![]() Like the Roman Gavras video clip for “Born Free,” /\/\ /\ Y /\ often verges on lurid didacticism, on telling rather than showing. Introducing the loose conceptual framework of the album, opening track “The Message” emphasizes the hyper-stimulation and over-connectedness of post-smartphone reality in a particularly clumsy, ham-fisted way: “Head bone connected to the headphones/ Headphones connected to the iPhone/ iPhone connected to the internet/ Connected to the Google/ Connected to the government.” It won’t be the last time on the album that M.I.A.’s lyrics take a turn for the painfully obvious. don’t surrender,” is largely absent here, replaced by a more ambiguous voice equally at home narrating a haunting story of terrorist love (“Lovalot”) or delivering a schmaltzy cover of a reggae-flavored song by 80s Dutch synth pop act Spectral Display (“It Takes A Muscle”). The defiant M.I.A., who once claimed that “like P.L.O. takes a purposeful step back from the tactics of Arular and Kala, which merged dancehall toasts repping “third-world democracy” with abrasive forgeries of global dance subgenres like baile funk and bhangra. has launched what is essentially her most subdued, least radically-pitched album yet, a puzzling collection of magpie-ish pop hybrids and abortive experiments seemingly formulated to frustrate the unfolding critical discourse that threatens to damn her.įor /\/\ /\ Y /\, M.I.A. Into this highly fraught public dialogue, M.I.A. Failing that, they have been satisfied with highlighting the artist’s supposed hypocrisies, retracing tired classist arguments that assume some fundamental incompatibility between wealth and radicalism. ![]() Whereas Lady Gaga and Ke$ha skate by on a presumption that their brand of pop is always already a calculated, commodified product, it seems an irresistible temptation for M.I.A.’s critics to poke at her collection of stylistic gestures searching for an ethics. Because of her willful and calculated aestheticization of the subaltern - third-world poverty, radical politics, terrorism, and guerilla warfare - her critics have consistently sought to derive a coherent politics from M.I.A.’s postmodern dance pop. ![]() seems destined for critical scrutiny of a very specific sort. For better or worse, Maya Arulpragasam’s work as M.I.A. As if timed precisely to capitalize on the controversy generated by Lynn Hirschberg’s widely-blogged NYT hatchet piece, sounding the warning shot in an inevitable critical backlash, M.I.A.’s third full-length album arrives with plenty of baggage in tow. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |