

Banks has a lot to say for someone who has only released a few songs so far, doesn’t she? She loves a Twitter feud, too, calling Iggy Azalea ‘Igloo Australia’, which I think we can all agree is excellently clever. What Azaelia is saying might actually be of some import, but we can’t know because it’s shrouded in a thick blanket of hyperbole and expletives. And I’m a gal that loves an expletive. Perhaps we’ll have more music from her soon? I mean, maybe.

 

Joe Mellor

Head of Content

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