MIA

Most of it sounds like she found a copy of Skinny Puppy's VIVISECT VI and started chanting over it, which I find to be awesome.

^really? that DOES sound awesome!

I'll repeat: It's streaming on her Myspace page

yeah my internet access is pretty limited right now for various reasons...

not to get all 'in my world of young ppl' but c'mon dude. she may not be lady gaga but she's pretty famous/popular.

― some dude, Monday, July 12, 2010 2:37 PM (6 hours ago) Bookm

??? im not sure what was weird abt that phrase! it basically just means 'anecdotal ppl in their 20s i know'??

― blap...tremendo (deej), Monday, July 12, 2010 10:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hey i go through the same thing of trying to relate anecdotal IRL experiences to the blogosphere shut-ins on ILM all the time and i sympathize with your own efforts, but the turn of phrase "in my world of young ppl" is just hilarious to me sorry

'in my world of aging drug addicts'

'in my world of staggered deadbeats'

(this is fun)

Most of it sounds like she found a copy of Skinny Puppy's VIVISECT VI and started chanting over it, which I find to be awesome.

okay, sold

be warned though that if you hated "Teqkilla", you will hate most of the album (or conversely maybe the album will make "Teqkilla" make more sense, I dunno)

noz had a bunch of angry tweets about this album like "i heard this album sounded like skinny puppy, THEY LIED TO ME"

Listening to it now via MySpace. It's loud, ugly and stupid. I like the air-gun sample; reminds me of "Stainless Steel Providers" by Revolting Cocks. I think this will almost certainly wind up being my favorite of her albums, but that's saying so, so little.

What songs do ppl consider loud? I only hear 4 excessively loud tracks on an album of 16 songs.

'in my world of staggered deadbeats'

Totally fun.

She's doing "Born Free" on Letterman right now, in the middle of a bunch of look-alikes and I think Martin Rev is on the keyboards.

Enjoying Christgau's review a lot. Good to see someone overtly irritated by the priggishness and disingenuousness of so many of MIA's critics. The more I read why certain people don't like her, the more I like her.

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Rock-Roll/Illygirl-Steppin-Up/ba-p/2907

Going back to the record yet again, I find that if I start with Story to Be Told then it's a great 25 minutes. Everything that really bothers me, both sonically and lyrically, is at the front of the album. Even just removing Teqkilla makes it significantly better. I don't understand why it's being painted - by people here as well as by Perpetua - as a complete disaster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MROxPK18v5I

As one of the commenters points out, there's an audible audience cry of "What the fuck was that?" at 4:16. Which is exactly the kind of reaction I'd imagine she was after.

listening for the 1st time, and speaking for people w shitty taste in music, it doesn't seem anywhere near as bad as has been made out. intro track ("the message") clearly sets /\/\/\Y/\ up as some kind of all-caps statement, and i'm okay with that. "steppin up" literalizes the idea with a wall of industrial noise that quickly subsides into a spare & self-aggrandizing banger of the sort she's been kicking out since day one, only festooned here with a more deliberately noisy brand of noise. works for me. the drills and processed guitars make as much musical sense as the gunshots and snare hits of yore, and i love the massive jungle bass that drops in occasionally to soften the architecture.

turns out that "xxxo" has grown on me in the last few weeks, and that it works WAY better in album context than it ever did as a single (as someone remarked a while back). in the flow of the album, there's the implication that the "you" who wants maya to be someone she ain't = the pop costume "xxxo" wears, relative to the preceding bombardations. represents perhaps the idea that she's a pop star in general, a commercial object to be made and sold to sheeps by google government demon corporations, or, i dunno, lemurian overloards or something. and then there's "teqkilla". i can totally see why this would be the last straw for a lot of otherwise indulgent ilxors. it's insanely, pitilessly aggravating. but again, i at least half like it. i at least respect the gesture... the jittery junkshop swing is appealing, and i like the palette of leaky robot noises. with the exception, maybe, of that weaponized "WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" thing that knifes out through the chorus. and shit, it's at least two minutes too long, after which lovealot's brief and subdued political ramblings feel like a wound-out afterthought.

but maybe it's best to view all five of these opening tracks as an intro of sorts, or an EP that happens to precede the album proper (which is more-or-less what dorianlynskey just said - i steal all my good ideas). after an initial fusillade of brickbats, /\/\/\Y/\ settles into a brief string of catchy, hazy tracks that go down much easier than what came before. "story to be told" jams along in fine, smoked-out xtrmntr style, "it takes a muscle" is lovely cod reggae pop, and "it iz what it iz" reminds me, obliquely, of PJ harvey's stories from the city stories from the sea, and/or the more subdued yeah yeah yeahs tracks from their last couple albums. maybe maya's not operating at "paper planes" level here, but once it's blown the iron filings out of its nose, this turns out to be a surprisingly appealing album.

and back to "born free". starting to seriously respect the pacing and structure of this album. this track was just kinda WTF cool as a single, but here it makes perfect sense, clearing the air and focusing the raw noise of the album's forward end into a sleek, pulverizing beast that doesn't sound gratuitously noisy in the slightest. following which "meds & feds" revels gloriously in the purely gratuitous, reanimates the zombie pixies, gives a damn (alegedly), makes of the central riff something wonderful that sounds nothing like sleigh bells.

i'll quit, but dammit, this is a fascinating and well-constructed landscape of a album (a trip, as the hill people used to say). i haven't spent any real time with it, so as excitingly complex as it seems in the moment, it may ultimately reveal less than it seems to promise. i dunno. and as pop/dance music it's clearly offering kala and arular a shred of competing, but taken on its own merits as a stand-alone offering, it's both interesting and immediately appealing. you know, on the first/second pass...

P.S. the three "bonus tracks" are much, much better than the tracks that close the official album. surprised that "tell me why", "space" and "internet connection" didn't get cut, saved for b-sides, whatever.

umm

...as pop/dance music it's clearly not offering kala and arular a shred of competition...

okay, retract the passing diss of "space". "space" is great. but damn, those last 3 "bonus tracks" smoke - esp, as cgau notes, illygirl. would love to hear the album arranged around this track.

Xgau, once again a sucker for facile and inchoate politics. Why he does't dismiss M.I.A.'s "art rock" move is a mystery, as there have been plenty of artists less full of shit than her who don't get a pass. Surprisingly patronizing piece by him, too, seeing as it considers her critics "idiots" who bristle at an artist that "dares suggest listeners introduce their overtaxed brain cells to world issues." I mean, fuck you?

Speaking of fuck you, that Letterman performance is great, though.

hahaha that Letterman performance! awesome

yeah man, that performance was amazing. Martin Rev in the house! Who was playing drums?

pretty good performance of a still essentially boring song, though i don't get what was so wtf about it unless letterman's never had any rock group use distortion on his show before (and smh @ the indie feedback at the end, why are people still doing this). not as fun as nicki'n'thicki's letterman performance.

i liked the lookalikes tho!

oh and i didn't read the xgau review past him calling her detractors idiots, josh's summation of it indicates this was a good idea. how ignorant does one have to be if you're being introduced to "world issues" (which is a nonsensical phrase anyway) by maya arulpragasam. what world issues does she introduce people to. GOD.

sounds like martin rev should have produced her shit instead of rusko or whoever. that was pretty tyt

um Lex, you are acting like the majority of the world isn't vacuous and self-involved

"Happy Halloween!"

surfboard otm

yeah man, that performance was amazing. Martin Rev in the house! Who was playing drums?

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, July 14, 2010 8:52 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

looks like it could have been Butchy Fuego of Chicago band Pit Er Pat, I know he's played drums for her recently.

Love the performance, love the socks.

Also: I'm pretty sure it's not the first time Xgau's written something like "Stick with it – these ugly sounds cohere into something meaningful eventually," which is a window through which impatient, "overtaxed" listeners can escape if they don't want to bother waiting for sounds to cohere.

gotta say, I think these guys did it better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wQXdS_D6PA

less Xgau plz, more Martin Rev's Betty White-style rejuvenated career!

what world issues does she introduce people to. GOD.

Well Sri Lankan politics for one. As Xgau points out at the end of the piece that you couldn't be bothered to finish.

she introduces people to sri lankan politics in the same way that [something really retarded] introduces [something complicated] to [people who get their news via buzz mp3s]

i guess m.i.a. would serve as an introduction to sri lankan politics for people who, idk, had never heard of sri lanka before? it's not as if there's anything substantive about it in her music - or even specific, given how readily she conflates it with palestine/africa/ginger kids with her primary school level "freedom fightah!!!111" slogans.

MIA introduces Sri Lankan politics about as extensively as I do when I say "Sri Lankan politics." Remember when calling rap "the CNN of black America" or whatever was considered a complement? Well, MIA is like CNN c. 2010, which I'm sure covers Sri Lankan politics in as much depth as she does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFY2kJ96jNY

I now know all there is to know about Nat Turner.

Some deliberate obtuseness going on here. She's a pop musician - she can raise an issue or introduce a topic but no, she's probably not going to be the last word on it. The fact that she is sometimes daft or reductive seems to have mutated into the idea that she has never sound anything of any value or worth about anything, which is bullshit. When Arular came out, she spoke plenty about the suffering of normal Tamils caught in the crossfire, which, unlike the southeast Asian politics brains trust gathered on this thread, was not something I was following closely at the time.

I feel like all the allowances that have been made for politically minded musicians in the past have been revoked in MIA's case. Y'know, Public Enemy didn't tell the full story about Louis Farrakhan, the Minutemen hyperbolically described Reagan's Central American policy as "genocide", etc, etc, but they still gave listeners an incentive to go and find out about this stuff. Yet MIA is somehow expected to present a fucking symposium on Sri Lankan politics. It's absurd.

"never sound anything" "never said anything"

southeast Asian south Asian

Too much annoyed typing.

letterman performance was amazing. made the song 100 times better than it is on cd. not heard the album yet but i imagine its not nearly as bad as people prone to hivemind-infected hyperbole like lex are making out. p4k review was obv just a gleeful attempt at an old fashioned crit-assasination, no matter what the writer claims about being reluctantly forced to admit to there being a terrible record infecting his eardrums.

How do you know it's not as nearly bad as "people" think when you haven't heard it yet?

The common thread here is that people find her persona annoying, ergo everything she does is wrong.

It's kind if funny to me that the most infamously all-or-nothing people on this board are blasting M.I.A. for being too simplistic.

*shhhh*hey, don't tell anyone...[checks to see if g00gle are listening]...but i've heard that unlike those other rabble-rousers...[whew, close one!]... Maya doesn't have a penis [shock! horror!]. egads!*shhhh*

xps

I think at some point it became incredibly unfashionable to give political musicians a free pass because they were political and vaguely on the left side of the spectrum. I'm thinking this was around the time Primal Scream started playing Bomb The Pentagon.

They shouldn't get a free pass, obviously, but it seems that now they get no leeway whatsoever. It drives me nuts. Ice Cube got less shit for Black Korea than MIA's received for a handful of sophomoric simplifications.

penis.

kind of cringe when PE big up farrakhan but let it pass because they're amazing. MIA has made some ok tracks but nothing in the same league as 'bring the noise'. the xgau thing about how he didn't know the first thing about sri lanka before MIA says more about the bubble he lives in.