More MIA

i never heard anyone say they don't like method man becasue he did PLO style it's true...

isn't the bottom line that she just makes you cringe? 'london boys they speak the slang, diddy diddy doo, shil lingy lingy lang' just like that first streets albun
'i got the train to mile end form bounders green and smoke some green, on the scene, know what i mean, seen'
its like the girl at fabirc mms was describing doing aerobic 'street' dancing to roll deep in that protective bubble a complete lack of self-awareness draws around you.

Clubberlang said:

No, he's written about 50,000 words on why he basically resents her "fans" (one of the great strawmen ever.) He's spent a couple of sentences on what he resents about her (although, of course, even that veers dangerously close to simply being an indictment of her "friends"--who oh irony of ironies are obv at least casual acquaintences with folks Matt knows--nice cover up that fact though.)

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resenting people's fans is a totally valid reason to absolutely fucking detest a band/artist.
the more i hear about MIA the more i loathe her, and i will come up with a proper explanation of my feelings soon - maybe on this thread - because although matt and simon have ticked most of the boxes there a few things i'd like to add.
fans and their reasons for liking a band/artist are almost entirely responsible for the cultural momentum of said band/artist and inform/bring much to a vast amount of their resonance...
truth be told, i might actually not object to MIA on a purely sonic basis, but i hate the reasons behind why i'm "supposed" to like her and the less said about her frankly tacky exploitation of certain issues the better.
in short, my dislike of her is entirely loaded. but i'm not the sort of fool who beliveves music can be criticised in a vacuum or listened to purely "coz it sounds dope, man"

luka said:

isn't the bottom line that she just makes you cringe?

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Not really. That "Langalangalang" tune on the Kid K mix is fantastic dirty pop.

luka said:

that protective bubble a complete lack of self-awareness draws around you.

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As opposed to that paranoid bubble of self-protection that being judgemental of others (and therefore of yourself) draws around you...

Out of interest, do people also get irritated by things like "Hey Mickey", or The Bangles, or Gwen Stefani? Cos I don't. She seems a bit like them.

And it seems to me that decrying her for a lack of "authenticity" is a road to nowhere...

Ummm, I hate to say this, but... it's only a record.

steve-k said:

I'm with Jess on this. Maya never said she was grime or dancehall, did she? Who are Woebot or Reynolds to say what genres an artist can use. The nitpicking of her album title and her lyrics seem like something Reynolds would never do to his dear Cabaret Voltaire, and others wouldn't do to dancehall.

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don't leave me out of this. she hasn't said she's grime or dancehall or brazilian baile funk or crunk or whatever and nor has dj rupture. there's a crucial difference between these two artists, though. one feels right, sincere, like there's some love in it and that connections are being made, relationships highlighted and music used to tell a meaningful story. the other feels like an opportunistic grab-bag of ghetto slumming by someone i wouldn't believe in if she came up and kicked me in the balls.

dubplatestyle said:

haha i think there are only five tracks on it that weren't also on the greensleeves comps for the last five years! i am no stelfox!

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hhhhmmm, has anyone ever seen us in the same place at the same time?

meme, she's shit and you are famous for revelling in your appaling ttaste in music!

shil-ingy-ingy-ing shlaangy-langy-lang

'oh, don't critisise it, i'ts great pop music, that means it's allowed to be a load of shit'

longy-langy-loo'

she conjures up the white magic of the aeons and archons with her fantastic dirty pop and strikes a blow for everyone with no self-awareness (and the tamil tigers) with her cathcy nonsense rhymes

shongy-shangy loo

'Those who champion her new efforts haven't been turned off to grime/dancehall/etc. - they have not been exposed to it.'

This is so patronising! It's just like the constant claim that you can't like e.g. Bloc Party if you've heard Gang of Four. In both cases, I've heard both, and I like both. I think M.I.A. is worth listening to because 1. her production is so varied and more importantly 2. her voice and delivery are fantastic. 'Boys say "Wha' gwan?"' etc. may not be very 'real' but nor is e.g. the whole Cockney rhyming slang/nursery rhyme strand in grime lyrics and everyone seems to love that. And comparing her to Gwen Stefani or whatever is unfair - pop music like that is made to be instantly accessible and easy to listen to *for everyone*, and while M.I.A. may be pretty easy listening compared to a lot of what Dissensus people listen to, compared to the rest of MTV etc. she's really strange stuff.

the problem is the "angle"... if you put out an album these days and hire someone to "do" press for you, they basically beg you to give them some kind of story to peddle. the smallest things that might make you sound more exotic and interesting (and therefore get a jaded journo's juices flowing) suddenly become your main selling point.

I heard sunshowers on the radio a while ago and enjoyed it (the first time I'd heard MIA)... "I salt and pepper my mango / shoot spear out the window"... then I did a bit of research and discovered her "angle" and I just chuckled.

it doesn't make me angry or irritated that the story doesn't quite add up, because I don't expect it to. pop music is so often about myths and exaggerations. seen any r kelly videos recently? does this add up?.

it's all about how much you're prepared to forgive, or at least take with a pinch of salt. I hear destiny's child sing about soldiers and I see it as no different to MIA singing about being a soldier.

gwen stefani is much better than mia for the sole reason that eve looks absolutely spectacular in her latest video (and i actually quite like louchie lou and michie one's rich girl, too).

also, why is mia saying "whah gwaaan" and "galang" and shit. if i did that - even as a longtime lover, supporter and obsessional devotee of dancehall and jerk-spiced meat dishes - i'd fully expect to be either laughed at or punched in the face. she is a sri lankan-born art-school girl from shepherds bush, with very posh friends. gwaaan in-fucking-deed.

pop music is so often about myths and exaggerations

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This is the absolutel core of the issues, but the question is which myths seem consistent and forceful, and which do not. I guess myths have their own genres come to think of it. Personally haven't made up my mind on MIA- I heard one track which I thought was fantastic, though the "militancy" of it is quite risible.

{shrugs}What I've heard is alright. I'll d/l some more stuff and see if it falls over. I'm not "allowing pop to be shit" -- it's just... alright.

also, why is mia saying "whah gwaaan" and "galang" and shit?

To wind up nerdy white boy music purists, obviously! And quite right too .

Big up Stelfox for like Gwen Stefani. Though. That Rich Girl tune is good, cracking little beat.

Nice to be renowned for bad taste though -- must tell the wife!

So, anyone else going to see the AByssinians tonight? Might do a thread for it...

Personally I'm just glad that as of Reynolds' comment on Byron Bitchlaces' blog, and the first post in this thread, the real issue at the heart of a lot of the negative reaction to M.I.A. has been explicitly stated. Basically, the idea here is that if you want to write books or blogs as a response to your love of a certain kind of music, your "street" credentials are unimportant - you can be an Oxford grad or whatever. Quite right too. But the second half of the equation is that if someone dares to express their love of a certain kind of music, their "street" credentials must be subject to detailed scrutiny, even or rather ESPECIALLY scrutiny BY the Oxford graduadtes who write about music rather than making it. Nevermind that the issue of how first-hand or second-hand M.I.A.'s music is is up for debate, what matters of the emotional ferocity she inspires in those writers who have not yet come to terms with the issues inherent in their own class and their relationship to certain kinds of music and culture. This seems to lead to some kind of breakdown in rationality of otherwise intelligent music writers, reducing them to 'arguments' such as the repeated shouting of "St Martins! Elastica!" (most people know by now, so the shouting can probably stop); accusing Maya of "lacking local character" (where's she REALLY from, eh? we don't know = she can't be trusted!); saying "don't be taken in by that clever hipster marketing gambit of having brown skin!"; singing her lyrics back in a stupid voice (hey, don't get me wrong, that's always an entertaining tactic at least); or ultimately just falling back on subjectivity-stated-as-fact: "you can HEAR that it's not REAL!"

lingy lingy loo

An interesting thread, but one which leaves me with the feeling that this could be summarised brutaly.

"MIA is to those that are passionate about dancehall as Lady Sovereign is to those who are passionate about grime"

Fair?

Flyboy said:

"you can HEAR that it's not REAL!"

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mate, you're really kidding yourself with this pose that authenticity doesn't matter - and this is central to the point that i hinted at earlier. the vast majority of people on your side of the argument are almost without exception trumpeting this stance but i can't help but get the feeling that this is a pretty clear case of lack of self-awareness.
authenticity *does* appear to matter to you and is absolutely, unequivocally at the core of why MIA is so popular. every story has hailed her work as post-modern, boundary-breaking music without borders, her as the epitome of otherness, her refugee status rendering her permanently out of context and thus able to pluck her cultural life from wherever she sees fit, without constraint.
key to this is "her refugee status". this is the backstory you're all really digging and, i'm sorry, but that's a kind of realness - a titillatingly exotic, brutally *real* tale of hard-knock migration.
this is totally fine if you're honest about it, but it's not really tenable to take the "fake music is better than real music (copyright chuck eddy)" line and then sneer at people who want music to document lived experience, to have roots and a scene behind it, a massive who it matters to, to belong somewhere (however, this is actually a lot more about music being believable, having heart, soul and blood, than its having or not having a *place*), because you're craving authenticity, too, albeit of a slightly different and more nuanced kind.
although i disagree with xgau, at least the recognition of this was implicit in his piece.

3underscore said:

An interesting thread, but one which leaves me with the feeling that this could be summarised brutaly.

"MIA is to those that are passionate about dancehall as Lady Sovereign is to those who are passionate about grime"

Fair?

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no because the sovereign thing pretty much laid it down that grime could only come from one extraordinarily specific set of circumstances.
also MIA is not dancehall. there's as much hip hop, grime, baile funk, blah blah blah in her music as ther is dancehall. there's just not a case to categorise her as dancehall, whereas there is one to judge sov agains grime artists.
(also i'm a very big dancehall fan and one of my favourite tracks of the past 12 months is by a german and one of my fave rhythms is by a crew of japanese chaps)

boiling blood etc

>Who are Woebot or Reynolds to say what genres an artist can use.

what a silly comment! who is anyone to say anything about anyone? the corollary of an artist being free to do whatever they like is that a pundit -- professional, amateur, anybody at all--is equally free to explore their feelings of being unconvinced, unimpressed, ambivalent, only partially-swayed, cringing, whatever

>blood boils

for me the primary and initial level of response is always one of feeling. so i would twist what Matt said around and say the problem is that the MIA records don't make my blood boil. listening to 'destruction vip' makes my blood boil -- with excitement. it makes me wanna do crazy stuff, throw embarassing shapes in my living room, smash it up a la Damned.

so the interest then becomes to analyse that lack of a visceral response where a response ought to be, and where it appears to be for other people.

the second and third and fourth levels get more meta, dealing with hype, audience response, and critical reception (i totally concur with stelfox's point re fans being a legitimate subject of discussion, aren't the popists after all ALWAYS saying it's the moment of consumption that defines the pop artifact, not the producer/auteur's intention?).

Now hype is not something to reject per se. after all i'm in the business of hype in a sense, and all artists are also hustlers to some extent. and think how there's a big big grime tune at the moment called Hype! Hype! on one level hype is just creating a buzz, transmitting excitement. nonetheless i am amazed at how quickly MIA has become a kind of sacred cow artist. As a journalist I've seen this happen before, it's particularly the case in America seemingly. a critical machinery gets set in motion whereby the artist is enshrined as a Major Talent who both transcends the genre they represent and is taken as an emblem or stand-in for that entire genre. (Funny this, i remember me and Sasha Frere Jones together arguing with a bunch of other rock critics against that very same process happening to Goldie vis a vis jungle). Moby is a good example re techno. MIA is on her way, in the US, to being the poster child for a whole bunch of genres (that grime meme will stick, i can guarantee it). More broadly, the process is in motion for MIA to be one of those critical touchstone -- a la Bjork, Beck, PJ Harvey--especially as she has the talent/charisma to possibly sell a lot of records (which critics here love because they are usually populists, in the sense of looking for someone to redeem popular music.) So if you question that process early on, it's like you're a spoil sport or something.

>antipop

i thought this one of matt's most acute points. how it's almost taboo these days to take an anti-Pop position. notice how rhetorically, "pop" is often used as an argument ender. As in "But it's pop!". so that makes it okay, then. Weird, this utopian investment in the word 'pop', when you consider the lamenesses perpretrated in its name through the ages (i almost wrote "cultural crimes"). You couldn't do the same with "rock". "But it's rock!". No, wouldn't work.

i tried to pinpoint this is in the originally piece by identifying the opposite of a pop approach --ie one that took into consideration content/context/intent. That is rockism (you could also consider "form" as the fourth cornerstone, the idea of musical progression as an important element of rockism, but more popists believe in that one too and claim it for pop). "Pop" might be the giddy dizzy relief felt when that particular bubble of framework bursts. The euphoric lightness of being when all that's solid melts into air. "Pop" also has a democratic charge, because it's available to everyone. How the mass media as they are currently constituted, owned and operated, etc, get conceived as "democratic" is a mystifying to me, as is the rhetorical swerve by which the undergrounds (which involve genuine self-organizing activity etc) get conceived as elitist (for not wanting to "go pop") and their celebrants as "snobs"

Yeah, but, Si -- I think that langalangalang tune is a GOOD pop tune. If it was a BAD pop tune, I wouldn't bother defending her. Saying something is "pop" isn't saying anything at all, and isn't a catch-all defence in the manner you describe.

Saying something is "good pop" is saying something, I think... and may well be a catch-all defence, and probably rightly so, for the same reason that Dollar's Land of Make Believe is at least defensible (hey, I still like it), as is Iron Maiden's Run for the Hills, or Curiosity Killed the Cat's Down to Earth -- but rubbish pop isn't.


Stelfox -- interesting to hear that there is a level of "realness" that we're supposed to dig.

But...

... I never heard before that she's supposed to be a refugee. I don't know nothin' about her.

I just like that langalangalang tune, especially when it turns into the Super Mario Brothers theme tune -- well it does on the mix where I've heard it (ah, the genius of Kid K!).

You're going to tell me know I'm thinking of the wrong artist, aren't you ? Wouldn't be the first time.

"Walk like an Eqyptian... boom-tiddy-boom-ting-boom-tiddy-boom"...

flyboy in the ointment

a couple of people have jumped on this "glaring contradiction" -- but there is a massive difference between celebrating/promoting a music (as blogger, journalist, compiler, label A&R, promoter, etc etc) and actually making music that competes with that music.


>those writers who have not yet come to terms with the issues inherent in their own class and their >relationship to certain kinds of music and culture.

why would i "come to terms" with these issues, and what would that entail exactly? the contradictions are irresolvable, aren't they? they are lived out every day, and thought about constantly, i'm sure, by anybody here who loves a music made by social or racial groups that are remote from where they're at. i think there is actually an acute awareness of the problematics of these transactions.

what's interesting to me is precisely the opposite though --not the remoteness, but the sensation of proximity, of connection, identification even -- despite the experential gulf -- how is this taking place? what is it worth?