THERE WAS ONCE a time when Australian rapper Iggy Azalea was dominating the charts and selling out concerts across the world.
Within a year or two of Iggy’s rise to fame, her career began to suffer when the internet became acquainted with the term ‘cultural appropriation’. A quick search on Google will find you think-piece after think-piece on the topic, from as early as 2013 to as recently as 2018.
There are plenty who’ll point to all of the evidence that every part of Iggy’s persona, right down to her accent, was stolen from other cultures and used for personal gain, while there are others who argue that attacks on Iggy and the demise of her career are a result of sexism, because didn’t Eminem do the exact same thing? Regardless of where you stood on the topic five years ago, there’s probably a pretty good chance you haven’t heard anything from Iggy Azalea in a while.
Unfortunately for Iggy Azalea, she made it back into headlines today after an incident during a concert in Brazil. Iggy was performing in Rio de Janeiro, at an event which was covered on live TV. Due to the heat and the lights at the show, one of Iggy’s backup dancers began to have a seizure in the middle of Iggy’s song Black Widow, and it became apparent that nobody on her team had been trained to deal with the possibility of an incident like that.
These things happen and thankfully the dancer was okay in the end. However, Iggy is not. The 28-year-old rapper has been criticised for going on with her performance while her dancer was experiencing the seizure. The music continued playing, and Iggy continued rapping (although she did call for a medic, as you can see in the clip below).
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After the performance ended, and after the backup dancer had been looked after by medical professionals, Iggy took to Instagram to let everyone know that everything was fine and that she had not understood the severity of the dancer’s condition.
I thought she had just fallen/twisted her ankle and it may sound harsh but; you keep singing until the music stops and ask for a medic, which is what I did. We are all really shaken up by what happened and just thankful she is okay. I know it’s easy to make memes of someone passed out, but someone having a seizure isn’t funny, it’s really scary! So I hope my fans do not repost some of the memes I’m seeing about my dancer.
It’s clear from this statement that Iggy’s not taking the incident lightly and is genuinely concerned for her dancer. However, people on Twitter have been arguing that even if the dancer had just twisted an ankle, Iggy still should have paused the show to make sure everything was okay. What do you think? Is it really that big of a deal to stop halfway through a song? Ed Sheeran stopped a gig twice for two separate pee breaks earlier this year, which seems a lot more disruptive than stopping to make sure an injured team member is feeling alright.
