More MIA

[padraig (u.s.)]

M.I.A. being a sassy sidekick for Madonna

well MIA, not Gaga or Nicki or whoever, has always been Madonna's real spiritual heir*. they're both pop culture vampires whose ravenous thirst for relevance requires them to continuously suck dry the creative juices of underground culture. Madonna didn't invent that hustle (see: Bowie, David) but she perfected it. she's the vampire queen. Maya has an agitpop angle that Madonna never did, ok, but it's the same shit, just updated for the social media generation (Madonna will always be trapped in the bygone age of Shep Pettibone 12" remixes + the Danceteria). Madonna pilfered Paradise Garage post-disco, vogue, krumping...MIA has the Tamil Tigers, Arab Spring + global bass musics pastiche drizzled in white guitar music to make it palatable for Pfork festival attendees. that shit is just endlessly loathsome, for real.

oh also I know most people here could care less about (U.S.) football but Madonna is the halftime act for today's Super Bowl (I'm taking the Patriots. never bet against a vengeful Belichick) thus continuing it's tradition of dragging out the dessicated corpses of old pop stars (except for the year they had Prince + his penis guitar, that was awesome).

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

*Gwen Stefani gets an honorable mention for her thoroughly creepy Harajuku Girls silent Asian sidekick pioneering efforts

 

[nomos]

oh look, i found the bad girls press release...

http://www.deeptime.net/blog/?p=778

 

[rrrivero]

Bad Girls turns the siege of Benghazi into a sexy, gold-crusted joyride

 

[CrowleyHead]

*Gwen Stefani gets an honorable mention for her thoroughly creepy Harajuku Girls silent Asian sidekick pioneering efforts

Poor Gwen was kind of ahead of her time though, wasn't she? She went headlong into Madonna Worship, identifying with the hyper-active relentless J-Pop attitude and Chola culture years before Gaga and others. It's just, well, she had her weird quasi-hip-hop success, and then Fergie's "London Bridge" successfully 86'ed her career in urban markets. (Not that following up with that weird Yodelling single wasn't helping commit the death-knell).

 

[Sick Boy]

What amazes me about the video is the level with which it so calculatedly weaves together this decade's cultural imagery from the perspective of mainstream America, and then sexualizes it all. As a pop video, it's pretty devious. It makes you wonder whether MIA is not actually some arch-capitalist media svengali.

Of course, she's an art-school fashionista with nothing between her ears, but it is still astonishing how she can, seemingly in ignorance, make work whose message appears to be moving in the totally opposite direction from what she clearly intends.

Unless, as mentioned, her intention is "make a lot of money."

 

[trza]

The Bad Girls video looks like Romain Gavras just watched a bunch youtube videos of Arabian Drifting and car skating that have bounced around various blogs and aggregator sites for five years now:

 

[Leo]

so edgy!: http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/02/05/middle-finger-super-bowl-photo/

 

[zhao]

what ever artistic, promotional, opportunistic, political, etc. problems aside, this, and she, gets an over all thumbs up from me.

 

[Sick Boy]

This sort of thing deeply offends Americans. They are a sensitive bunch you know.

 

[zhao]

rather embarrassing that i didnt connect the new vid to driving laws in Saudi. all of you did, right? right??

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

oh look, i found the bad girls press release...

says it all 100x better than I ever could. honestly none of it's any more ridiculous or awful than the gladhanding of Live Aid or Sting playing private concerts for Central Asian dictators or whatever, it's just in this case privileged white people (cos her core audience most definitely ain't in the favelas or the shantytowns or refugee camps) get guilty hung up calling bullshit.

@zhao - lol yeah I'm sure it'll go a long way toward liberating Saudi women

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

also the Super Bowl thing was tame as hell. mia + nicky came about for about 90 seconds - halftime shows are always medleys - then cee-lo showed up in a very unflattering drum major outfit. madonna is about 473 years old + bathes nightly in the blood of young pop chanteuses a la countess bathory. still reckon the pats would've taken it if Gronkowski was healthy tho.

oh also I just realized that mia copped that pregnant grammy thing from neneh cherry. buffalo dance >>>> mia's entire discography.

 

[zhao]

@Zhao - lol yeah I'm sure it'll go a long way toward liberating Saudi women

i think so too.
she is certainly raising a lot of awareness of these issues.
the video had 1.4 million views in less than 2 days.

i don't think she should be compared to Live Aid, Geldof or Bono... she is trying to make money by voicing (vague) angst, and not trying to make money from eliciting pity in such a condescending, shameful and creepy way.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

the madonna song is fucking terrible. i hate all her modern 'dance' music. ray of light's title track was cool, candy perfume girl was great and the best thing on there, and i didnt even mind beautiful stranger but everything since then has been seriously horrendous.

having just heard it, bad girls is prob MIAs worst/most conventional song to date. she even sounds bored doing it. its just her slant on hip-hop car anthems, but vaguely/crassly linked to the middle east. you can tell shes trying to go mainstream this time, so theres none of her usual politics (though its worse as the middle east setting probably wont be to the liking of middle america, so now i get a shit song, that isnt likely to even get her where she wants anyway - if it said something a bit more interesting with a video that im guessing is meant to provoke a bit, id be happier), and i think this might be the 'sexiest' video shes done, which is a bit pathetic. (she does look great though and i would still marry MIA). maybe she could usher in a new age of sexy videos, but with the female artists fully clothed. might make a change for rhianna.

cant quite put my finger on it but something dated about the video, and the way it seems to look at the middle east. im surprised she didnt try and do a video like beyonces run the world with arabic women.

def not like geldof or liveaid though. MIA wants to be down with the places she features/refers to, show how cool they are/she is by association and maybe piss people off along the way. geldof just wanted to give them money and charity.

 

[rrrivero]

i think so too.
she is certainly raising a lot of awareness of these issues.
the video had 1.4 million views in less than 2 days.

You said yourself you didn't get the reference at first. I've lived and worked in the Arab world, in fact most of my past year I spent promoting political activism day and night, whether at home, in Egypt or in Tunisia in lieu of the Arab spring, and of course the Manal al-Sharif debacle passed through my lens countless times, and even I didn't get that reference. Maybe if that video had come out in May or June when the Saudi drivers ting was all over the news, then it could have been counted as raising awareness.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

def not like geldof or liveaid though

y’all missing the point of that comparison, which is that in both cases it’s about the pop star, not the people they purport to be helping or speaking for: pictures of starving children sell records. for mia, global poverty, uprisings + guerilla chic sell whatever the modern equivalent of records is. she makes her (all I wanna do is take your) money off the backs of refugee camps + the triggers of AK-47s, while herself maintaining a life of impossible luxury that 99.99% of those people could never dream of. demanding that pop stars have coherent politics is as pointless as it is futile but that don’t make it any less thoroughly unappealing. the real difference between her + U2/Geldof/etc is that they’re easier targets b/c they are so very uncool and there’s no element of white/well-off privilege guilt. if she wants to trade on her background that’s fine, but she can’t then have it both ways + flip out when people call bullshit on the ridiculousness of many of her positions.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the video had 1.4 million views in less than 2 days

+ as for this ffs are you serious man. if you think a chintzy pop music video lifting some hip middle eastern themes is going to liberate any women from wahabism, then all respect but you're off your nut.

(partially related sidenote: reckon rrivero could speak to this better than me but I been saying for years + years that so-called social media revolutions are vastly overrated. you can mobilize a lot of people in the moment but if you don't have an IRL base that you've developed through years of actual organizing then you're going to lose the post-revolution when groups with real power bases occupy the vacuum. as is happening now in egypt w/the military + the islamists. no one in power gives a f.u.c.k. how many YT videos you got)

 

[rrrivero]

Egyptians are doing surprisingly well based on the circumstances, I thought the protests would die down months ago but they're still going strong, but yeah it's not like anything's going to get better over there for the next decade at least, in a situation where the army owns like 70% of the economy and gets 1.3 billion crisp us dollars shoved up their ass every year by the US government whilst salafists and other islamist wankers get millions from their Saudi sugar daddies. You could tell an islamist banner from a secularist banner during the protests just by how pretty they looked.

Though in my opinion it would be a welcome change if islamists were to be elected democratically in Egypt, that way they can pave their way to their own failure soon enough. Except I'm pretty sure the military/the us/israel will never let that happen (See: Algeria) and M.I.A. won't be there to stop them

 

[sufi]

Though in my opinion it would be a welcome change if islamists were to be elected democratically in Egypt

23 January 2012 Last updated at 17:25
Egypt's new assembly elects Muslim Brotherhood speaker
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16677548

+73% of seats in parliament ...