new MIA album on Youtube

[blake 3:17]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uWwa6FAQNM&list=PLYMnb1jHtWEv-7IevIrNQiPbuMYpHQiKw

Seems like the whole album is here... Sounding really really good.

[#FF0000]

Yo.

This is really great. Feeling like it's her best yet.

[Yuppie Grinder]

fuck mia

[#FF0000]

:(

[Creative Destruction]

why "fuck MIA"? she's pretty good.

[Yuppie Grinder]

She's a cultural vampire just like Diplo. She fetishizes and makes caricatures out of everything vaguely "ethnic" and fronts likes she a radical while swimming in millions and dating European royalty.

[The Idler]

She's also soft on Tamil Nationalism.

[#FF0000]

She's a cultural vampire just like Diplo. She fetishizes and makes caricatures out of everything vaguely "ethnic" and fronts likes she a radical while swimming in millions and dating European royalty.

fwiw she split with that dude. turns out she was actually never around and they were basically living entirely separate lives.

[Os Cangaceiros]

She's also soft on Tamil Nationalism.

Not surprising considering her early life experiences. LTTE was one truly deranged group, though, no doubt about that

[Rusty Shackleford]

She's a cultural vampire just like Diplo. She fetishizes and makes caricatures out of everything vaguely "ethnic" and fronts likes she a radical while swimming in millions and dating European royalty.

still sounds nice. and so does diplo. like, i understand, but some of it sounds reallllly fucking gooood.

like, a third example, Janelle Monae does quite a bit of generic* pop stuff but it still sounds good.

*or what i think is generic, like have a music discography that is over half full of 'love' themed songs.

[Prairie Fire]

I'm torn on MIA...

She is one of the few artists where I actually went out and purchased all of her albums, rather than simply downloading. I have Arular,Kala and Maya on disk and on the Ipod. From what I've heard of Matangi, it seems pretty good.

As for the politics that she's pushing, it's a mixed bag.

Her Dad wasn't LTTE, but he was a founding member of EROs. EROS was pretty close to the Tigers, and eventually a lot of the membership did dissolve into the LTTE. Whether it is for gratuitous shock value or is sincere, at least two music videos did include a lot of tiger imagery in them. Her "Galang" music video features the tiger pretty prominently, opposite themes of war and resistance:

[YOUTBE]DCL1RpgYxRM[/YOUTUBE]


The tiger shows up again in the background of Bird Flu:

6Kq16GAuNcg



The Tiger here is most likely an allegory for the LTTE/ Tamil nationalism.


Maya comes from a Tamil nationalist family, and as near as I can remember, she didn't go soft on the atrocities of the Sri Lankan state in 2009. She condemned them pretty strongly.

Other than that, politically, she's all over the place.

The flavour of 'Arular' and 'Kala' was pan third-world revolutionary,with strong Tamil nationalist undertones.

MAYA, on the other hand, was eclectic as all hell. In the jacket art and the opening song, the primary theme of the album was awareness of internet espionage on the part of the state. Now, that is a valid concern, but she approached it in a bit of a right-wing populist/Infowars kind of way.

Around this point, she had adopted the Islamic persona ( i.e. her ridiculous Burkha influenced fashions, etc.). She had already briefly mentioned her "Holy Q'ran" on Kala, but on this album she went full speed ahead with this. In her song "Love a lot", the chorus " I really love a lot" distinctly sounds like "I really love Allah." Judging by how she name-drops Mecca in the same song, it's unlikely that this is a coincidence. This continued at least for a while with her music video for "Bad girls", where she she was still rocking the Hijab, or at least a knock off.


In the same song, however (" Love a lot"), she conspicuously drops this line in the forth stanza: "... Got nothing to lose, if you get me." A reference to the last lines of the Manifesto? Her dad helped found EROS, which had a pretty strong Marxist bent in the beginning... Maybe I'm reading too much into things, but she definitely likes to accessorize with anything perceived as militant.

From what I've seen and heard of Matangi, she's ditched the faux-Muslim persona (maybe it didn't stir up as much controversy as she had hoped,), and seemed to go further with the right-wing populism. She takes a stab at the banks in "Bring da noize":

" ...cause it's not me an you; it's the fucking banks!"

Definitely smacks of the gold-standard, "End the fed" types. A little ironic, considering that her baby-daddy is a Bronfman.


Whether she is sincere in her mangled politics or not is a tough call to make.

I knew that everything wasn't completely on the level right from the beginning, because she has a weird habit of mixing up words in her early songs with other similar sounding words with completely different meanings.

i.e.) in "Sunshowers", " Congo" becomes "Combo".

Very peculiar, considering that these are songs that she wrote.

Also, when interviewed about her pretty provocative song " Bucky done gun" from "Arular", she didn't seem to even know what it was about. Again, ostensibly, a song that she herself was the author of.


On the flip-side, she has been a fairly consistent proponent of Sri-Lankan Tamil rights, and probably the most widely known spokes persyn in the western world ( Few North Americans/Europeans are familiar with Prabahkaran.). I'm not sure what The Idler is talking about; she didn't mince words, calling the actions of the Sri Lankan government "Genocide" in 2009.

She must be doing something right, because she was put on the no-fly list in the United States, and has had her movement and entrance into that country restricted.

She took a fairly decent stance on the 2011 London riots.

I dunno... if I had to come up with a final verdict, the phrase "useful idiot" comes to mind. Like Michael Moore, she brings certain topics to public light that otherwise wouldn't be. Unlike Moore, she has been fairly consistent on the subjects that she has endorsed.

Is she a fraud? Perhaps.

Is her over-all political line coherent? Not at all.

Even so, her advocacy has it's uses, I thing. The role of political organizers is to know how to apply her advocacy to further work that is in motion.

[Panda Tse Tung]

Am i the only one who thought this was about the Marxist Internet Archive. I r dissapoint (and lazy in reading).

[Prairie Fire]

I'm torn on MIA...

She is one of the few artists where I actually went out and purchased all of her albums, rather than simply downloading. I have Arular,Kala and Maya on disk and on the Ipod. From what I've heard of Matangi, it seems pretty good.

As for the politics that she's pushing, it's a mixed bag.

Her Dad wasn't LTTE, but he was a founding member of EROs. EROS were initially closely affiliated with the Tigers, and eventually a lot of the membership did dissolve into the LTTE. Whether it is for gratuitous shock value or she is sincere, at least two music videos did include a lot of tiger imagery in them. Her "Galang" music video features the tiger pretty prominently, opposite themes of war and resistance:

DCL1RpgYxRM

The tiger shows up again in the background of Bird Flu:

6Kq16GAuNcg

( check out the tiger throne behind Maya at 1:29)


Images of Tigers featured in her work are most likely an allegory for the LTTE/ Tamil nationalism.

Maya comes from a Tamil nationalist family, and as near as I can remember, she didn't go soft on the atrocities of the Sri Lankan state in 2009. She condemned them pretty strongly.

Other than that, politically, she's all over the place.

The flavour of 'Arular' and 'Kala' was pan third-world revolutionary,with strong Tamil nationalist undertones. She gave the PLO a shout-out in "Sun showers".
She also did some weird, racist skits on Arular between tracks (some self depreciating.).

'Maya', on the other hand, was eclectic as all hell. In the jacket art and the opening song, the primary theme of the album was awareness of internet espionage perpetrated by the state. Now, that is a valid concern, but she approached it in a bit of a right-wing populist/Infowars kind of way.

Around this point, she had adopted the quasi-Islamic persona ( i.e. her ridiculous Niqab-influenced fashions, etc.). She had already briefly mentioned her "Holy Q'ran" on Kala, but on this album she went full speed ahead with this. In her song "Love a lot", the chorus " I really love a lot" distinctly sounds like "I really love Allah." Judging by how she name-drops Mecca in the same song, it's unlikely that this is a coincidence. This continued at least for a while with her music video for "Bad girls", where she she was still rocking the Hijab, or at least a knock off.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yDke3ZdJlJY/TSzZ-2lFZ7I/AAAAAAAAAHQ/kC6NpA3sGe4/s1600/mia-burka-pg281282.jpg

2uYs0gJD-LE

In the same song, however (" Love a lot"), she conspicuously drops this line in the forth stanza:

"... Got nothing to lose, if you get me."

A reference to the last lines of the Manifesto? Her dad helped found EROS, which had a pretty strong Marxist bent in the beginning... Maybe I'm reading too much into things, but she definitely likes to accessorize with anything perceived as militant.

From what I've seen and heard of Matangi, she's ditched the faux-Muslim persona (maybe it didn't stir up as much controversy as she had hoped,), and seemed to go further with the right-wing populism. She takes a stab at the Banks in "Bring the noize":

cCkIYkaLBGs

(1:23-1:25)

" ...cause it's not me an you; it's the fucking banks!"

whether this is anti-austerity sentiment, or "end the fed", gold standard rhetoric, is difficult to pin-point.


Some of her advocacy of the poor is also a little ironic, not just because of her own wealth, but considering that her baby-daddy is a Bronfman.

Whether she is sincere in her mangled politics or not is a tough call to make.



I knew that everything wasn't completely on the level right from the beginning, because she has a weird habit of mixing up words in her early songs with other similar sounding words with completely different meanings.

i.e.) in "Sunshowers", " Congo" becomes "Combo".

Very peculiar, considering that these are songs that she wrote.

Also, when interviewed about her pretty provocative song " Bucky done gun" from "Arular", she didn't seem to even know what it was about. Again, ostensibly, a song that she herself was the author of.


On the flip-side, she has been a fairly consistent proponent of Sri-Lankan Tamil rights, and probably the most widely known spokes persyn in the western world ( Few North Americans/Europeans are familiar withPrabhakaran.). I'm not sure what The Idler is talking about; she didn't mince words, calling the actions of the Sri Lankan government Genocide in 2009.

She must be doing something right, because she was put on the DHS risk list in the United States in 2006. She couldn't get work visas to work in the states and had her travel into the country restricted for a time.

She took a fairly decent stance on the 2011 London riots.

I dunno... if I had to come up with a final verdict, the phrase "useful idiot" comes to mind. Like Michael Moore, she brings certain topics to public light that otherwise wouldn't be. Unlike Moore, she has been fairly consistent on the subjects that she has endorsed.

Is she a fraud? Perhaps.

Is her over-all political line coherent? Not at all.

Even so, her advocacy has it's uses, I think. The role of political organizers is to know how to apply her advocacy to further work that is already in motion.