Azealia Banks No Longer Signing With RZA Following Russell Crowe Drama

Robin Little/Getty Images

Azealia Banks No Longer Signing With RZA Following Russell Crowe Drama

Robin Little/Getty Images

One of the strangest bits of news this week (and this year, and this lifetime) involved Azealia Banks attending Russell Crowe’s Beverly Hills hotel party as a guest of their mutual friend RZA, an encounter that ended with Banks getting thrown out of the party. Per TMZ’s report, Banks laughed at Crowe’s music choices, described the crowd as “boring white men,” and alluded to slicing the throat of another woman in attendance with a smashed champagne glass — and when Banks raised her glass, Crowe carried her out of the room and called security. Banks told the story differently, first in a now-deleted Facebook post — “I went to a party at Russell crowe’s suite , at which he called me a nigger, choked me, threw me out and spat at me” — and then in an official police report.

Now there’s more fallout from the incident: Banks is pulling out of her impending record deal with RZA’s label because RZA didn’t back up her version of the story. In the aftermath of the fight, RZA claimed that Banks, not Crowe, was the one using the N-word, and his representative tells TMZ that Banks is “full of it” with regard to the events in Crowe’s hotel suite. So when RZA’s people called Banks this week to finish up the record deal, she called it off, thus preventing RZA from adding to his menagerie of Bankses. Don’t worry, RZA, there are other fish in the sea!

In other RZA news, today the rapper launches 36 Chambers, a menswear line that fuses hip-hop, Chinese culture, and high fashion. In a press release RZA says it’s inspired by “kung fu, mathematics, Eastern philosophy, and art.”

UPDATE: Banks tells her side of the story to TMZ…

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