2010 Bands You Can Ignore #2: M.I.A.

1.12.2010

2010 Bands You Can Ignore #2: M.I.A.

M.I.A. Would rather listen to Vampire Weekend rhyming “slave trade” with “getting laid” than another shitty M.I.A. album.

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Editor’s note: 2010 Bands You Can Ignore: Bands you can ignore this year. And probably next year.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 3:04 pm and is filed under 2010, Bands You Can Ignore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Ryan

BITCH PLEASE, Vampire Weekend sucks.
J.P.

"She’s a terrible vocalist. Can’t rap, can’t sing. She’s a provocative lyricist and an occasionally interesting producer; music-wise, that’s about it"

....and yet you're gush-crushing everyday for Joanna. Fucking. Newsome?! The irony inherent there should cause this site to fold in upon itself.
David Greenwald

@Pantha Basically: She's a terrible vocalist. Can't rap, can't sing. She's a provocative lyricist and an occasionally interesting producer; music-wise, that's about it. #ignore!
ariel

it's just such a lame topic for a post. it's SO EASY to hate on something and does nothing relevant in informing anyone about anything.
pantha

i guess you're trying trying to suggest that people like the "idea" of M.I.A. — third world rapper, omg! — more than the songs themselves, which is fair. but even as a fan, i'm not immune to the (often obnoxious) way the media handles her, nor the ways she plays into that treatment. it's almost impossible to divorce her music from world context, so if you have a knee-jerk reaction against her then you may never find a "compelling" case.

that said, i still think the music speaks for itself. she does a whole lot to equalize genres that people typically view with artificial barriers, and the attitude of her approach is nearly inscrutable. she knows that the sounds she's making will fundamentally appeal to the same audience she's trying to subvert, so there's an extreme tension behind every song that keeps them re-listenable and propulsive — much like the classic pop formula does. she's able to smuggle ostensibly "fringe" ideas/sounds/etc. by co-opting the mainstream model, making them danceable, etc.

(as a loose comparison, film theorists make a similar argument re: Douglas Sirk's melodramas. he gives his audience the chance to radically encounter their own fears, but it's done within the guise of a popular form.)
pantha

love your website in general, but yeah, this is dumb. there's an argument to be made re: yeasayer but M.I.A. is clearly one of the most 'relevant'/'important' artists of our time. even if you personally can't get into the music, it's naive to dismiss her.
David Greenwald

Pantha, I would love it if you could make a compelling case for M.I.A.'s music -- not M.I.A. -- as being "relevant/important."
matthew

For the record, my "Spot on" was in reference to Dave's post, not the commenters. (No offense commenters, but MIA is the terrible.)
floorpaper

definately need a 'take this website off the internet' button.
matthew

Spot on. Thank goodness others feel the same as me.
Carms

Dislike
Philm

Unlike
Kay Randolph

Definitely need a LIKE button here.
sarah

i can get behind this a little better than the last one, thank you

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Rawktumblr

Gold Soundz
Can’t argue with that. Strong finish, dudes.
09/03/10
More P4k list commentary
Bummed that on a list of a lot of only semi-obvious picks from artists with bigger, even better songs, Elliott Smith got stuck with “Needle in the Hay,” the song that most plays into the Elliott Smith Was Sad And Took Drugs And Sang About Himself Narrative, when, like Joni Mitchell or Neil Young or his heroes in Big Star and the Beatles, his “confessionalism” was as much storytelling and character study as it ever was diary-page.

Despite “Miss Misery,” it is admittedly the song I think he’s best known for; it is a great and powerful song, but he was and remains so much more than that.

Also, this: “Posthumously parsing Elliott Smith songs— for foreshadowing, for anything— feels like something of a fool’s errand in 2010.”

I don’t know, Amanda, does that mean David Foster Wallace’s books have no meaning now? Or the poems of, like, Samuel Coleridge? What an awfully slippery slope to look for an angle on.

Also really glad “1979” charted so high, song rules, the Pumpkins rule(d), suck it, cred.
09/03/10
The guitars on the No Age album
They sound like volcanoes erupting or meteors killing dinosaurs

It’s amazing that there are songs here at all
09/03/10

2010 Bands You Can Ignore #2: M.I.A.

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Rawktumblr

Gold Soundz

More P4k list commentary

The guitars on the No Age album