Born Amethyst Amelia Kelly in Mullumbimby, New South Wales, Iggy's stage name comes from the name of her childhood dog and the street she grew up in.
It was Tupac Shakur who inspired Iggy to become a rapper after she heard his "Baby Don't Cry (Keep Ya Head Up II)" cut at the age of 11. "It was the song that made me fall in love with music and also what sparked my Tupac fascination," she told The Pop Manifesto. "That would later make me pick up my own pen and write songs."
By the time she was 14 Iggy was writing her own raps and hanging out at hip-hop clubs in Sydney. "When I first started rapping, I thought I'd move to the city [Sydney]," she recalled to Billboard magazine. "But when I got there I was like, 'These people are still not my people.'"
Iggy left home at 16 and flew to Miami alone. She told her mother she was going to the Florida city with a friend on vacation, but phoned home two weeks later to say she was staying for good and pursuing her dream of being a rapper. "There was definitely a lot of crying from my mom," Iggy recalled to The New York Post.
Iggy planned to enroll in an audio engineering course if her rap dreams didn't work out. "I had always been drawn to jobs where there weren't many other women involved," she told The Observer, "and very few women do audio engineering."
Iggy first gained recognition in 2011 after the music video for her sexually provocative song "Pu$$y" from her first mixtape, Ignorant Art, earned some views on YouTube.
After initially resisting suggestions to go into professional modeling, Iggy signed with Wilhelmina Models in 2012 and was announced as the face of Levi Jeans' "Go Forth" campaign.
Iggy dated Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky in 2012. She tattooed three of her fingers with the words Live, Love, and A$AP, the title of his mixtape. She had them removed after they split.
On February 13, 2013 she signed a record deal with Mercury Records. Her debut single on the label was "
Work," a Top 20 hit in the UK.
in 2012 she became the first white woman to appear on the cover of XXL magazine when she was part of their "Freshman Class" issue. Future and Macklemore were also on that cover.
When "
Fancy" climbed to #1 on the Hot 100, Iggy's collaboration with Ariana Grande, "
Problem," jumped to #2 on the tally. The Australian rapper became the first act since the Beatles to simultaneously occupy the top two spots with their first Hot 100 hits. "It doesn't mean anything," she said. "I'd rather be The Rolling Stones."
Iggy told GQ magazine that when she's chilling out at home, she likes to "cook something nice." She added: "My absolute number one favorite thing to cook is chicken teriyaki. My grandma taught me how to make it. I left home when I was 16, and it's the one thing I really enjoy. I put so much soy sauce and chicken broth in the thing and make it so potent that nobody else could possibly enjoy it! But it's just the way I like it."
Did you spot Iggy's blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo part in the 2015 Furious 7 movie? She delivers the lines: "Hey, there's the girl I've heard so much about. Where you been at, ghost girl?"
Iggy Azalea had a son named Onyx Carter in 2020. The father is rapper Playboi Carti, whom she started dating in late 2018. They split up a few months after Onyx was born.
In 2023 she launched an OnlyFans account where she posted provocative photos. She became a top earner on the site but left after about a year. Iggy later revealed that during this time she was dealing with a "chronically non-healing wound" and had a kind of catheter in her arm called a PICC line. "We would take the PICC line out and then take hot bikini pictures for a day or two," she told ABC News.
By 2019 the music industry mostly turned on her - many of the folks who collaborated with her during her rise were now ghosting her. A lot of this had to do with accusations that as a white woman using a Black accent in her flow, she was culturally insensitive. In 2024 she got fed up and announced her retirement from music. She turned to business ventures, including crypto. Later that year she launched a meme coin called $MOTHER.
