Hi everyone, Sothony Zentano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. Hope you're doing well.

Let's side quest into a bit of music commentary here around one of the industry's most beloved artists today, Miss Azealia Banks, somebody who hasn't really released a formal full-length project in a minute. I am not going to go check the span of time that it has taken to do a follow-up to her last album. Austin will put that number on the screen [since 2019]. Thank you. That's the reason production and editing exists.

And believe it or not, despite Azealia pretty much becoming one of the biggest optics nightmares in the music industry and burning every possible bridge a single artist can, there are still fans out there who are hoping and praying for the day she returns to the music industry as the triumphant pop girly, who many sort of predicted she would eventually be, only to crash and burn miserably in the alternate timeline that we are existing in now.

And in many ways, through her multiple social media rants and tirades, Azealia, I think, has only made it more of a sure thing that she will not be returning to the music industry in any major capacity because she has made so many enemies, made so many preposterous statements. We have covered some of them on this channel. The stuff around... coming to mind is a tweet where she's just basically saying, you know, all that Epstein stuff back in the '80s and '90s was just normal. Nobody make a big deal of that.

Okay. I digress. Let me get into the meat of this video by saying Azealia Banks, believe it or not, has actually dropped a brand new album and it's one of the strangest releases I think we are going to hear this year from anybody who might be popular music adjacent in any way whatsoever. The record is titled Zenzealia, and as, you know, its name suggests, it's a record that is all about meditation, positive vibes, chilling out. There's a lot of ambient music passages, spoken word passages all over this record.

And, yeah, it's a very interesting piece for multiple reasons. One, which I think, you know, has a lot to do with kind of the disconnect some might read between the message and its messenger. Like, if you spend any amount of time on Azealia Banks's social media platforms – or look at any of her past hits, if you want to call them that – on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, she for the most part comes across like one of the least chill people on the planet ever, of all time, in the history of human existence. Like, absolutely, positively no chill whatsoever. In fact, when it comes to those who still follow and stan Azealia to this day, you could say, I think that being not chill in any way, being toxic, being over the top, that is actually the selling point. That is not a bug, it is in fact a feature. So her doing an album to help people relax and chill out and, I don't know, realize their higher selves, open their third eye, do some diaphragmatic breathing, talk about chakras and stuff, I mean...

It's also known in the past that Azealia Banks can be kind of spiritual. A little woo-woo, but maybe not full, hour-long zen meditation album woo-woo. But I guess she is. And look, for as much criticism I have of Azealia Banks and her music and her platform, I don't read this album as cynical or inauthentic in any way. I think on some level she wholeheartedly believes she is giving a meditation album, giving an ambient album, giving an abstract kind of, you know, higher plane experience here the good old college try. But I'm not so much, obsessed with the authenticity of this record as much as I am obsessed with the quality of it, or lack thereof. Because the question is, at the end of the day, is this album actually good for what it is? And does it achieve its goal as, you know, this experimental ambient meditation piece?

And after hearing the entire thing, I would say no, honestly. And there are a myriad of reasons why. Maybe let's start with the instrumentals, which is maybe the most simple and easy part of the album to approach. I mean, for the most part, not only are we talking about the most generic, boring, bottom-of-the-barrel, droning ambient synthesizer passages that you could possibly describe, there's really no character, no flavor, no nothing to these synth passages that you could say are special or stand out or memorable in any way. In fact, the only way I think you could commit any of this to memory is by virtue of never having heard an ambient album or a drone album in your entire life.

Not only that, but given that we have ten tracks on this album – cuts that span past 6, 7, even ten minutes on this record – given that you have to sit with these instrumentals for a long time, at the very least you would expect, maybe to a degree, they would advance or progress in some way, or that you would actually hear a unique and different instrumental on each track of the record.

But multiple times throughout this LP, Azealia is actually recycling instrumentals from previous tracks, almost in the same way that you might adjust the font size or the sentence spacing on a term paper in order to get it to the expected amount of pages or something. There's just a really funny amount of filler on this record on the instrumental side, which is just crazy. Sort of goes to show just how little attention Azealia expects her listeners to really be giving to this record, that she thinks she can, on multiple occasions, just reuse certain musical ideas without any real sort of different framing or novelty to them.

There's a lot of rehashing of certain phrases and ideas and concepts on the spoken word side too, and it really speaks to maybe not just a lack of familiarity with other projects in this genre, but a lack of anything substantive or truly helpful or meaningful to say on this record as well. In fact, a bulk of this album's runtime is dedicated to just kind of directing the listener to relax specific parts of their body. And you know, that inherently is not a bad thing, but Azealia Banks on numerous occasions will direct you to relax certain parts of your body that she that maybe just minutes ago told you to relax already. Like, I can recall only moments ago you telling me to relax my tongue. It is still relaxed. It has not gotten any more tense than it was in the last few minutes that you told me to relax it.

So yes, a very good chunk of this record's hour-long runtime is dedicated to telling you to relax the same exact body parts over and over and over and over. And what instances of progression we do get kind of come in the form of offhandedly mentioning certain colors attached to things, certain colors of light, a purple fairy at some point. What these colors are supposed to represent isn't exactly explained in detail or anything like that. I think you would just have to be, you know, very kind of woo-woo, crystal necklace to be like reading that deeply into it.

And rather than presenting the listener with any kind of real, true abstract thought that might cause themselves to dig deeper into their minds, Azealia much of the time just kind of infers that, by virtue of listening here and just having this experience, your mind is opening and it's expanding and you're, you know, opening your third eye and your chakras are going all crazy. And believe me, the repetition, I don't think, is by virtue of trying to like lull the listener further into a sense of, I guess, really letting go and completely just erasing their mind or anything like that.

What I think is happening is Azealia is just legitimately doing everything here vocally off the cuff and is often forgetting what she just said minutes ago, or thinks again that her listeners are not going to be paying that much attention. Because there are actually at least a few parts on this record that are escaping me, but I know I fucking heard them, where she misspeaks or stutters or goes to start a sentence, doesn't finish it and jumps instantly over to the next part. This is maybe a moment that at one point she intended to go back and edit out so that it was like kind of, you know, clean flow from one statement to the next. But they are actually left on this record.

So, again, the reason I think a lot of this repetition exists is because she's not really mapped much of this out and is just kind of throwing these repetitive ideas and phrases out there because she is just trying to fill up as much time as possible to get this album to an hour of length.

As we reach the end of the album and hit a very funny finale track where Azealia is almost like congratulating you for going through this journey, we hit more themes of, you know, self-love, self-actualization, reaching a higher mental plane. And again, a lot of these ideas would be a lot easier to swallow if it were not for the fact that they were being delivered by one of the most toxic people on the planet. But I really am having a difficult time getting past the fact that Azealia Banks – Azealia freaking Banks – is telling me to meditate and relax. Which, you know, maybe I would have an easier time doing if this record were more immersive, had more something of substance to say, and just generally sounded better and had more to offer sonically and instrumentally. And, you know, wasn't just repeating itself numerous times.

But yeah, the quality of the record is not good. It's not immersive. So I'm not really able to do anything else other than sit with my own thoughts of, like, why is this person specifically going in this direction? Especially if you weren't going to put in the time and the effort and the focus to make such a bold switch up creatively actually worth it and valid. But yeah, I can't really see this record appealing to many people, honestly. Like, not only is it not the kind of album Azealia's core fanbase at this point are interested in seeing her make – unless they're so obsessed they would listen to her do anything, I guess – but it's not even really good at what it's trying to do.

At no point when I was listening to this did I at all feel relaxed, chilled out, more actualized than I already was, I guess? This thing is a very boring hot mess, but I appreciate the surprise of it. I guess I appreciate the surprise. And, you know what, I'm gonna leave it there.

Anthony Fantano. Zen. Forever.