Abhi blogged M.I.A.’s LA concert in inimitable style, so let me fill you in on the NYC gig last Saturday as best as I can: consider me the B side. And Anna couldn’t make the sold-out concert, but she graciously gave me her unused tickets. Caring, sharing and turning green with envy: it’s the mutineer way.
The concert utterly rocked with audience energy, and Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam felt like a star in the making. There was heavy promo in NYC: a staid New Yorker story (talk about hipster buzz kill), the cover of the Village Voice entertainment section, Gawker. And her DJ backup, Diplo of Hollertronix, is popular out here. Her first full album, Arular, is out Feb. 22.
The crowd was a weird mix of spiky-haired Asians, Williamsburg hipsters and Upper West Side liberals with the odd square-jawed, Shannyn Sossamon-like Tamil beauty thrown in. There were very few desis in all, but the show was jam-packed. Most of the crowd already knew and sang along to her songs. I can’t tell you how much Lower East Side angst it inspired in me to find out she’s no longer a ‘discovery’ :)
Arulpragasam had great flow, and every single song was good. The tracks she chose were much fresher, catchier and more layered than the mixes I’ve heard online. They call it electro-dancehall and electrogroove, but the moves were deliciously familiar: she and her backup dancers reminded me of early Salt ‘n Pepa. I did find the soldier step a bit precious.
I’ve never rocked out to a desi woman before, that was quite novel. The Village Voice called her a ‘Sri Lankan Tamil hottie,’ a phrase you rarely read in America. But her aesthetic was also intimately familiar: her small-faced, tousle-haired cutenesss resembles my female Berkeley classmates; the South Indian hip-hop fans at Berkeley are legion.
Arulpragasam apparently wore the same outfits as in L.A, and she wore the same yellow ‘Polo’ T-shirt as in the Village Voice publicity photo. Her first outfit, metallic diagonals on a baggy teal blouse, was straight ’80s Harlem. She benefits from being dark brown in her genre, she gets an automatic stamp of authenticity.
As Abhi points out, the terrorism issue will unquestionably be a serious roadblock for M.I.A. commerce: MTV refused to run ‘Sunshowers’ without a disclaimer. In 1991, the Tamil Tigers assassinated the prime minister of India with a female suicide bomber. As suicide bombing pioneers, they’re hardly a cuddly, symbolic, ‘stick it to the Man’ organization, which makes Arulpragasam analogous to Lee Harvey Oswald’s daughter or that aspiring pop singer, bin Laden’s niece.
And Arulpragasam doesn’t downplay her Tiger connection, she flaunts it, it’s integral to her marketing. She did a mix album using unauthorized samples called Piracy Funds Terrorism. Her song ‘Sunshowers’ refers to suicide bombs (‘And some showers I’ll be aiming at you’), her first album bears her dad’s eponymous codename. Jungle guerrillas are all over the ‘Sunshowers’ video, there’s a large running tiger in her excellent concert visuals, she does a soldier step on stage and a shoutout to the P.L.O.
At the level of an individual music fan, going white hat can be quite difficult. So much shared infrastructure is contaminated, you can go nuts trying to track it all. If you watch Bollywood, you fund criminal gangs. If you go to Vegas, you fund the mob. If you buy gas, you fund al Qaeda.
At the same time, ‘it’s too hard’ is the main excuse people use to turn a blind eye to all kinds of injustices. You do as much as is practical. I don’t expect to agree with Arulpragasam’s ideas. She’s a Sri Lankan Tamil, they are right to be bitter about their situation. Where I disagree with them is in methods, their choice of the expedient over the good. The key is not the fuzzy politics of rebellion, it’s whether you press into service the slaughter of non-combatants as a tactic. You can’t simultaneously be against indiscriminate profiling in London and for indiscriminate killing in Colombo, by either side. ‘Sunshowers’ is less ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ than ‘I Bombed the Sheriff’s Wife and Kids.’
The dividing line for me is whether my album and concert dollars go to a great new artist, or to inadvertently funding terrorism. That’s what’s still murky. For M.I.A. to blow up big, she’ll have to come out into the sunlight.
Choice bits from an interview:
“And then now it seems like what President Bush is teaching us is if somebody steps to you, you just kill him. Don’t even ask any questions. Just take him out. He’s the biggest bloody 50 Cent he is…“… in England, the Indian radio stations wouldn’t put Galang on because I didn’t have an Indian intro… And I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to do that… It’s obvious I’m fucking brown. I don’t have to say it again and again…’
“Every year my mum learns one new English word… last year she learnt the word, ‘lesbian.’ Because I didn’t have a job and I wasn’t married, she got a phone call saying, ‘Maybe your daughter’s a lesbian…’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m making music… I just don’t want to take time out to marry this like fat guy in Sri Lanka with a moustache just right about now.’ And then this year, it’s been ‘underground.’ But she didn’t know ‘underground,’ she thought it was ‘underworld.’ So she rang me up and she was like, ‘My friends in church think you’re underworld, now what is this?’ ” [National Post]
Check out the show photos here and here; Toronto show photos; watch the cheesy ‘Galang’ video (right-click link and choose Save Target As; 18 MB).
Musicologists break down the set: NYT; was she lip-syncing, and what’s this about a blowjob?; Abhi’s not the only one fantasizing; another set review; hipster buzz: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, . More interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4. And what M.I.A. listens to.
Update: Here’s a detailed bio (what the hell is a ‘Mowgli dance move,’ and how could something ripped from Disney and Kipling be a good thing?)
