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Azealia Banks, Lazy Jay

212

Azealia Banks's 2011 debut single, rapped, sung and shouted over Lazy Jay's house instrumental Float My Boat: three and a half minutes of Harlem wordplay that critics heard as a fully formed persona and placed among the defining songs of the decade.

By korczis 3 min read
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Review

Genre and Mood

Azealia Banks and Lazy Jay made 212, a hip-hop record built on house: Wikipedia files it under hip house, electro house and dance rap. It is provocative and bold, and playful above all; Edward Okulicz of The Singles Jukebox called her playful, sassy, with a dirty mind to match her mouth.

Song Summary

The title is the area code of Manhattan, where Banks grew up, and the lyric moves between Harlem references and explicit sexual boasts. The music is Lazy Jay’s instrumental house track Float My Boat, made by the Belgian brothers Jef and Toon Martens and used as the song’s base. Banks’s voice does the rest: Erick Bieritz counted four distinct voices in a little over three minutes.

Musical Breakdown

The song has no conventional verse-and-chorus shape; it moves through three sections.

Verse 1

The first section pairs rapping with electro beats. Hazel Robinson heard her sound amazing on the rapid-fire rapping at the start.

Breakdown

Halfway through, the beat recedes and Banks sings, in what Robinson called a taunting, cocky voice.

Climax

The final section gradually merges into altered synths and goes into a build of shouting. Brad Shoup heard the pings of the beat morph into klaxon roars; Anthony Easton called it air siren aggressiveness.

Concepts in Focus

Sampling usually means borrowing a fragment. Here the borrowed material is almost the whole musical base: 212 takes Float My Boat and turns an instrumental into a song by putting a voice on it. Shoup thought that made it sonically little more than a mixtape take on the original, and still understood why it was chosen.

The breakdown at the halfway point is a dance-music device used for a rap song. When the beat thins out, the attention moves from the flow to the singing voice; when the energy returns, as Shoup put it, needling turns into pure menace.

The music video, directed by Vincent Tsang and Paul Labonté in Montreal, is black and white: Banks in a Mickey Mouse sweater, dancing and rapping to the camera in front of a brick wall, with the producers Jacques Greene and Lunice in supporting roles. Jonathan Bogart noted how much of it focuses on her mouth.

Artistic Context

Banks released 212 as a free download on her website in May 2011 and self-released it officially on 6 December 2011. It was the lead single of her 1991 EP of May 2012 and later appeared on her debut album Broke with Expensive Taste in 2014.

Impact and Reception

Pitchfork named it Best New Track and later placed it sixth among the best songs of the 2010s; The Guardian ranked it second of 2011, and Rolling Stone put it among the 500 greatest songs of all time in 2021. It reached number 12 in the UK and number 7 in Ireland. Play it loud and count the voices.

Learn from this track

Intermediate

What you will learn

  • Explain how a rapper builds a song on an existing house instrumental, here Lazy Jay's Float My Boat.
  • Follow a song that changes shape halfway: rapping, then a breakdown with singing, then a build into altered synths.
  • Hear how assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds, can drive a verse.

Listening guide

  1. the opening section Rapid-fire rapping over electro beats at 126 BPM, before the song changes shape.
  2. the middle The beat recedes and she sings, taunting and cocky, as Hazel Robinson of The Singles Jukebox put it.
  3. the second and third verses Lines built from the oo and uh vowels of the area code itself, a stream of assonance Michelle Myers traced through the verse.
  4. the final section The synths alter and the pings morph into what Brad Shoup called klaxon roars, under a build of shouting.

Concepts in this track

music video

144 tracks

A short film made to accompany a song. Since MTV it has shaped how songs are remembered, and on YouTube it is often the main way a song is heard.

breakdown

20 tracks

A section where the beat drops out or thins, leaving pads, melody or vocals. On a dance floor it gives a moment to breathe before the music builds back.

sampling

63 tracks

Taking a fragment of an existing recording and reusing it in a new one, as a loop, a chop or a texture. Sampling is central to hip-hop and dance music and raises questions of credit and copyright.

Listen next, and why

Questions for discussion

  1. One critic heard four distinct voices in three minutes. How many can you count, and what does each one do?
  2. Brad Shoup called the song little more than a mixtape take on Float My Boat. Is borrowing a whole instrumental a weakness or a craft?
  3. Why might a song with no conventional chorus become one of the defining tracks of its decade?

References

  1. Wikipedia. 212 (song). Encyclopedia
  2. The Singles Jukebox. Azealia Banks – 212 (2011). Review
  3. MusicBrainz. 212 (recording). Database

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