Frazer Harrison/MTV1415/Getty Images for MTVIggy Azalea shot to super stardom following the success of her single "Fancy," but as fans of the rapper know, her fame hasn't come without its fair share of criticism.
"People have said I'm not real rap or real hip-hop," the chart-topper tells Vanity Fair in a new interview. "But I don't care if people think I'm pop or rap. Everyone interprets music differently."
While the Australian may seem like a surprising figure within the rap community, the 24-year-old musician struggled for years to find success in the industry.
"I never thought it was strange," she tells the VF contributor Lisa Robinson when asked if she ever questioned whether it was "weird for a white Australian girl to be a rapper."
"If you go back to the Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley and Eminem—they've all basically done black music," she explains. "I felt this wasn't that far from what we've seen in music history over and over again."
As for whether she finds the criticism of her music to be misogynistic?
"Well, they don't say that stuff about Macklemore," she says of the 31-year-old white rapper who hails from Seattle. "So, yes, I think it has 100,000 percent to do with the fact that I have a vagina."
Azalea traveled to Florida at the young age of 16, moving from Australia with the hopes of starting a music career. For two years, she only had one pair of shoes and it took nearly a decade of hardships before Iggy found success with her No. 1 debut album The New Classic.
"The leather would wear off and I would color them in with a marker to keep them looking black," she recalls of her only pair of footwear. "I'm doing a shoe collaboration with Steve Madden now—when I first came to America I thought the Steve Madden brand was the pinnacle of high fashion, because the shoes were $200. And I thought, 'Who the f--k has $200 to buy shoes?'"
Now, $200 is seemingly next to nothing for Azalea whose life changed in "every way possible" following the success of "Fancy."
"Some bad, some good," she shares. "I can't walk down the street anymore, and I have to be very selective when I grocery shop. I went from having nothing to having everything I could possibly want. It's weird. It's almost scarily easy to quickly forget that you had nothing."
While Iggy won't stop making music anytime soon, there is one thing you will see less of during her onstage performances: twerking.
"Sometimes things become part of pop culture, but they run their course. I think it's time for it to be over," she says of Miley Cyrus' signature dance move.
The leggy blond also addressed those pesky sex tape rumors which continue to plague the rap artist, despite the fact that she has repeatedly denied the tape's existence.
"Every week I have some sort of crisis that involves the Internet," she spills of the endless rumor mill. "I do not have a sex tape; I would remember if I had a sex tape. But if I did have a sex tape it would be completely f--king fine and my own business."