This absurd year could not ask for a more fitting epitaph. After two listens and into a third I remain convinced that M.I.A. will have the last laugh. This year you were not lukewarm on M.I.A. You were with her or you were against her. I was with her and still am. I liked /\/\/\Y/\ a lot and I thought the "Born Free" video was amazing. "Teqkilla" is in my top four or five tracks of the year. I even thought it was cool that she posted that Times Magazine writer's phone number on Twitter. You fuck with someone's shit like that, you better be prepared to reap the whirlwind, that's what I say.
If "of the year" meant not "best of the year" but "most of the year," which is to say, "embodying the year most perfectly, for better or worse," who else but M.I.A. could be called Artist of the Year? (Yes, okay, I know who else, let me finish.) /\/\/\Y/\ is not a pleasant record to listen to and God knows ViCKi LEEKX isn't either. But neither was 2010 a pleasant year to live through. 2010 was the year Facebook surpassed meatspace to become America's most popular plane of reality. In 2010 it stopped being fun and we kept doing it because we couldn't stop. 2010 was the year of Four Loko and Robot Unicorn Attack.
Say what you will about /\/\/\Y/\ as an album, but as a document of this fucked-up time it could not be more perfect. It was shot through with that feeling of breaking-apart that we all knew this year even if we did not talk about it because it was too near to us. In 2010 everything was underlaid with surreality and paranoia. Something was happening, something we all wanted to ignore, and /\/\/\Y/\ grabbed us by the hair and shoved our faces in it. No wonder we didn't like it.
It is now well-established that Pitchfork knows jack shit about music. How they feel about an album has nothing to do with it and everything to do with them. Pitchfork hated /\/\/\Y/\ so much because, decadent aesthetes that they are, they couldn't handle it. It was too much for their delicate constitutions. So they started a backlash and then relaxed in the bathtub with Grizzly Bear. But mark my words: M.I.A. will have the last laugh.
RAJ: Well hell, Nick, I was lukewarm on M.I.A. this year. There's fundamentally interesting things about everything she's been doing recently - there are also fundamentally stupid things about all of it as well. I probably would love Maya (I refuse to use the backslashes) if I really thought it was a provocative, uncompromising "document of this fucked-up time" about alienation and Google being connected to the government and what have you. And there are definitely moments where I see where people are coming from - the sonic chaos of "Teqkilla" and "Stepping Up" is pretty potent as a representation of digital alienation and the attempt in "Lovalot" to get into a terrorist's headspace is as daring as it is unprecedented for a pop song. But Maya is also the sound of M.I.A. hedging her bets hard - nearly half the album is just awful garden-variety pop that manages to be more bland and insincere than most of the Billboard Top 40. Call the album's incoherence an artistic stategy if you must, I'll just call it haphazard and poorly executed.
(Same half-brilliant/half-idiotic thing with the "Born Free" video for that matter. The cinematic elements of it are downright virtuosic in their execution and it's probably a fair point that Westerners tend to avoid empathizing with victims of genocide and should maybe think about it more. But could there be a more heavy-handed way to go about that idea? Like, look, I'll even grant you the shooting-the-little-kid thing if you really need to get the horror of it all across, but I don't see any reasonable way to justify the neccessity of that shot where the disintegration of a kid stepping on a landmine is filmed in loving gory slo-mo detail.)
All that said - this mixtape? It's obviously a retreat from the abrasive experimentation of the album, but retreats don't usually sound so goddamned triumphant. Nick said Vicki Leekx (Jesus, again with the capitalization) isn't a pleasant record to listen to, and I guess wecan debate what pleasant means, but this thing is immediately club-ready in a way that the album certainly wasn't. In fact, the beats here are out-and-out fire one after another - shades of Kala, and I'm one of those Kala-was-best-of-the-past-decade-level types. Old material here is completely revitalized with new beats, and all of the producers are completely on point - we already know what Diplo, Blaqstarr, and Switch can do when they're at their best, but Rusko here finally proves his ability to work effectively as a collaborator, and the presence of Danjahandz (the actual guy behind FutureSex/LoveSounds while Timbaland was mugging) is downright thrilling - there's no actual pinpointing of who did what, but the Meds and Feds remix certainly sounds like Danja working on a fascinating avant-dancefloor level.
And I guess I have to get into M.I.A.'s identity politics here a little bit because of the fascinating "Marsha/Britney". The track starts out with M.I.A. declaring that what she hates most is "fame hos" - red flag right away, since that's pretty much what everyone's been calling M.I.A. for the past year! And as she rolls through a takedown of your average shallow nail-painting ditzy Britney type, more flags pile up - "she's always claiming that she's part Navajo" (leaning on your backstory!), "You wanna be the next best thing... But you can't sing!" (have you heard "Tell Me Why"?). And then the hook "Hey Marsha! Whatcha do yesterday? What I read on the blog story/don't add up to what you told me".
Now, I guess it's possible that M.I.A. is just completely delusional, but I'm going to give her credit and say she's self-aware enough to know that all these criticisms obviously have been aimed at her, and her response is effectively "So what?". Yes, she's guilty on some of these things, but so is your average garden variety pop star, and the "blog stories" aren't exactly trying to tear them to pieces they way they've gone after M.I.A. All this because M.I.A. is making people think - about globalization, about terrorism, about genocide - while your more vapid stars really aren't. So yeah, maybe M.I.A. is prone to empty revolutionary sloganeering and not having a position paper to back up each of her pop songs, but she seems to be arguing that that kind of thing is better than nothing - which is a pretty remarkable self-assessment of her own limitations and her own strengths. And certainly a better response to press criticism than the childish tweeting the phone number thing.
But all of that is unimportant compared to the actual truth of the music here, which is just stunningly hot. Cop it immediately - for cranky types like myself who demand track separation, this is a split up version.
Other thoughts:
- It really confuses me why M.I.A. still bothers to work with Diplo. There was no dick move this year larger than Diplo going to both Twitter and the New York Times to badmouth an album and an artist he had been working with - especially when said artist is the primary reason that he has a career in the first place.
- I know Pitchfork is a pretty easy punching bag, but it seems a little unfair to just say they couldn't handle Maya - I mean, Pitchfork praise of No Age and Animal Collective (back in their more abrasive days) is no small part of the reason why both bands have major careers now. I really would like to see a convincing argument about why exactly Pitchfork is so evil - like, sure, they make bad calls, and the subset of music that they approve of is maybe more limited than it should be, but find me a music publication that doesn't have those same exact problems. Also, I like Kanye West and Grizzly Bear.
RAJ: Well hell, Nick, I was lukewarm on M.I.A. this year. There's fundamentally interesting things about everything she's been doing recently - there are also fundamentally stupid things about all of it as well. I probably would love Maya (I refuse to use the backslashes) if I really thought it was a provocative, uncompromising "document of this fucked-up time" about alienation and Google being connected to the government and what have you. And there are definitely moments where I see where people are coming from - the sonic chaos of "Teqkilla" and "Stepping Up" is pretty potent as a representation of digital alienation and the attempt in "Lovalot" to get into a terrorist's headspace is as daring as it is unprecedented for a pop song. But Maya is also the sound of M.I.A. hedging her bets hard - nearly half the album is just awful garden-variety pop that manages to be more bland and insincere than most of the Billboard Top 40. Call the album's incoherence an artistic stategy if you must, I'll just call it haphazard and poorly executed.
(Same half-brilliant/half-idiotic thing with the "Born Free" video for that matter. The cinematic elements of it are downright virtuosic in their execution and it's probably a fair point that Westerners tend to avoid empathizing with victims of genocide and should maybe think about it more. But could there be a more heavy-handed way to go about that idea? Like, look, I'll even grant you the shooting-the-little-kid thing if you really need to get the horror of it all across, but I don't see any reasonable way to justify the neccessity of that shot where the disintegration of a kid stepping on a landmine is filmed in loving gory slo-mo detail.)
All that said - this mixtape? It's obviously a retreat from the abrasive experimentation of the album, but retreats don't usually sound so goddamned triumphant. Nick said Vicki Leekx (Jesus, again with the capitalization) isn't a pleasant record to listen to, and I guess wecan debate what pleasant means, but this thing is immediately club-ready in a way that the album certainly wasn't. In fact, the beats here are out-and-out fire one after another - shades of Kala, and I'm one of those Kala-was-best-of-the-past-decade-level types. Old material here is completely revitalized with new beats, and all of the producers are completely on point - we already know what Diplo, Blaqstarr, and Switch can do when they're at their best, but Rusko here finally proves his ability to work effectively as a collaborator, and the presence of Danjahandz (the actual guy behind FutureSex/LoveSounds while Timbaland was mugging) is downright thrilling - there's no actual pinpointing of who did what, but the Meds and Feds remix certainly sounds like Danja working on a fascinating avant-dancefloor level.
And I guess I have to get into M.I.A.'s identity politics here a little bit because of the fascinating "Marsha/Britney". The track starts out with M.I.A. declaring that what she hates most is "fame hos" - red flag right away, since that's pretty much what everyone's been calling M.I.A. for the past year! And as she rolls through a takedown of your average shallow nail-painting ditzy Britney type, more flags pile up - "she's always claiming that she's part Navajo" (leaning on your backstory!), "You wanna be the next best thing... But you can't sing!" (have you heard "Tell Me Why"?). And then the hook "Hey Marsha! Whatcha do yesterday? What I read on the blog story/don't add up to what you told me".
Now, I guess it's possible that M.I.A. is just completely delusional, but I'm going to give her credit and say she's self-aware enough to know that all these criticisms obviously have been aimed at her, and her response is effectively "So what?". Yes, she's guilty on some of these things, but so is your average garden variety pop star, and the "blog stories" aren't exactly trying to tear them to pieces they way they've gone after M.I.A. All this because M.I.A. is making people think - about globalization, about terrorism, about genocide - while your more vapid stars really aren't. So yeah, maybe M.I.A. is prone to empty revolutionary sloganeering and not having a position paper to back up each of her pop songs, but she seems to be arguing that that kind of thing is better than nothing - which is a pretty remarkable self-assessment of her own limitations and her own strengths. And certainly a better response to press criticism than the childish tweeting the phone number thing.
But all of that is unimportant compared to the actual truth of the music here, which is just stunningly hot. Cop it immediately - for cranky types like myself who demand track separation, this is a split up version.
Other thoughts:
- It really confuses me why M.I.A. still bothers to work with Diplo. There was no dick move this year larger than Diplo going to both Twitter and the New York Times to badmouth an album and an artist he had been working with - especially when said artist is the primary reason that he has a career in the first place.
- I know Pitchfork is a pretty easy punching bag, but it seems a little unfair to just say they couldn't handle Maya - I mean, Pitchfork praise of No Age and Animal Collective (back in their more abrasive days) is no small part of the reason why both bands have major careers now. I really would like to see a convincing argument about why exactly Pitchfork is so evil - like, sure, they make bad calls, and the subset of music that they approve of is maybe more limited than it should be, but find me a music publication that doesn't have those same exact problems. Also, I like Kanye West and Grizzly Bear.
