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M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

from pitchfork.com

Why We Fight #4
The Trouble With Maya
by Nitsuh Abebe, posted June 4, 2010
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Last week, the New York Times Magazine published a feature by Lynn Hirschberg about M.I.A. (Truffles were involved.) You may have read it or heard about it-- especially after M.I.A.'s irate response, which involved putting Hirschberg's phone number on Twitter. That middle-school comeback is a pretty good indication of what the feature is like. It's like watching Hirschberg walk into a room, lay a briefcase on the table, remove an array of rusty surgical tools, and hack away at a point I'm pretty sure people in the music world realized long ago, have been fine with for years, and did not need quotes from experts on Sri Lankan politics to remind them of: Maya Arulpragasam is not a politically sophisticated thinker. Or if she is, she doesn't always talk like it.

In Arulpragasam's defense, this may or may not be a bad thing. After all, people don't need to be "sophisticated" to be right. People don't need to be nuanced or thoughtful to say something important. (Sometimes sophistication is a way of keeping people powerless-- ignoring anyone who doesn't speak your diplomatic language.) And people definitely don't need to be any of those things to release good music. Hirschberg isn't much interested in the music; in that sense, the piece is like reading breaking news that Public Enemy's politics may have been-- get this-- somewhat messy or incoherent. And politics is important, but so are love, sex, religion, and how we treat one another as human beings-- all topics we're often fine with pop musicians acting out in ways that are contradictory, unsubtle, or problematic. We don't need musicians to be "right" so much as we need them to be resonant-- and at least not objectionably wrong.

And in art, there are different versions of that. Being bad with politics-- holding an indefensible position-- can make you "wrong." Being bad with symbols and gestures-- in other words, being bad at pop-- might just make you uncool or embarrassing. It's funny: Half the praise M.I.A. gets comes from the space between those two things, which makes it kind of perfect that negative reactions to this article do, too. It's this weird blur between whether she's politically wrong or just embarrassing and sophomoric. Moral wrongness versus pop wrongness. So is she politically irresponsible, or fraudulent, or annoying, or none of the above?

Well, she's definitely not always responsible. She's sloppy about nationalism and violence, even when she's talking about places-- like the whole continent of Africa-- where revolutionary politics have not always been a great experience for everyone. But we'll come back to that.

Let's start with her art. A whole lot of its appeal comes from something even she'd admit would be going on with or without her: The way elements of hip-hop and dance music have started collecting the input and innovation of a more global class-- the way attitudes built to cope with life in places like New York and Kingston have turned out to resonate just as much if you're coping with Dar es Salaam or Rio, or living illegally on the outer edges of London or Paris. Or living someplace where you're constantly exposed to political violence and repression. The one thing Arulpragasam has consistently acted as is a conduit. She's an importer, a curator, and a packager-- she taps into this idea and gives you a name and a face to buy it from. She does it visually and lyrically, and her longtime collaborator Diplo-- a guy who made a name for himself as a "conduit" DJ of things like Brazilian baile funk and Baltimore club-- does it musically. And the package they came up with is every bit as vexed, messy, problematic, and potentially effective as a lot of different pop packages.

This is actually one of the first things Hirschberg gets dead wrong about her subject; she seems to see something interesting or contradictory in talking about global poverty while sitting in safety eating nice food. Which is weird, because you'd think anyone even passingly familiar with either hip-hop or immigrants would see why this isn't unusual. (And why the "radical chic" dynamic the headline points to is long past its prime.)

What's unusual is the way M.I.A. acts as a conduit-- how she presents herself as a person within this package. So far as I can tell, it involves two habits, one of which does not bug me, and one of which really, really does.

The first is that she likes to remind us, at every opportunity, that the world is full of political violence, poverty, death, and injustice. That people are rounded up and shot, that people are born and live and die in refugee camps, that whole populations are terrorized. That in a lot of the world, this kind of stuff is, perversely, "normal." These aren't outrageous comments, and in a lot of ways they're not even political; they're pretty much just statements of verifiable fact. They're even important enough that it's hard to accuse her of being ham-fisted or simplistic or a broken record about them. They can only become outrageous if she follows them with concrete statements about what should be done, something I have very rarely seen her do. Unless, of course, the statement is "listen to me."

In that sense, her lack of sophistication sort of balances itself out: Her political thinking might not always be subtle, but she tends not to say much that requires a ton of subtlety anyway. (Even provocations like "give war a chance" are so blurry-- and so directed at a safe audience-- that they work more like gestures.) It's pretty hard to be wrong about saying "people live in refugee camps"-- and, to her credit, she's involved herself in direct action beyond just saying so. Again, the risk she runs isn't usually wrongness; it's the risk of looking stupid, or disappointing folks who think you should have something nuanced or substantive to say beyond that. And hey, maybe that's other people's problem.

But adopting a pose like Arulpragasam's has meaning way beyond what you do or don't advocate. And that's the second thing, the big problem: M.I.A. is incredibly non-hesitant to wrap herself in the idea of political violence. Not just poverty or struggle but actual political violence. She is shockingly non-hesitant to put on that cloak. She implicates herself in it even in places where she's clearly not: Listening to her talk, you'd think she was about to get sent to Guantanamo, not profiled by major newspapers. Terrorism, nationalism, revolution, insurgency, armed struggle; it's like she goes out of her way to keep these things floating in the tag cloud around her name. In my personal observation, not that many people who transfer between the third world and the first-- even at the age Arulpragasam did-- are anywhere near so blithe and carefree about packaging themselves as authentic representatives of this stuff. (And there are others in the pop world whose backgrounds, like Arulpragasam's, might give them the leeway to try.) For a lot of people in Arulpragasam's position, the idea of political violence is a little too serious to fuck around with, and definitely too real to wrap oneself in-- the whole point is that nobody should have to be wrapped in it in the first place.

For me, that's notable and unusual. It may involve an unattractive level of arrogance or lack of seriousness, which is what Hirschberg's profile is driving at. I don't know Arulpragasam and I can't say; I'm not sure I even care how it works for her-- that's her business. But I think it's possible that, art-wise, this is the single most Western thing about her-- the way she's figured out how to draw style and success and authenticity out of the idea of political violence. It's a quality that may have more in common with an old Urban Outfitters t-shirt rack than anything in the third world.

What's bizarre to me is that Hirschberg, and plenty of the people reacting to Hirschberg's piece, are so willing to take this up as a point of contention-- to needle Arulpragasam or argue about whether she can really, credibly wear that particular cloak. As if the cloak is, without question, an honor to wear. But maybe it shouldn't be a cloak or a prize to begin with. For me, the purposeful way M.I.A. wears it-- and the benefit she seems to get out of it-- can get almost laughable. And "laughable" is not the safest thing for a musician like her to be.

It also makes for the most Western quote in Hirschberg's piece, where Arulpragasam fires off a line about Bono's poverty efforts in Africa-- about how Bono's not African, but she herself is from Sri Lanka. This is an incredibly first-world thing to say: It's not about policy or development issues or whether Bono's accomplishing anything worthwhile. It's entirely about this Western game of authenticity and who gets to wear the cloak, who gets the credit for something. Which is funny, because lots of people who are forced to wear this particular cloak-- forced into a relationship with poverty and political violence-- would give just about anything not to. Arulpragasam puts herself in a weird spot. She'll talk about how seldom we hear the voices of the third world, but on some level she suggests that listening to her might work, too.

There are ways these things have energized M.I.A.'s music in good and valuable ways. There are others that are problematic and/or annoying. For one, there are the age-old issues involved in trying to represent for people beside yourself. And when it comes to her art, there's a whole lot of risk involved in aestheticizing political violence, turning it into signifier and style. This, oddly enough, is why I loved a particular lyric to Vampire Weekend's "Holiday", from their latest album (appropriately enough titled Contra):

She'd never seen the word BOMBS blown up to 96-point Futura
She'd never seen an AK in a yellowy Day-Glo display
A t-shirt so lovely it turned all the history books gray

It's hard for me to hear those lines without immediately thinking of M.I.A. And the last line, the way I understand it, is exactly the right kicker: Turning some of these things into an aesthetic-- or a cloak to be worn-- can step on the reality of them in a way that's worrying, especially if it's not coherent. The image of an assault rifle, at least, has some kind of resonance as an image of resistance. But M.I.A. is happy to set one dancing right next to the image of a tank. And a tank, unless it's fighting another tank, is pretty much never on any "good" side of political violence.

Does that bother you? Granted: I'm pretty sure there are parts of the world where you can't spend all day being dead-serious about tanks and Kalashnikovs because they're too often parts of the scenery-- if you couldn't toy with their images you'd have to cease being human. (There are also places where it's hard to find anyone fighting for you who isn't, in someone's eyes, the problem.) This is pretty obviously one part of where Arulpragasam's coming from-- it's certainly an element of this global beat-music realm, where hip-hop might give someone a template to talk about what it's like to live in, say, Gaza, instead of a Brooklyn project. Besides, our first-world popular culture has given us a lot of weird things as signifiers, including death, sex, murder, alcoholism, suicide, fucked-up gender politics, drug-running, mental illness, and gang violence. Sometimes it's reprehensible. Sometimes these things are just part of people's lives whether they like it or not, and they're acted out in ways that actually mean something valuable.

It's funny, though: I can think of at least one moment where M.I.A.'s pop package has worked better when it's coming from someone else. It's on her last album, Kala, when a verse in the song "Hussel" is handed over to the Nigerian/British rapper Afrikan Boy. His image of a third-world hustle is a hundred times more resonant than most of M.I.A.'s-- it involves standing out on the highway selling sugar. On one of his own tracks, "Lidl", it's about sneaking into the UK and getting caught shoplifting from supermarket chains.

Compare this with M.I.A., who so often wraps herself in the idea of political violence and armed resistance-- things that make a much more exciting package for Western audiences, but can also be a lot more cartoonish and self-aggrandizing. Part of it is surely just the background difference between Nigeria and Tamil Sri Lanka, but M.I.A.'s the one trying to bridge these things. If she ever talked about a plastic bag full of gasoline, you get the feeling she'd add a match and make it a bomb. If it were Afrikan Boy, it'd just be something kids sell to people with cars to make a little money. Afrikan Boy is being funny in "Lidl", and yet I still take what he's saying way more seriously than I take the popstar who introduced me to him.

Funny, too, that she has him guest on a song called "Hussel", an idea he turns inside-out in a freestyle elsewhere: "You're a hustler? What is that to an African? To a Nigerian? It is nada." Maybe what you want to call "hustling" is really just being alive. This is the kind of space M.I.A. packages and acts out for us, but I think she's a lot better at packaging it than examining it. A lot of people seemed to read that Times piece and feel like M.I.A. was being exposed as somehow fraudulent. If she is, it's not because she's so politically "wrong"-- it's that her cloak has slipped for a second, and people have noticed just how much it's something she enjoys putting on.

If she starts spending more time adjusting that cloak than releasing good tracks, she might have a problem. But for us as listeners, there's another easy trick, which is to approach any good music she makes from the standpoint that the cloak is, well, kinda bullshit-- that she's a normal person, unsophisticated and flawed like anyone, who does not actually have any grand authority or credibility that other people lack. Isn't it possible to swallow the music and spit out the cloak? To not act like she's speaking for anything beyond her own messy self?

That's one way to navigate the distance between pop and a UN subcommittee. There are other "political" artists out there who could probably sit down and explain their viewpoints, patiently and thoroughly and sensibly, for days. But for a lot of them, no amount of focused thinking has resulted in a package that's quite as resonant, engaging, or accessible as what M.I.A.'s turned out in the past. Which leaves us all deciding how much we care about resonance versus how much we care about right-- not because they're opposites, but because thus far Arulpragasam's been a hell of a lot better with one than the other.