More MIA

'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!

I was unclear. I meant to indict those MIA supporters who seem to irritate Diss. posters.

Does this require full disclosure? I totally bumped the Piracy mix for a few weeks. Lead me to the Favela.. comp. and I still think that 'Galang' is killer.

this is entertainning..

i still have to hear more than 1 song from her...

so i'll keep reading

it's pure art school surface, she seems like a project, and sounds like one, designed for discussion like this.

the backstory is great, let's get camp, the tamils are the chic'est of terrorists, good uniforms,with a female group called the freedom birds who carry 2 slugs of cyanide in case they are caught, marxist, too far away and local for any real comment. Just effortlessly cool and edgy, with no need to commit to te fact that over the last 20 years they have totally destroyed sri lanka thru civil war.

she can't help that, but imagine the find for a would be svengali, and she looks great, tall and young, with an art school post electroclash look.

the music is so effortlessly cool it hasn't got much energy to these ears, its empty, signifiers and nothing else, the thing people can buy because the origins of the music she grabs are a bit too difficult to get into.
Same with the lyrics, just nothing going on. compared to someone like elephant man, she sounds like purple six form prose.

it's a good job she is being brought up in arguments and attacking the audience is a way to get at the real problem, the problem with the way people listen to music, make decisions about how much they need to invest in uk culture ,she requires less effort, its all vaguely done for you in one package. the only 'edgy' record you need to buy this year.

personally i can take or leave her, i have a roughly equal cringe/jump about reaction to 'piracy funds terrorism'
BUT a few things are irking me here

the points upthread about why this is neccessarily worse than the white rasta posing of the slits or scritti, or the baader-meinhof posturing of the cabs or ACR making deadpan funk records (ad infinitum) have been left totally unanswered. why is one appropriation and one not? i remember thinking similar a while ago when kid 606 or someone was described as relying on 'borrowed intensities' on blissblog- yeah, but weren't the pop group?

isn't it a good thing people are actually ENGAGING with grime/dancehall/brazil funk/whatever rather than sticking in the endless revival cycle of indie rock? and isnt part of the reason why wasteland or rupture get less flak for this precisely because their sounds are so un-pop?

owen said:

the points upthread about why this is neccessarily worse than the white rasta posing of the slits or scritti, or the baader-meinhof posturing of the cabs or ACR making deadpan funk records (ad infinitum) have been left totally unanswered. why is one appropriation and one not?

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because one is white and the other is not.

white-rasta

it's a good question -- the question underlying it perhaps being where does being influenced end and appropriation begin

and well you know i did actually compare MIA to Ari Up in the original voice piece

at the time there were those who thought her faux-patois very grating and borderline offensive, like minstrelry

not me, i think the Slits are great, Cut in my top 10 of all time, fantastically original sound'n'vision,

i think one difference is to do with 20 or 30 years time difference and technology

when groups try to imitate black music using played instruments, there is a space between ambition and execution in which getting it wrong occurs and an inadvertant mutational process occurs -- of course there can also be consciouslly applied mutation and warping too -- but even in the group is trying to imitate faithfully, they get it wrong and create something new -- esp with postpunk where the groups generally didn't have the technique

whereas with kid 606 types sampling etc means you can have EXACTLY the sound you aspire to, mentasmic noises, etc those kind of mashed up breaks, etc -- it's much more like a collage of sonic signifiers, "rave" + "bashment" + "gabba" -- what i meant by borrowed intensities was more related to the pathos of creating a frisson by rubbing all these cool past sounds together, but not being able to create your own mentasm, your own amen, etc etc

the transition from played-instrument hybridity to sampler-based composites is like the shift from fusion (which is still a modernist ethos) to pastiche/citation etc (pomo)

with your specific examples, apart from the subliminal skank in some songs and the drummer's white dreads i can't see why Scritti are called white rastas, they were as influenced by English folk music actually as by reggae

Pop Group had jazz, funk, dub inputs AND a whole raft of content coming from a totally other place than any of their black music sources

(whereas with MIA the content/delivery as well as the sonics is in large part a composite -- "rudeness"/Missy/etc)

there's no black singer that sound like mark stewart is there? although he admired last poets

ACR are a good example of funk (high technique black drummer) meets OTHER STUFF (non-disco-friendly content, but also what the lead guitarist is doing is total texture-synthoid smeariness that is like nothing in funk) also meets incompetence (they became totally boring when they could actually pull off technically what they aspired to)

finally -- Cabs, did they really have a big terrorism chic going on? my mind's blanking but i think there's like one baadher meinhof referencing song, there's also songs that sample born again evangelists etc etc, it's all part of their non-judgemental, here's the mediascape approach

maybe the difference between ari up is ari up was utter indulgence, confused, joyful, out of her depth, exploring,
whilst

mia is cool, clean, indulged signified, detached, coldly modelesque.
(that makes her sound like grace jones but grace was onto something else, no blank generation)

the first things are what i like about the post punk era, exploration at any cost (of the self and the surronding environment, political and social), confusion, honesty, fumbling, god honest beauty and not an ounce of cynicism.

blissblogger said:

... and actually making music that competes with that music...

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'competes'? in the sense that there is a buying public who are making choice between expending their scarce resources on baile funk and grime records who are now going to purchase mia records instead? i find it hard to imagine such a listener - they are effectively part of different markets.

of the insanely small proportion of music buying public who are aware of baile and grime, the smaller proportion who choose to purchase are most likely to be buying either Boy In Da Corner or diplo/hollertronix's mix cds.

i have less of a problem with mia's appropriation than i do with, for instance, radiohead's appropriation of autechre etc - because anyone listening to mia understands that she didn't create this music out nowhere by herself, it is part of her aesthetic that she is introducing them to a musical subculture - whereas the radiohead-autechre theft on kid a was considered by all and sundry (who weren't previously familiar with the style) to be a completely new development of pure experimental musical genius.

puretokyo said:

i have less of a problem with mia's appropriation than i do with, for instance, radiohead's appropriation of autechre etc - because anyone listening to mia understands that she didn't create this music out nowhere by herself, it is part of her aesthetic that she is introducing them to a musical subculture - whereas the radiohead-autechre theft on kid a was considered by all and sundry (who weren't previously familiar with the style) to be a completely new development of pure experimental musical genius.

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While I have met Radiohead fans who think exactly that, in interviews 'round the time Thom Yorke said very explicitly that he'd bought up the entire Warp back catalogue and couldn't get enough of Autechre. (Certainly the only time you'd see Warp artists mentioned in the pages of Q!)

Likewise, at gigs leading up to and following 'Kid A' they used lots of Autechre, Skam tracks etc. as the warm-up music.

So it may not be part of the aesthetic of the music that they were introducing people to a musical subculture, but the band members themselves didn't seem to be offering any kind of pretense about where the shift in direction came from.

Give or take the album, love the debate

I have to say, I'm loving the whole debate around this record - it's like one of those thorny little problems in science that reveals whole worlds of information when its solved.

To me the record is nice, but not stunning, but still a long way off being execrable. And I know exactly what Woebot and Blissblogger and Luka mean in terms of how you can look at it as "wrong" and "cringeworthy". And I thoroughly concur that while it has a lot of appeal and excitement in today's context, it is unlikely to still sound fresh in 5 or 10 years time.

MIA is appropriating and harnessing street music to her own agenda. She does "get it wrong" on many parts of the album, and a lot of it does seem 'fake'. And the whole package can add up to seem very aesthetically unappealling, particularly if you're someone who has immersed themselves in underground music for a long time, and who likes discrete scenes, as applies to nearly everyone on this board.

But why does it seem so wrong to us? Why do US rappers get a free pass to be "studio gangstas" and still be acceptable? Why can Brazilians appropriate, and get hilariously wrong, the hip hop sound and have us all raving about it? Why is it okay for Riko and Flo Dan to rap in patois when they don't speak that way, but not for MIA? Why is Public Enemy's clunky and dangerous political posturing better than MIA's?

Ultimately why is it that the only people we don't want to see do these things are those who are tainted with the dread middle-class tag or the worse art-school one?

I mean granted, art-school students are fucking annoying, but a decent proportion of them do go on to create things of value, certainly a higher percentage than, say, actuaries.

Underground scenes are great, and music that comes out of them does have these 'higher frequencies' that still resonate years after the event and that you can still hear in acid house records today, almost 20 years after the fact, and after its descendents took over the musical world. But things never stay underground, and if something is good, people will notice it and exploit it, that's the way of the world. Hip hop, dancehall and "shanty house" are long overdue general middle-class acceptance, and MIA is simply the frontrunner. It's no different to what happened with rock and electronic music. We've just got to accept it.

Personally I reckon it's exciting, because something like this signals a sea change, there are going to be all sorts of new eddies and wrinkles springing up in music as a result, and that's usually a good thing. Sure, MIA might have all sorts of dreadful, worthy descendents in the years to come, but we'll also probably see new iterations on all the things she's ripping off as a result of this.

And, yeah, galang is still pretty catchy.

michael said:

So it may not be part of the aesthetic of the music that they were introducing people to a musical subculture, but the band members themselves didn't seem to be offering any kind of pretense about where the shift in direction came from.

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Yeah, fair point. I guess I can't get past all the people at uni who used to loooove radiohead and thought Kid A was like some incredible genius space music beamed in from a higher intelligence (Thom) who could see years ahead of us. Argh. The musics actually okay, its those fans that kill me.

You know they asked Autechre to tour with them on Kid A? Autechre told 'em to get fucked.

if my existence weren't so cocooned (or if i owned a television), i'd probably be much more aware of how m.i.a. is promoted

but i simply heard "galang" out one night and thought it wonderfully catchy -- though beginning to suspect that i must have heard the re-mix alluded to by 2stepfan above, as i didn't rate the record nearly so high upon purchasing it

still haven't heard "arular," but will likely buy it at some point

that said, i'm able to *imagine* the way that m.i.a. & diplo are trying to market themselves based upon reading what SR has to say -- and i tend to agree w/ SR

now this may seem like a foolish way to assess the significance of something, but I do it all the time when reading movie reviews or, indeed, another person's account of a book or philosopher i haven't read

it's what critics are for, and why people read critics -- you develop a way of reading other people's criticisms of what you've yet to encounter, such that you can determine, based upon the criticism, whether the music is worth investigating or the movie worth seeing or the philosopher worth reading -- of course none of this is fool-proof, and there are always exceptions

so my position is that i love the record "galang" but am suspicious of the total phenomenon that is m.i.a.

dominic said:

that said, i'm able to *imagine* the way that m.i.a. & diplo are trying to market themselves based upon reading what SR has to say -- and i tend to agree w/ SR

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I think a lot of people seem to be imagining that diplo is far more involved with the M.I.A. album than he actually is. or am I misunderstanding?

i think so, but they do have quite a record of working together and they are shagging.