Simon Reynolds - C or D

Where she says things like:
"'I'm glad I went that far into it. I was the best hoochie on the West Coast at the time. I had the best clothes 'cos I was coming from England and really good at shoplifting. I had Versace on before Lil' Kim started rapping about it 'cos the only place I could steal at was Harvey Nicks, where it was sooo easy. So I studied, like, the whole thing out in Compton: how the best you could do is be there for your man, be really good at sex, throw barbecues in the park, have babies and keep that unit together with the money that you get.'"

This obliquely reminds me of the revelation about the philosophy department here at UCI. In the men's restrooms there, there's a huge amount of anti-Derrida graffiti, obviously prompted by his residence here every spring. One time I asked someone in the department about that -- "Geez, are the grads here really ticked off with him?" "Oh no," came the reply, "that's from the professors."

thats a great anecdote!

This leads him to conflate the apparently rockist and popist arguments put forward in M.I.A.'s defence. He assumes that all M.I.A. fans are anti-authenticity popists who nonetheless love M.I.A. due to the perceived authenticity of her Sri Lankan/terrorist/anti-globalist lefty imagery.

For him the M.I.A. fan contradicts him or herself by moving between two arguments: "M.I.A. is important because she is [x]!", and "so what if she is not really [x], it is rockist to care about such things!"

It is true that different M.I.A. fans have touted these lines. But unless I'm forgetting some glaring example I can't remember an instance of the same person using both.

the funny thing is, if you look at reynolds' piece in the voice, it's really very even-handed and bends over backwards to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though, at the end of the day, it's critique pretty much amounts to *points finger* "she went to St. Martins!"

and then, after being attacked from all quarters, his rhetoric got surprisingly spiteful online, especially dissensus, and he wound up attacking her for a lot of the things that he went out of his way not to attack her for in the voice piece (eg, supposedly stealing grime's thunder)

and at this point he's reduced to pretty much incoherence i think.

time for a group hug, really

It's not an issue of people contradicting themselves, it's a question of a contradictory articulation of authenticity in the first place: how MIA herself has been constructed. Neither position, either the popist or the rockist, is particularly convincing as a result.

And besides, wasn't Reynolds' original comment that she doesn't "come from anywhere" directed at the promotion of MIA from the industry, at a promotional concert? I don't think that the fans are his target.

not really. it was that she didn't have the right to use images of war and struggle. and she doesn't have the right to use them because she is an outsider. and the only real evidence we're given that she's an outsider is that she went to st. martin's. nothing else about her background, apart from to say that her father's terrorism doesn't fit a third-vs-first struggle.

my beef is really that, all arguments about MIA's rather-more-complex-than-simply-going-to-st-martins background, it's a bit late in the day to be saying that being middle-class, or having the taint of the middle class that going to st. martin's gives you, means you come from "nowhere." it's the old rootless cosmopolitans vs. grounded proles trope. everybody comes from somewhere, including prince harry, and proles (like, for example, hip-hop loving grime MCs) are just as likely to pick up "other people's music" and use it for their own ends as anyone else is.

but god knows i'm not getting involved in this again! vye

"It's not an issue of people contradicting themselves, it's a question of a contradictory articulation of authenticity in the first place: how MIA herself has been constructed. Neither position, either the popist or the rockist, is particularly convincing as a result."

I agree Michael! That's what jars about M.I.A. (positively or negatively, depending on your position) and it's the tension which instigated the entire debate. But the attacks on M.I.A. inevitably did become displaced onto her fans and, by extension, all "popists" (as if popists had been responsible for her campaign strategy).

Still only heard it all the way through once myself. Diplo was better than her at the live show I saw, frankly.

Fair enough, it's been done to death, it just struck me that Tim's popist defense of the fans was slightly skewed - but there were seemingly some quite heated debates over personal politics over at dissensus from memory. A few that Tim joined in.

But finally bugged, I think Reynolds is interested in the cultural politics of MIA - or what those would involve for Prince Harry to start making grime, for instance. This is not question anyone's ability to do so, it is examining the effects of those exchanges and the ethics involved.

uh uh. read the piece! he never once mentions the industry or the promotion of MIA, unless you count the "face of hype," which is very vague and more sensibly read as referring to critics

Reynolds is more cluey w/r/t M.I.A. than most people on ILX give him credit for being, but that doesn't mean the anti-M.I.A./anti-pop position staked out on Dissensus wasn't absolutely riddled with holes (the biggest being the idea that M.I.A. = pop).

basically:
fortysomething journalist who's just put out a book about music made a quarter of a century ago. hears the clock ticking. feeling on the verge of slipping out of the loop. sees mia video. decides to start an argument so that people will take notice of him again. it all seems pretty sad and pointless to me, and yet another indication of how reynolds seems to revel in painting himself into an aesthetic corner.

of course it doesn't help that dissensus is the de facto reynolds fan club message board, run by someone who is essentially reynolds' errand boy/lickarse, which thereby shuts off all potentially useful outside lines of debate. try and question any of reynolds' opinions on dissensus and see how long you last there (i speak from personal experience, lol). although it's apparently ok for ingram to insert snide comments about "let's hope mia wins the mercury 'cos that will kill her career stone dead," and have all the other smug 35-year-old wire hacks nodding their plump and ample heads in agreement.

i mean, is it just me, or was the simon reynolds who used to write lovely, lurid and lyrical prose about ar kane and the young gods and throwing muses about a million times better than the one who came out of the rave on the road to damascus/beltram? in a lot of ways i've stayed with that '87-'88 melody maker/monitor mindset but i still feel i've done more in the way of "moving on" than reynolds has.

usually if you decide to shut yourself off from all other options, you end up suffocating.

Tim, I think M.I.A. is pop, or "Galang" is at least, it's being played on daytime Radio 1, it's out as a single called "Galang 05" (!!) next week, it fits the pop context at least.

Mind you I'm as arch a 'poppist' as they come and I can't stand most of her stuff.

Also Marcello I think it's pretty much inescapable for message boards to defer a bit to 'celebrity' members - sure Chuck gets challenged on ILM sometimes but there's a lot of respect for his viewpoints too, ditto Mark and Frank K. And in fact if you look upthread you see J Sutcliffe complaining cos I'd threatened to delete something he wrote about Simon R! (I have no recollection of this). I didn't look at Dissensus for long but there was definitely a spectrum of opinion there.

Is it utopian to hope that maybe one day the whole "who is the crankiest crank in Ye Olde Cranky Rock Critic town?" sweepstakes will give way to . . . . something else?

Irony-alert ahoy! I'm pretty sure "J. Sutcliffe" posted as "Majooba" elsewhere (both mention teaching philosophy in Texas, have conniption fits over snooty British dudes). Remember that buttmagazine.com photo of you and Martin piggybacking nude? L4nya 4nderson: ""Based on the picture above, I may have to become a Matmos fan." Majooba: "If you're into Aryan gay sex. Whatever floats your cute fascist boat, aesthetes."

Aside: I have absolutely no idea how I'm supposed to be "helplessly stuck in the joke-trap set for him with that 'all of western philosophy' stuff" No idea what that means, none. Help me out here, people, I'm only a BA.

this is because only white artists can do art school projects and have cred, when 'the ethnics' do it it just means theyre no longer authentic, duh

Ha ha true (and ouch).

My point was simply that I think not all reasons for liking M.I.A. are pro-pop ones, although certainly some are.