MIA's Honda Advert!

[3underscore]

I'd like to see mor up and coming artists selling out to advertising at every opportunity.

Freudian slip, Dave?!

 

[bun-u]

really? i thought Lady Sov got nuff love here, apart from a few heavy-duty grime purists. I for one think she's great.

This thread
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=815&highlight=Lady+Sovereign
is probably 50/50 for and against the S oh V, but the bloody-spitting debate almost reaches MIA proportions. It just seems a little strange how artisits like the Mitchell Brothers, Plan B and even Klashnerkoff can quietly waltz into the grime scene without getting the same crap levelled at them.

 

[droid]

I can quietly waltz into the grime scene without getting the same crap levelled at them.

Isnt that the differnce? Quietly waltzing in rather than bursting onto the scene in a blaze of Record company orchestrated PR and Marketese? Im not defending or attacking the criticism of MIA/SOV - but it seems to me that female artists tend to get more press and attention - and therefore promote more of a reaction (be it positive or negative)...

Its a double edged sword innit!

 

[joeschmo]

<i>Quietly waltzing in rather than bursting onto the scene in a blaze of Record company orchestrated PR and Marketese?</i>

I think you mean "making crap records that are easy to ignore rather than really catchy ones that people spontaneously get excited about the moment they hit the internet"

I loved Galang right off the bat, before I had a clue who MIA was. There was no PR blitz. Bloggers and music nerds just picked up on her immediately, rightly or wrongly.

 

[zhao]

I certainly don't get the degree of emotion about it all...

I think the hate atleast partially stems from understandable rage when an "outsider" is championed for "insider" music. like here are all these true grime and dancehall artists struggling and some art school BRAT just comes along and takes the awards.

 

[captain easychord]

dum de dum, this whole thread is turning a tad sisyphusian...

 

[zhao]

people see popular music, from rock and roll to jungle to MIA as being the inheritor of folk music, exactly the people who never had patrons and made music anyway.

The comparison to Damien Hurst is deeply flawed anyway.

you've got good points there WRT folk music... and I should have thought the Hurst argument through a little more...

but immediately the Absolut ads come to mind. what about that? I never heard ANY of all those artists making card-board cut-out caricatures of their work to sell Vodka reprimanded on grounds of "selling out".

 

[ripley]

A good rule of thumb is, if you have to explain to a crowd of people you mostly don't know why something you said isn't racist you've already lowered the discourse and created a nasty atmosphere.

and you should have thought more carefully.

and if you can't see why a gaggle of folks saying "mud hut people don't buy Hondas ho ho ho" sounds racist then you don't get out much.

Where as when MIA says she lived in a mud hut, it is 1) quite possibly true, and 2) not perpetuating a racist stereotype in any meaningful way - which actually seems to be some people's problem. Even if it's cynical, who does it hurt?

 

[zhao]

Ludacris doesnt go around throwing down the rhetoric of revolution and liberation the way MIA does

people on this board are supposed to be progressive thinkers... which is why I am very surprised that many still subscribe to this kind of "either / or" type dualism.

reality is a lot more complex than these simple cut and dry definitions, and so called "selling out" and so called "keeping it real" or a "revolutionary stance" are NOT necessarily mutually exclusive.

 

[zhao]

So it would be better if she would be as apolitical as most other musicians?
Surely that would be worse!
Also, why are most people so sure about her referencing Tamils etc "to get cred / attention"?
How do you know it's not a genuine feeling of hers?
The Honda commercial is by no means a proof that she doesn't care about Tamils or whatever.
Moreover does it matter?
Shouldn't she be judged on the basis of her actions, rather than guesswork about her thinking?
Isn't the better criterion for an evaluation of her media performance the ideological effects?
Like:
she doesn't promote hardline anticapitalism but she does try to raise awareness about exploitation of poor people?

Basically it's the old question whether it's better to be a capitalist pig who doesn't care for poor people but at least isn't a hypocrite or to be part of the capitalist system like almost everybody, criticise it and be accused of hypocrisy, selling out etc.

on the money.

too much emphasis is put on activists, in global anti-authoritarian movements, to keep with a strict code of conduct, which puts unnecessary and unrealistic pressures on the individual, while these details don't even matter in the bigger scheme of things.

rebellion must evolve just as authority evolves.

 

[zhao]

what rupture does in his dj sets is about as (in)authentic as mia and i love it to bits, because it doesn't make loud grandstanding claims for itself - it just does what it does and lets the music talk. there's a whole lot of love and respect in what jace does and an infectious enthusiasm that connects all kinds of geographical and stylistic dots. MIA's music and MIA as a personality is too calculated and too busy telling you that it's doing something special to really be believable and, as a result, is a lot less graceful.

oh don't tell me Jace's project is dogma free. I love him too but it sits comfortably in a Po-Mo multi-culti theoretical framework. and how is Rupture more "enthusiastic" than MIA? how do you mean "MIA as a personality is too calculated"?

 

[satanmcnugget]

which is why I am very surprised that many still subscribe to this kind of "either / or" type dualism.

i personally dont see what non-dualistic thinking has to do with progressivism...fascists (thinking about Nazi Germany here) meddled around with such esoteric theories/philosophies back in the day...many coeval practitioners of Vedantism are elitist and racist crypto-fascist...meaningless mush SOMETIMES...not always...but im digressing

too much emphasis is put on activists, in global anti-authoritarian movements, to keep with a strict code of conduct, which puts unnecessary and unrealistic pressures on the individual, while these details don't even matter in the bigger scheme of things.

im with you here...but only to an extent...at SOME point, you have to draw the line...somebody just trying to get by is often forced into contradictions...i myself am one...been an anti-corporate/anti-capitalist activist for many years...yet, i work for a large corporation to make my rent...not too much choice in the matter...so i bite the hand that feeds me at every opportunity

but, someone like MIA is making a decent living....im not about to rage at someone for having the audacity to make a decent living...all power to her...ill certainly buy her next album ( if i have the spare cash)...but, when youre already living high on the hog, and you go just that lil extra step further, that's just excessive greed, the same thing that revolutionaries and activists denounce corporate CEOs for...the contradiction is just a little too glaring to pass without comment...and that's all im doing, commenting...im still a fan of her music

but, i dont buy her whole revolutionary schtick, either....and i think others will also find it hard to take her very seriously on that front...she's just a lovely bubble-gum pop artist...but like Stelfox has been saying all along, that's prolly all she ever was...i can live with that cuz i like bubblegum pop, too..but some have invested her with a certain liberationist aura (which she has seized upon quite nicely, thank you very much), and now i think that bubble has burst, and rightly so

so, yeah, its hard to live by an unrealistic anti-authoritarian code of conduct, but you cant just go around unnecessarily sleeping with the multi-nationals and expect to be taken TOO seriously as a revolutionary or whatever

 

[stelfox]

A good rule of thumb is, if you have to explain to a crowd of people you mostly don't know why something you said isn't racist you've already lowered the discourse and created a nasty atmosphere.

and you should have thought more carefully.

and if you can't see why a gaggle of folks saying "mud hut people don't buy Hondas ho ho ho" sounds racist then you don't get out much.

Where as when MIA says she lived in a mud hut, it is 1) quite possibly true, and 2) not perpetuating a racist stereotype in any meaningful way - which actually seems to be some people's problem. Even if it's cynical, who does it hurt?

the most spot-on thing anyone has said out of any of the MIA threads here and exactly why i find the mud-hut-referencing stuff (whether she said it or not) really problematic and best left unsaid. i don't think there are many racists here, that's why i chose to give some context to what was being said. i'm surprised, though, that people would really want to go *there* in open debate, the risks and the implications being far too obvious, really, especially in light of the fact that there's been enough bad blood about this whole issue already.

 

[k-punk]

I think this is silly.... It isn't as if she casually mentions that she 'lived in a mud-hut' in passing, she does it calculatingly to gain credibility...the fact it is true doesn't matter... it becomes an exercise in cynical spincerity by the very fact she keeps banging on about it in interviews...

 

[k-punk]

<i>why not pour derision on those who really deserve it, such as Williams, or more pertinently Franz Ferdinand and the Futureheads?</i>

because they aren't treading on turf that certain people are heavily personally invested in, that's why...

I see what you mean, but surely ppl are invested in post-punk etc, which FF demean by their derivative retreads?

 

[joeschmo]

I love Do You Want To

Difference is, post-punk happened twenty years ago. The music MIA is supposedly despoiling is happening now.

 

[atomly]

A good rule of thumb is, if you have to explain to a crowd of people you mostly don't know why something you said isn't racist you've already lowered the discourse and created a nasty atmosphere.

and you should have thought more carefully.

and if you can't see why a gaggle of folks saying "mud hut people don't buy Hondas ho ho ho" sounds racist then you don't get out much.

Where as when MIA says she lived in a mud hut, it is 1) quite possibly true, and 2) not perpetuating a racist stereotype in any meaningful way - which actually seems to be some people's problem. Even if it's cynical, who does it hurt?

I dunno, in a way I agree with you, but I think this also smacks of being a tad too touchy-feely for me. So she can talk about this to big up herself, but nobody can respond to it and use it in a critique of her?

The mud hut thing was obviously an off-the-cuff joke that I, personally, thought was funny in a self-referential way. My initial thought was that it was not an attack on MIA so much as an in-joke to a previous thread, and I think that's still how I interpret it.

 

[DJL]

MIA selling her record to a motor vehicle company is typical of the complete loss of direction amongst most music currently imo. She claims to represent the mud-hutters but then does this? Doesn't make sense. There is no direction amongst the current crop of popular artists - just complete confusion.

The most significant and higly regarded musicians do not make music to feed themselves. For the musicians and artists outside the basic entertainment bracket it isn't about personal sufficiency - it is about evolution ultimately. MIA and everyone else on the idiot box thinks that the way forward is to amass large personal fortunes in order to affect change. No it isn't - it's about connecting with the masses. The masses should hopefully by now realise the whole American Dream thing is bollocks and no one is ever going to be emulate their "heroes" except the incredibly lucky few. Amassing huge amounts of money has nothing to do with 99.9% of the human population.

Musicians and anyone else who is serious about creativity needs to acknowledge these facts and start coming from a new angle.

 

[k-punk]

Forget MIA, forget Franz Ferdinand, why doesn't Mike Skinner (text: Lad's Mags/ music: casio presets) get the hatred he deserves?

 

[don_quixote]

probably because you have to defend him from morons abusing him for the wrong reasons too often to hate him

what have honda done with the bmw references in galang? i dont have a tv