Month: January 2015

When an ambitious teen from Down Under travels to the United States to launch a career in a rough-and-tumble part of the music business, the results aren’t always pretty, as the artist known as Iggy Azalea has discovered. A U.S. District Court in Los Angles recently granted her a preliminary injunction, enjoining Primco Management, ESMG Inc., and Wine Enterprises Inc. from using Azalea’s image and releasing what she calls unauthorized tracks from the rap star’s formative years.The order is part of litigation over an agreement that defendant Maurice Williams, aka Hefe Wine, claims Azalea signed in 2009 that gives him full ownership and exploitation rights to the early recordings. She says the accord is fabricated and her signature on it was forged — that it was cut and pasted from an early management contract with another individual that Wine took from Azalea. Just reading the ruling provides plenty of eyebrow-raising reading about the relationship-building in rap, which apparently can be a raw as the genre’s lyrics.The early recordings, Azalea asserts, were stolen from her during her brief relationship with Wine, when she was age 17 and he, among other things, made “unwelcome sexual advances” on her. Amethyst Amelia Kelly, aka Azalea, says he downloaded the contents of her personal computer, including unreleased musical sound recordings she created and performed. The performer, songwriter and model says she never completed nor approved...