MIA

man i get real tired of this whole "its a pop star -- let them be as stupid as they want" kinda defense

yeah but isn't it the case that when it's somebody we dig, we make all manner of excuses - pop stars are just people - name the # of people you know who aren't dumb shits at least half the time - zero unless you were friends with Mother Teresa iirc - let he who does not have at least a hundred posts he'd delete himself if he could cast the 1st stone

Dom's take on this is quite funny, for those who miss the man put out to Athenian exile.

jd i don't know many ppl who make a pretty lucrative living by being dumb shits cuz hey it pays the bills (not that they need the money lol) and who cares if some poor ppl get fucked they got an image to maintain/desperately keep alive and the press loves it (except when they don't in which case you should act like a petulant douchebag). do you?

who is balls

the question that had to be asked

blunt iirc

haha i mean blount, actual typo and not going for easy joke

James?

Wait who is getting fucked by her stupidity?

thx some d00d

Wait who is getting fucked by her stupidity?

― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Thursday, May 27, 2010 10:48 PM

ben whatshisname

Franklin

lol

bronfman! i'm reading this book about prohibition and how the o.g. bronfmans were smugglers and scary motherfuckers before they bough seagrams and went legit

Feel bad for poor fucked Ben Bronfman.

jd i don't know many ppl who make a pretty lucrative living by being dumb shits cuz hey it pays the bills (not that they need the money lol) and who cares if some poor ppl get fucked they got an image to maintain/desperately keep alive and the press loves it (except when they don't in which case you should act like a petulant douchebag). do you?

umm no - it's just like, really? we're mad at mia because her brand of being a pop star with nothing of particular value to say is somehow more offensive than any other pop star's vacuity? also, why are you so hostile to me since you came back, I thought we was bros

http://www.observer.com/2010/media/lynn-hirschbergs-response-mia-tweet-fairly-unethical-and-infuriating

btw in case you were wondering who the piece was directed at, from my fb:

J****** S****** P***** MIA is vile. lies! I feel violated.
7 minutes ago · Comment · Like

J****** S****** P*****
but, you know, I still like her music.
6 minutes ago

goodnight, guys

peace

who's 'mad' at mia? i don't even know mia! saw the 'controversy', saw the funny hirschberg response, saw the pharrell quote, laffed, glanced at ilx, saw the groupie slurping here, commenced rolling eyes. totally able to deal w/ remarkably stupid professional provocateurs and their sycophants w/out getting emotional or heavily invested: paul broun is my congressman.

wait mia's groupies are getting slurped???

weve missed balls

i'm finding it harder to be a gentleman everyday

J****** S****** P***** MIA is vile. lies! I feel violated.
7 minutes ago · Comment · Like

J****** S****** P*****
but, you know, I still like her music.
6 minutes ago

― call all destroyer, Thursday, May 27, 2010 11:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

who's that? jessa saraca parker?

i think it's worth considering her in the contexts of western pop music and the war in sri lanka. pop music - is there any other pop star right now who makes politics, however muddled, one of the central features of their music? much less radical politics? not that i know of. i don't listen to a ton of top 40 stuff though, so maybe i'm wrong -- to me it's refreshing.

after all does anyone who is active in the conflict in sri lanka (in any of the political camps), or who writes about it from there or abroad, argue that mia is actually a factor to be weighed seriously? the guy quoted in the nyt saying she helped put the tigers on the map - uh, right. whose map again? some western hipsters? having one tiny anti-sri lankan military voice in the morass of war on terror rhetoric that predominates media coverage of the conflict here isn't a problem for me (speaking from the US anyway). she's also continually stated she doesn't even support the tigers. the most damning political criticisms from hirschberg are that she put tigers on her arular art and that she isn't a pacifist.

tl;dr - xp aerosmith otm

She chose the olive bread.

having one tiny anti-sri lankan military voice in the morass of war on terror rhetoric that predominates media coverage of the conflict here isn't a problem for me (speaking from the US anyway).

glad its not a problem for you but it seems to be a problem for the guy who is actually working on sri lankan issues!

Did you find that quote terribly credible?

I mean he seems annoyed that she's not doing anything particularly constructive, that's fine. . . but the argument that she's actually making things worse seems suspect to say the least.

plus the opinion of one person you certainly don't know as quoted by another person you probably don't know in an obvious attempt to make somebody else look bad...

I don't care. Misguided or not I miss politics in music.

*shrug* ok yall

plus the opinion of one person you certainly don't know as quoted by another person you probably don't know in an obvious attempt to make somebody else look bad...

― the other is a black gay gentleman from Los Angeles (contenderizer), Friday, May 28, 2010 1:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol, journalism

I don't care. Misguided or not I miss politics in music.

― Moka, Friday, May 28, 2010 1:46 AM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol, politics

Wasn't zinging shakey so much as pointing out that Mia gaga hatorade might be motivated by slipping it girl importance but hey ymmv or whatever.

The Hirschberg piece reminds me of something Steven Wells wrote in NME about Huggy Bear: "They have had their ideology combed over, examined, misinterpreted, rewritten and kicked to death a hundred times. Talk about breaking a butterfly on a wheel. If the Clash or Dylan or Bob bloody Marley had suffered such intense scrutiny they would all have failed the examination.”

Hirschberg's piece is written in such bad faith, and with such intolerance of contradiction in political pop, that any of the above would have got the same treatment from her. None of them were fully articulate and coherent when discussing politics, and none donned a hairshirt for their whole career. LH has no apparent desire to understand her interviewee, only to find more and more lines of attack. If MIA had decided to have lunch in some "authentic" down-at-heel Sri Lankan joint, or a fucking Wendy's, I've no doubt LH would have accused her of posturing - "Hey, she's rich, why is she pretending to be poor?"

I'm not saying that MIA doesn't overuse the word "terrorist", or overstate her own dangerousness, or talk a fair degree of bullshit, but LH is interested only in that. I've done interviews which could have made the subject look a lot worse if I'd favoured only the daftest remarks or harped on about what they were eating, but that wouldn't have represented the interview accurately - it's entertaining and attention-grabbing but it's also mean-spirited and cheap.

i just noticed this from the piece as well:

“I wasn’t trying to be like Bono,” Maya told me. “He’s not from Africa — I’m from there. I’m tired of pop stars who say, ‘Give peace a chance.’ I’d rather say, ‘Give war a chance.’"

maya. you are not from africa!!!!! in any sense!!! wtf.

(also, i think africa has done enough of the "giving war a chance" over the years.)

yeah, much as i'd like to defend outrageous quasi-political statements for their own (rare) sake in contemporary pop, there's a point at which saying stupid shit is just, you know, fucking stupid

If the Clash or Dylan or Bob bloody Marley had suffered such intense scrutiny they would all have failed the examination

if ONLY those acts had suffered some scrutiny rather than rock writers buying into their stupid myths!

as jordan said upthread, i really resent the argument that the idea of a pop star is to be an idiot.

My problem with the "scrutiny" being applied here is that, with the exception of the Tamil/Sri Lanka-specific stuff, it's the same kind of "scrutiny" that people on the right apply to middle-class socialists.

i mean, the reason this is much-needed isn't because pop stars' thoughts should all be combed over for incoherence, because where would we stop - it's 100% to do with a) how m.i.a. presents herself, b) the extent to which the majority of the media has totally bought into this. sure, us music nerds have been discussing her politics for years and have mostly concluded that she speaks bullshit, but the mainstream media has barely questioned her credentials as a "revolutionary" "political" "activist" who should be taken seriously on those grounds, and that's just plain wrong. i seriously can't believe how much that stupid "born free" video was reported as though it was an actual political statement. i'm really glad she got punctured in this way, and if it takes mocking her olive bread to do it, i'm all for that.

(also harping on about mia's politics obscures discussion of her actual artistic strengths, which are actually more interesting than her stupid sloganeering.)

what does that have to do with anything? if you take advantage of celebrity's public platform to issue political proclamations, they will and should be scrutinized. i agree that maya attracts more than her fair share of criticism on such grounds, but i can't say she doesn't invite it...

i also don't want to read too much into this, but i do think it's somewhat interesting that mia seems to be drawn to old-money privilege in her personal relationships, from justine frischmann at st martin's to her husband now.

my last post was directed to the x (matt dc, not the lex). and i'm not sure i buy lex's idea that the mainstream pop media have given mia a free pass on her political seriousness and relevance. the impression i've gathered is that most writers/critics have always considered her stated politics a dubious kind of set dressing, mainstream or not.

i dont understand how she is so rich tho

My problem with the "scrutiny" being applied here is that, with the exception of the Tamil/Sri Lanka-specific stuff, it's the same kind of "scrutiny" that people on the right apply to middle-class socialists.

So OTM. "If you care about the poor so much why don't you give away all your possessions and live in a skip?"

Lex, you're deliberately misreading her. By "there" she clearly means the region she's talking about, ie Sri Lanka, not Africa. MIA might talk shit sometimes but I'm sure she realises Sri Lanka isn't in Africa. And, as contenderizer says, you're seriously overstating the free ride she's gotten from the press. In virtually every piece I've read there's been a degree of critique and questioning, without anyone having to resort to the truffle-fry manouevre.

The old money thing is interesting, but isn't that a classic hip hop trope? Like Jay-Z with his Bentleys and wanting to stay at the Dorchester.

dorian, did you just quote steven wells to make the argument that journalists should be more deferential to their interview subjects?!?!1?

He was pretty deferential to musicians with lefty viewpoints, even when interviewing Belle and Sebastian he was like "why aren't you more political? You're obviously more intelligent than 99% of other pop stars".

I don't really get what scrutinising Dylan to see whether he'd thought through the economic consequences of The Times They Are A Changin' would get you. The specific issue with MIA is that she is pretty much the most prominent person from Sri Lanka anywhere in the world and therefore runs a much higher risk of doing serious damage when she shoots her mouth off.

iirc people *did* scrutinize dylan, *after* he stopped making protest records, and he gave rly oblique answers in response... happens in 'walk hard' anyway.