“212” by Azealia Banks featuring Lazy Jay

"212" was Azealia Banks' debut single, out in December 2011 as the opening shot for her 2012 EP 1991, and it later landed on her debut album Broke with Expensive Taste. She wrote it with Lazy Jay, the alias Belgian DJ Jef Martens shares with his brother Toon, over his own track "Float My Boat", and it straddles hip house, electro house and dance rap. Nick Conceller recorded and mixed it.

Banks raps about growing up in Harlem and gets gleefully explicit about sex. It started life as a free download, went top 20 in the UK and charted in the Benelux, backed by a black-and-white video of her dancing and rapping in front of a brick wall. Billboard later counted it among the songs that shaped the 2010s, and Rolling Stone put it on its 500 greatest songs list.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.