M.I.A.: Is She For Real? What's Real? - Page 3

Some critics have discussed M.I.A.’s background, but very few of them have addressed the contradictions she seems to embody. The closest anyone has come was Robert Christgau writing in the Village Voice:

Sinhalese depredations have been atrocious. But my reading suggests that more Sri Lankan Tamils want equality than want Eelam, and from this distance I'm not pro-LTTE. Hence I strongly advise fellow journalists to refrain from applying "freedom fighter" and other cheap honorifics to M.I.A.'s dad. But I also advise them to avoid the cheaper tack taken in last week's Voice by Simon Reynolds: "Don't let M.I.A.'s brown skin throw you off: She's got no more real connection with the favela funksters than Prince Harry." Not just because brown skin is always real, but because M.I.A.'s documentable experience connects her to world poverty in a way few Western whites can grasp. Moreover, beyond a link now apparently deleted from her website to a dubious Tamil tsunami relief organization, I see no sign that she supports the Tigers. She obsesses on them; she thinks they get a raw deal. But without question she knows they do bad things and struggles with that. The decoratively arrayed, pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck her album are images, not propaganda - the same stuff that got her nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize in 2001. They're now assumed to be incendiary because, unlike art buyers, rock and roll fans are assumed to be stupid.

M.I.A. has no consistent political program and it's foolish to expect one of her. Instead she feels the honorable compulsion to make art out of her contradictions. The obscure particulars of those contradictions compel anyone moved by her music to give them some thought, if only for an ignorant moment - to recognize and somehow account for them. In these perilous, escapist days, that alone is quite a lot.

I respect Robert Christgau, and much of what he writes above is dead on the money. But I feel he gives M.I.A. too much leeway. By minimizing the symbolic freight carried by pastel tigers and burning palms, he trivializes both M.I.A.'s art and experiences and the real world events those stenciled images refer to. Moreover, by simultaneously assuming that M.I.A. is fully in charge of how these symbols are deployed, and arguing that these pastels (and the rest of Arular) show that she is undoubtedly deeply conflicted about South Asia's history of violence, he gets to have it both ways.

Article Author: John Owen

John Owen is a music writer, multi-instrumentalist and music industry veteran based in coastal Massachusetts.

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