MIA

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.

the united states?

Uh, what's wrong with admitting you don't know something, then taking the time to find out?

You have tried to insert a duplicate message.

Return to Front Page

BAH!

I don't know dick about Suriname or Chad. Guess it says something about the bubble I live in.

hmm, perhaps if you're going to get into what you don't know about sri lanka, it's best not to start the paragraph:

The notion that M.I.A. isn't politically meaningful because her motives are mixed and her ideas are screwed up is clueless about how pop music works -namely, all kinds of screwy ways.

oh noooo, clueless about how pop music works, what a personal disaster.

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

i said i IMAGINE, columbo.

"Uh, what's wrong with admitting you don't know something, then taking the time to find out?"

nothing. but it can make for boring, all too rational art.

I admit seeing MIA live in Brussels shortly after the London 2005 bombing took the bloom off the rose, though it was more contextual than anything else. It wasn't that she was going off on the event with bizarre conspiracy theories or the like but I found a lot of her presentation a little hard to take -- especially given that someone many of us knew was one of the victims -- and I haven't been able to enjoy her much since. But this is personal and I recognize that, and I can appreciate much of what's happened with her over the past few years, if at a remove.

The argument's inconsistent, history mayne - you can't argue that MIA hasn't introduced people to Sri Lankan politics (maybe more lex's argument than yours) and then say, oh well, anyone who doesn't know about the subject already lives in a bubble so fuck them.

I think if this album came out in the winter it would've made alot more sense to people.

I think if this album came out in the winter it would've made alot more sense to people.

maybe, but i also think that it suffers for its attachment to maya's pet issues. by this point, people are waaaaay too attached to their own ideas about her ideas, and this not only makes the record into a sort of rorschach blot, it assigns the music itself a subordinate role. that xgau piece, for instance, devotes relatively little attention to /\/\/\Y/\'s specific sounds, structures, effects and influences. it's primarily addressed to what other people supposedly think about maya, and how she's supposedly positioning herself.

yeah--I'm not sure anyone outside of the critical community really cares about her politics. They just want some good beats. Most of my friends think the album is as good or better than her previous stuff.

if she'd gone lighter on the rhetorical grandstanding, the album's musical provocations might have been granted some leeway. the whole thing is so aggressively and intentionally challopsy, both intellectually and artistically, that a backlash reaction seems inevitable.

Great rhetorical stance there ^ xpost

Most of my friends think the album is as good or better than her previous stuff.

not yet sure what i think on that level. i like it, but i don't love it. probably put it somewhere between kala and arular.

it's a good record to mess with, sequencing-wise. can be made to work a bunch of different ways.

now that my expectations have been dashed i went back and listened again, and i kind of felt bad for the album, in the sense of "aw, it's not the worst thing in the world." there are things to enjoy but i'd still put it way behind arular and kala (or at least the half of kala that's amazing).

think that's the sense in which i've been approaching it, not so much due to collective hate, but cuz i've always been particularly fond of ambitious albums that don't quite work. they're puzzles of a sort, and they offer more room for play than those that seem perfect as is.

It's my favorite of her albums to date, but that's setting the bar really, really low. I have deliberately ignored the lyrics (and will continue to do so), because I think she's an idiot, and paying attention to what she said would probably have spoiled my enjoyment of the parts I wound up liking.

feels like an album out of time. not sure that it's a winter record, as a. bruneau suggested, but it would have played better during the adrian sherwood era (in my mind, between the pop group at one end and late primal scream at the other).

did someone mention big stick a while back?

current tracklist, 43 min, pretty solid imo:

steppin up
xxxo
believer
illygirl
born free
it takes a muscle
it iz what it iz
story to be told
tekquilla
meds & feds
space
all caps

(RATM retro...)

listening for the first time now. not nearly as bad as some are making out. 4.4 out of 10? what the fuck? that reviewers acting like shes gone from pull up the people to the cheeky girls. it does have a much more serious/belligerent tone to it, her vocals especially, and its a hell of a lot harder, more metallic and all round industrial-aggressive than before, but theres still a lot of interesting ideas here, i dont mind too much that shes not being quite as playful as before (though songs like xxoo make up for that). obv that makes it harder to swallow some of her less accurate lyrics, but ive never really taken her that seriously on that front before anyway - shes always been like a slightly more politicised missy elliot as a lyricist. not sure if shes just angrier at the moment or if shes trying to do her 'serious' album.

People are really overstating the "stupidity" of MIA's lyrics - I hear worse every day. Sure, Lovalot is an incoherent mess (it makes more sense when you learn it's from the POV of a teenage suicide bomber but still) but there's an interesting thread of self-examination here: "I'm gonna say something even if you think it's nothing" (It Iz What It Iz), "I don't wanna live for tomorrow/I'll push my luck today" (Born Free), "All I ever wanted was my story to be told" (Story to Be Told), "I could be a genius, I could be a cheat/It's a fine line and I'm fucking with it" (Believer), "I just give a damn" (Meds and Feds). She's not claiming any great authority on geopolitics but fessing up to a certain gobby recklessness. And there are some nice, quotable couplets: "Yeah I hate it when people ask me hello girl whats up?/ I say age tax cost of living yeah boy aint that enough?" (Tell Me Why) and "I need to spend some time with you/There's nothing new on the news" (Space). You might not want to put any of these lyrics on a T-shirt but they're not as moronic as people seem to be saying.

ha I want to talk about inconsistency in lyrical analysis between M.I.A. and other artists but there's no way to do it without looking like I am specifically picking on Lex

Her failing to me is one of expectations. It's not that her lyrics are poor or incoherent, it just seems like she can do ... better. Back when PE name-dropped Louis F. or Minutemen talked about U.S. meddling in Central American, those subjects took more than a mere 5 second google search to explore. Hence: introduction. But given how easy it is to research Sri Lanken politics (for example), I wish MIA would use her position of purported knowledge and experience to give forceful direction to said google searches rather than be so vague and/or blithe.

or, in other words, she is the ambassador to all things Sri Lankan and ergo must be a reliable narrator for all of the curious white people