Iggy Azalea is always in the news, for one reason or the other. The rapper, who scored massive hits in 2014 was planning a big tour titled Great Escape for this year but surprised everyone this past Friday when she announced that it has been cancelled. This followed her controversial wins at the Billboard Music Awards where she won in the Top Rap Song, Top Streaming Artist, and Top Rap Artist categories.
There were various reports of reasons behind the decision but today, Iggy has taken upon herself to offer the real story to Seventeen Magazine.
In her own words:
I’ve had a different creative change of heart. I want to start totally anew, and if I stayed on my tour, that would mean I wouldn’t even be able to start working on that until after Christmas.
On top of that, mentally, to be honest with you, I just feel I deserve a break. I’ve been going non-stop for the past two years, nearly every single day. I’m not in a bad place. I think sometimes when you say you need a mental break, people are like, “A mental break? Be sure you don’t have a breakdown because you’re sad.” No, not necessarily. It’s very emotionally draining to be on all the time and going all the time, planning all the time. It’s a lot, and it’s tough. I need a break from everything to just enjoy what I worked so hard for, and I don’t really feel like I’ve had a chance to do that. I need a break to figure out what I want my sound to progress to, and I need a break to figure out how I want my visuals to progress.
It can kind of wear on you, too, when you’ve been doing the same material for a really long time. Even though a lot of people just discovered it, I am a musician and a creative person and I want to be able to perform new stuff and do new things. I feel like I’m at the end of an era now. To go on a tour in late September and to stay in that mindset of what I’d envisioned for that tour, I feel like that would stifle me.
And then, on top of that, once I postponed [the tour the first time], I couldn’t find two opening acts. I began the search, and to be honest, I never found someone who was available on those dates that I thought was a good fit for the tour.
It just seemed like it was so many things pointing me in the direction of not doing [the tour], that I finally thought, when enough things come your way, you can’t ignore the signs. It’s not easy to decide that the best thing to do is cancel a tour, but that’s the best thing for me. I don’t want to disappoint fans. I feel really bad. It was a tough decision to make, but it was the best thing.
There are people thinking it’s me giving up, or me failing at something, somehow. I said to a friend the other day, “The only reason why at this point I would stay and do this tour is to save face publicly, or to not endure publicly what people will say if I cancel it,” and that’s not a good enough reason to do something. So that’s the choice I made.
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