#81
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cleanhands posted:
whats a good leftist critique of whatever it is mia does (not that nyt interview though you fascists!)


this article is a fairly entry level analysis, but pretty astute

M.I.A. said on her second album, Kala that she was “put people on the map that never seen a map,” but her music was never really about the Third World; like all the music in Internetland, it was about the First World. Us comfortable Westerners, in M.I.A.’s vision, were intrigued but threatened by the developing world, even while we sent them our brand names and weaponry, which they repaid to us with immigrants and asylum seekers. The construction relies on Westerners collapsing the Third World into an amorphous “other,” and Arulpragasam’s trick is to not disabuse us of the notion, but to appropriate it as a source of authenticity for her own work. It was exciting, inventive stuff, made of clattering rhythms and odd, recycled sounds jammed haphazardly together, but it demanded that its audience retain the ignorance its creator believed us to possess. Her sleight-of-hand assumes we think the lives of poverty-stricken Africans, Sri Lankan refugees, Brazilian favela-dwellers, rural Aboriginal-Australians and poor urban Americans are similar because they are not like ours. Knowing that these are all distinct cultural entities with no real similarity other than a general lack of access to a McMansion in the suburbs and a new SUV every couple of years makes the charade fall apart and removes any ability to read M.I.A.’s music — or the disparate source material from which she constructs it.


This was the failure of Internetland’s capacity to make the musical globe genuinely borderless. Even when the online musical landscape seemed to be concerned about the Third World, we in the First World were really in control. The citizens of London and Philadelphia, Brooklyn and Virginia curated our entrée into the great musical other. We could hear a mixtape from Malawi and a singer from Senegal with much greater ease than in decades previous, and even, with a bit of help, examine their musical output without ever leaving our bedrooms, but we still relied on American labels and British curators to point the way.

Edited by blinkandwheeze ()

#82
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#83
Kurdt
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i like mia thats my story
#84
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tpaine posted:
did yall know that whenever tom gets exceptionally hungry he develops what he calls "hunger tourettes" and begins randomly shouting out things like "beefy!" and "crunchy!" and, for reasons i'm not sure anyone is comfortable enough to explore just yet, "mother!"

the english delicacy known as 'roast beef flavour monster munch' would start a revolution in his tastebuds and send his hunger to the gulag... permanently.

#85
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#86
Kurdt
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monocle
#87
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#88
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#89
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the whole MIA deal was funny because it exposed really stupid reactions all around. i dunno what to call it really, image activism? it's like the idea that so-and-so is on the forefront of feminism because she does things in a music video
#90
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more like watching a cage match between market liberalism's effortless repackaging of revolutionary aesthetics and social liberalism's pathological inability to look third world struggle in the eye
#91
drivel of drunken hags
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you can trace the transition of lf from a place dominated by revolutionary blustering to the internet's largest pre-op pseudo-feminist community when their pop idol shifted from MIA to gaga
#92
Kurdt
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either propaganda is an effective tool for manipulating society or it is not

or maybe being under the influence of propaganda is like being drunk, in that you never do anything that you wouldn't already have done anyway and historical materialism lives to fight another day
#93
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well gaga did make better music sooo
#94
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#95
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MIA sucks shit Lol
#96
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#97
Kurdt
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jools posted:
MIA sucks shit Lol


#98
penitent
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i saw mia for like 5 minutes at exit festival.... she was doing this weird sitar dubstep thing, it wasnt awful exactly but not nearly as good as, say, engineearz. when it became apparent that paper planes was not gonna happen any time soon we left and saw carl craig i think, that was awesome