60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “Paper Planes”—M.I.A

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Rob looks back at some major performances that came with pregnancy announcements, before focusing in on M.I.A and her 2008 hit “Paper Planes.” Along the way, Rob also touches upon the controversies that came with M.I.A’s fame. Later, writer and editor Puja Patel joins to discuss dancing on stage with M.I.A, the political and cultural conversation around the artist back in 2008, and much more. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Puja Patel Producers: Jonathan Kermah and Justin Sayles Additional Production Support: Olivia Crerie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, this is a true story. I have a friend who once faked his own death so he could have more time to watch his favorite TV show. In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about the lies they tell, from forging new identities to taking their love of Game of Thrones a little too far. From Spotify and the Ringer podcast network, I'm Brian Phillips.

Listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever. you get your podcasts. She was pregnant, like really tremendously, almost worryingly pregnant. I was worried anyway. She was like a miss, please sit down, level of pregnant, right? But that ain't going to cut it in terms of mythology. Any other pop star, that's enough. That's plenty remarkable and impressive enough to do this while super pregnant,

but not her. This person pushes boundaries. She's startled. She provokes. This person makes you wince ever so slightly, and you say, are you sure you want to do it? Oh, gee, she's already doing it. She just did it. It's done. That's her. That's her thing. That's her superpower. She did it while she was super pregnant is a great start, but we're not quite on her wavelength yet. Keep going. She was in her third trimester. All right. That's closer. That's startling. Keep going. She was nine months pregnant.

Okay. This is starting to feel ill-advised, but it's too late to turn back now. It's too late to turn back now is her motto, basically. So let's power through. Let's go over the top. Let's strain credulity. Let's overdo it and be legends. It was her due date. She told USA today that it was literally her due date. She says, quote, they say that you're often late the first time. planning to go. We'll see. End quote. And then she went. No, not Beyonce. Belting out love on top and then dropping the mic and cradling her stomach at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2011, though this was a phenomenal

pop star pregnancy announcement. Yes, Kanye West and Jayze in the crowd bouncing around like little kids. This was delightful television, truly. And the key changes at the end of Love on Top are Plenty impressive and worrisome enough. But Beyonce is not an imminent danger of going into labor on stage. Let's try again. Listen, this lust got you this messed up in the bed. You want a random chick up in your bed. She don't even know your middle name.

Watch it because she might steal your chain. You don't want someone who love you instead? No, not Cardi B. Doing Be Careful on Saturday Night Live in 2018. The applause intensifying there. the camera pans out in what amounted to a likewise delightful formal pregnancy announcement. This was tremendously sweet this moment. I've always loved she don't even know your middle name.

Cardi B. deftly navigating the Be Careful radio edit is likewise tremendously sweet and almost wholesome as she elegantly dodges all the 200-pound swear words in this song. Cleaning up your act for live TV is harder than it looks or sounds. I'm just saying, who else knows what I'm saying? It's not her either, but Rihanna knows what I'm saying. That song, of course, is called Bitch Better Have My Money. But here, it's called Better Have My Money, because, delightfully, it's the opening number to Rihanna's 2023 Super Bowl halftime show.

Cleaning up your act for live TV is harder than it looks or sounds, but Rihanna does it with a plumb. And she also does it while, it is quickly confirmed afterward pregnant, which is tremendously impressive. Rihanna does not move much physically, herself, during her Super Bowl halftime show, but in this moment she is singing,

Better Have My Money, on a platform dangling roughly 60 feet above the field, which at the time definitely triggered, my miss, please sit down, reflex. Yeah, in fact, miss, please lie down whilst we slowly lower that platform back down to field level. She did not ask me for this, obviously, but I was quite concerned on Rihanna's behalf.

Great television. All of these high-profile pop star pregnancy announcements made for fantastic television, startling television, provocative even, but they're not on this woman's level. Nobody else is. And maybe nobody else should be. And there she is.

MIA, international pop star MIA, singing her quite unexpectedly huge single paper planes at the 2009 Grammys. Just now you heard her sing four lines out of the five lines total that MIA is permitted to sing alone on stage at the Grammys on February 8th, 2009, which also happens to be her due date. every vowel a barbed delight. If you come around here, I'll make them all day. MIA is wearing, the internet informs me, a House of Holland naked dress because it basically looks like you're naked that doubles, of course, as a maternity dress.

The more conventional dress-like components of this dress consist of large polka dots. I'm getting a Yoshi vibe, the dinosaur that Mario rides, the Super Mario car character, Yoshi's eggs. You don't want me describing this dress. Dude, I am often out of my depth, but at least in this case, I am aware of it. When I watched this in real time on TV, I thought MIA's dress was ladybug themed.

No, that is inaccurate. No, I need to stop talking about this. MIA in this moment has not been famous, Grammy famous for very long. It's a plenty of confused and also deeply concerned television viewers. MIA is not famous at all until this performance occurs. She was born in London, but her family's roots and her music's roots as well are in Sri Lanka. She has put out two albums of quite noisy and pugnacious and gleefully politically confrontational pop music. And music critics love her very, very, very, very, very much. But this song, Paper Plains is a quite unexpectedly gargantuan pop hit out of all proportion to her whole deal.

up to that point. She has never been quite this big before. Arguably, she will never be quite this big again unless you are way too online in 2010, or unless you count the time during Madonna's Super Bowl halftime show performance in 2012, when MIA shows up as a guest star for two minutes, flips off the camera, and gets sued by the NFL for $16.6 million. This is not a person who cleans up her act for television. or for anything, really. Are you sure you want to, she just did it, it's done. So this Grammy performance is meant to be her coronation. But in addition to her being pretty much as pregnant as you are medically allowed to be, MIA has more or less already decided to light her own throne on fire. So let her sing her fifth and final line, please. And then they emerge, the rap pack, as Queen Latifah proudly interested.

introduced them. Four super famous guys in tuxedos, conspicuous in all their formal, dapper, regal splendor. This whole song is shot in black and white, conspicuously, to emphasize the elegance, the classic status, the Sinatra-like coronation

transpiring here. Let's have ourselves a Grammy moment, shall we? Say hello to mullet era Kanye West. I had forgotten about Kanye's mullet. So much to remember with Kanye. So much to forget as well.

Who's Kanye got there with him? Who else? Jay-Z. God bless Jay-Z. You can pay for school, but you can't buy class. Great line. Jay-Z is capable of A-plus lines, even in D-plus environments.

That's why he's the best. This is not a D-plus environment. I'd go as high as B-plus here. This particular Grammy's performance felt like a true capital E event in real time, albeit graded on the fabled Grammy curve. The Grammys are so clueless and pancake-handed when it comes to rap music that any rap performance that rises above the level of like, Together at last, Sting and Shaggy qualifies as a huge triumph for, you know, the culture.

I don't even think I'm making that up. Sting and Shaggy This was better than that When it comes to styles I got several Chumper than the swagger Dagger all metal Lil Wayne my friends

When it comes to styles He's got several A classic clunky genius Lil Wayne line He's got hundreds thousands trillions What do all three rappers

so far have in common In various ways All three of them will be grievously insulted by the Grammys trophy-wise in the decade and a half to come, and all three of them

will grievously insult the Grammys in turn. Kanye West, in fact, in 2020, will tweet a video of presumably himself urinating into a Grammy statue lodged in the toilets.

Like he's peeing into the record player horn of the... I forgot about that as well. Kanye was mad at his label, I think. Also, I don't enjoy remembering all

this. I forget about shit like this on purpose. At this point, the song they're all doing is not MIAs or Kanye's or J's or Wayne's song. By the way, it's this guys. It's T.I's song. Actually, it's a T.I. song that features Kanye J. Z and Lil Wayne and copiously samples MIA. This song is called Swag Like Us from T.I's 2008 album Paper Trail. And we let T.I go on a little longer there, both because it's his song, and because many of the things he says there, living revolutionary, nothing less than a legendary, not to mention gangster shit, hereditary, got it from my dad, those lines certainly apply to him, but they don't only apply to him. Yeah? Swaggo like us is not a great song. It doesn't make the top 20 songs of anybody involved,

and that certainly includes MIA herself. But the beauty of this moment, this Grammy moment, sure is that the Grammys usually biff it so hard when it comes to hip-hop that these four dudes on stage and tuxedoes feels nice, it feels apt, it feels grievously overdue. The rap pack framing

is a little corny and overwrought, but still primarily it's nice. It's momentous, but it's equally momentous to have MIA up there in the mix, swaggering amidst these giants, swaggering alongside them. They are swaggering at her behest. The Grammys, belatedly, are opening their arms to these super famous rappers,

and the super famous rappers, in turn, are opening their arms to her. And they all lived happily ever after. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the fifth episode of 60 songs that explain the 90s, colon the 2000s. And this week we are discussing paper planes by the British via Sri Lankan pop star and provocateur MIA from her 2007 album Kala as a mass culture proposition anyway it took a little while for this song to get anywhere and then suddenly it was everywhere how did we get here how did she get here how did MIA get on stage at the Grammys with all those famous dudes how does the song as confrontational and subversive and gunshot ridden as paper planes sneak into the top five of the

Billboard Hot 100. I don't know if she gets there if she doesn't sneak in here first. They saw me see them shoot them. What? He saw you? No. Do they follow you in? I don't know. Let's get out of here. Get the snacks. Food to roll-ups. Here's a trailer for a film called Pineapple Express, a stoner comedy starring Seth Rogan and James Franco. I remember this trailer vividly. I remember the first time I watched this trailer in a packed New York City theater. I don't remember the movie we were all there to see. It doesn't matter. It ceased to matter. What I remember is that everyone in that packed New York City theater laughed uproariously at this trailer. Now you see the Pineapple Express trailer on every list

of best trailers or best needle drops of the century so far. The greatness of this trailer is somewhat conventional wisdom now. I'm here to tell you that this trailer elated everyone immediately. Absolute uproar in my theater. Uproar at James Franco doing the worm in slow motion outside a liquor store to this song. Uproar at the gunshots in this song mirrored by the gunshots on screen. A nice touch. now, baby.

Thug life. James Franco punches Rosie Perez in the face right as the cash register rings. She headbutts him in response. Uproar. Danny McBride cocking the shotgun and going, thug life. Uproar. Absolute uproar. And finally, they're in a car chase,

and there's red slushy all over the windshield, and James Franco's driving, and most uproarious reaction to any scene in any movie I've ever seen, and this wasn't even a movie. The Pineapple Express trailer does not work without paper planes and vice versa. At some point, it's intangible. It's unexplainable. The perfect song for a movie and the perfect movie for a song, Align.

And the incongruousness helps. The total surprise. You do not enter that theater. Was it forgetting Sarah Marshall? We were saying the timing works, but I don't know. You do not enter that theater expecting a dope. mainstream Seth Rogen stoner comedy and an MIA track to coexist.

In this moment, MIA is nowhere near Hollywood popular, Billboard chart popular, Grammy popular, rather. She is year-end album list popular. She is rock critic popular. She is extremely, eternally, think piece popular. But these are different spheres, different galaxies of popularity. Paper Planes is a song that launches

MIA into all the other galaxies. So perhaps we ought to go backward from the Pineapple Express trailer and figure out how MIA even got there. Give me one second here and we'll do that. And we're back. Ooh, a coherent ad break. Sophisticated. Professional. And now let's head back and catch up with our friend MIA. shit, we went too far back. We went all the way back to the 80s.

Dude, we went all the way back to the paper planes sample source. Oh well, it's too late to turn back now. Straight to Hell by the Clash. From their 1982 album Combat Rock, the loveliness, the wooziness, the disarming languor of the straight to hell intro. There is a stoned profundity to straight to hell.

Combat Rock is the Clash's fifth album. It's their biggest album, commercially, top 10, double platinum in America. Is Combat Rock the best Clash album? No. That's London Calling, duh. Or the first one, duh. Is the Combat Rock single Rock the Casbah, the best Clash song? Yes.

Hell yes. Oh, I love Rock the Casbah so much. Rock the Casbah is one of my favorite songs of all time by anybody. ever come up. If I say Rock the Casbah one more time, I'm going to end up playing you Rock the Casbah. I just said it two more times. Hit the deck. At least I played you the most

MIA sounding part of Rock the Casbah, the noisiest, the most disruptive. The threat of bombs dropping between the minaret, the quite jarring video arcade jolts, beo, of the bombs falling. Legit candidate for Best Song,

of all time. But maybe I love Rock to Casbah now because I first hear Rock to Casbah when I'm six years old and I see the video on MTV because of the Clash have sold out. Maybe. They've gone pop.

Maybe. They've betrayed their radical their revolutionary ideals. Maybe. But the idea, maybe, is the Clash, get this song on MTV and I hear it and love it. And eventually, I buy combat rock. And then I hear straight to hell and then I am radicalized. Straight to hell is a song about the immigrant experience.

The desolation, the seemingly permanent dislocation of the immigrant experience, the cruel societal impulse to demonize immigrants, a lovely melody for an ugly and pervasive sentiment. There ain't no need for you. We're talking immigrants in England to begin with. Joe Strummer sings from the perspective of a racist asshole blaming immigrants for the desolation of England. If you can play on fiddle, how's about a British jig and reel? Speaking King's English in quotation,

as railhead towns feel the steel mills rust. It takes Joe a long time to sing all that, so I just quoted it. That's quite a first verse, poetically. Vulture once ranked all 139 clash songs and it turns out that straight the hell is the second best clash song. White Man and Hammersmith Palais is number one and rock the casbah is number 10. Just flip those two numbers and I agree completely. But seriously, as railhead towns feel the steel mills rust, that is a beautiful and a very hard line, as though it is the immigrants' fault that they can't play British jigs. that they speak the king's English in quotation, that the steel mills are rusting, but the chorus blames them anyway.

And in the second verse, the scope widens to Vietnam, to children born to American servicemen during the Vietnam War, and then left behind there, which is an awfully serious, an awfully heavy topic for even a punk rock song, even a punk rock song by the punk rock band.

But Joe Strummer's childlike percussive repetition here somehow both lightens and deepens the heaviness, the seriousness. And I suspect a young MIA might have noticed that too. Let's do one more great straight to hell line for the rest of all jeanin. road about the confusion as to what take me home even means if you don't remember it if you've never actually been there

about the displacement the sense of not belonging to either place the place you're stuck in or the place you wish you could be bonus points if we get a brand name in there just for some good old punk rock type capitalist subversion let me tell you about your blood bamboo kid it ain't Coca-Cola it's rice The Clash, pretty good band. You heard it here last.

It is insufficient, in my opinion, to say merely that MIA samples this song. Straight to Hell and Paper Plains feel perfectly musically and spiritually and sociopolitically aligned. That's four adverbs and seven words. That's a new personal record. Thank you. Straight to Hell manifests paper planes. Just as the Clash manifests MIA. If we're talking about combat rock, the definition of rock has certainly changed in the intervening 25 years between these two songs.

But so too has the definition of combat. I love the UPS trucks there. I love how MIA sings we pack and deliver like UPS trucks, like it is the most serious and least serious thing in the whole world. In 2007, she told the fader, quote, that's how I. sing. Most of the time when I go into the studio to sing, I get really bored. If I'm going to sing, then I'm going to have to sing a bit weird. But with that one, I just woke up and just sang the whole song in one go. It was in the morning and I wasn't thinking too much. I hadn't brushed my teeth. End quote. So on straight to hell, the clash personify the way much of the world views

immigrants and villainizes immigrants. Now, on paper planes, MIA personifies the villainized immigrant. You want her to be the bad guy? She'll be the bad guy. She tells the fader she was, quote, just thinking that really the worst thing that anyone can say is some shit like, what I want to do is come and get your money. People don't really feel like immigrants or refugees contribute to culture in any way, that they're just leeches that suck from whatever. end quote so she embodied that stereotype as cartoonishly as possible by a cartoon sound effects all i want to do is psh psh psh and take your money i just really wanted to do that she says quote it's up to you how you want to interpret america is so obsessed with money i'm sure they'll get it end quote yeah sure we'll understand you

completely We begin for real this time in 2003 with a tiny vinyl pressing of MIA's debut single which is called Galang and frankly for many of us this is enough right here the phenomenal mesmerizing pulverizing charisma of these 10 seconds is enough that will follow this person anywhere anytime forever

no matter how weird and contentious and uncomfortable her universe might get. And no matter how much we might regret following her there later. Because what this song might mean textually, verbally, is pretty meaningless in the face of how this song ideally makes you feel. The pure electrifying jolt of it. it. It's the joy, even the confrontational joy of pop music as a shared, as a universal language. She is born Matangi Arul Pargasm in London in 1975 to Sri Lankan parents, her father, Arul, and her mother, Kala, who are part of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. Her family moves to Sri Lanka when she's

just a baby, but in 1986, when she's 11 years old, her family returns to London as refugees of the Sri Lankan civil war between the primarily Hindu Tamil minority and the primarily Buddhist Sinhalese majority, a word that her father, Arul, stays behind to fight. In London, at her aunt's suggestion, young Matangi changes her name to Maya,

so it's easier for kids to pronounce. Maya was also apparently the name of her aunt's skiing instructor. Maya once told the guardian that when she landed back in London at 11 years old, she knew five English words. Apple, Mango, Elephant, Michael Jackson. Pop music continued to help her fill in the blanks from there. It sticks in your head, don't it? Like chewing gum for your brain.

And so, but here immediately is what's always made MIA such a fascinating but also terribly challenging pop star to write about. Because right off the rip, critics had to swing in one breath, from here's a fun, fresh, unexpected, noisy pop song I like to, and now here's a brief description of the Sri Lankan Civil War. MIA's father, a rule, is a founding member of a Tamil resistance group called the Elam Revolutionary Organization of Students. In early interviews, MIA would stress that her father was not a member of a far more militant group called the Tamil Tigers, a group described by NPR in 2009 as suicide bombing innovators. But whether you are enthusing about this fun, fresh new pop song on a message board like I Love Music or a newspaper like the Village Voice or a magazine like the New Yorker, when describing this person and where she comes from in the world she is describing, you had to grapple with words like, say, freedom fighter or militant or revolutionary.

Meanwhile, in 2004, MIA releases her first full-length project, a mixtape called Piracy Funds Terrorism, Volume 1. Words like Gorilla as well. Gorilla getting trained up. This song is called Fire Bam. This tension. How to describe MIA's music. How to describe this situation in Sri Lanka. how to describe her father's role in the situation in Sri Lanka, how to describe the war

imagery and often specifically the tiger imagery in her music and her visual art. These interlocking tensions are never resolved, really. These are all frightfully moving targets that frustrate the thoughtful precision of even the most thoughtful and precise rock critics among us. in a 2018 documentary called Matangi slash Maya slash MIA MIA says quote you know there are loads of people here she means London who can empathize with what it's like to have a dad who became a banker a lawyer a judge a fucking whatever and this is what happened to a kid whose dad went off and became a terrorist and

this is how it fucked up the family and this is how it fucked up the people this is how it fucked up the country. End quote. How do you reconcile all this fraught real world backstory with a catchy chorus of competition coming up now? Load up, aim fire, fire, pop. You don't. Let's complicate things further, shall we? In London, young Maya gets a scholarship to central St. Martin's College of Art. And she graduates with a degree in film. But if she'd studied sculpture at St. Martin's College, she'd literally be a line from the Pulp Song, Common People, another one of my favorite songs of all time. And a fairly confrontational and even mean song about rich people slumming it with poor people whose lives they fundamentally

misunderstand. And MIA does not fit neatly into either of those categories. But in this documentary, the Tangi Maya MIA, directed by your friend in St. Martin's classmate Steve Loveridge, there's a further source of tension between Maya's early life in Sri Lanka and her subsequent life in London. There's footage Maya shot herself in 2001 when she goes back as a 25-year-old to Sri Lanka for the first time in 16 years to visit her family, and she wants to interview them on camera, but they're scared to be interviewed on camera. They're afraid of the police of the army. But a family member also gives her shit because her memory of Sri Lanka, Manka is so limited. He says, quote, the information you get is from asking and reading. That's different.

You don't have experience, end quote. And Maya protests because of course she does have childhood experience, but his response is, that's the only experience you had. You never had the war zone experience. End quote. Hey, who needs a quick burst of frivolity? You know what else? The next track after Firebam on this piracy funds terrorism mixtape is called Fire Fire and it basically just runs back walk like an Egyptian by the Bengals in its entirety. Yes, walk like an Egyptian

from 1986. Speaking of songs I loved as a kid thanks to MTV. Ah, the Halcyon days when you could write a globally compelling culture jamming, chart topping pop song that had lines like all the Japanese with their

yen. Simpler times. Yes? No, they weren't. They were simpler for me, though, on account of my being eight years old. MIA contains multitudes, frightful multitudes, irreconcilable multitudes. She's even already witnessed pop stardom up close. In the late 90s, Maya befriended Justine Frischman of Brit Pop Stars Elastica. And Maya joined the band on tour for a bit and directed a later Elastica video, the second, the way less famous. Elastic album from 2000 called The Menace is super rad, actually. Maybe get on that sometime. But Maya is also frustrated by how stultifying this sort of stardom can be, or at least how stultifying Elastica have chosen to make it.

Justine does have a writing credit on Galang, along with Steve Mackey from the band Pulp, who also co-produceded it, just to keep the common people incestuousness going. But in this documentary, as her time in the Elastika tour, hours, Maya says, you've got access to a microphone and 1,000 people every night. Please use it to say something, end quote. This is not to say that MIA's music only works when she's all caps saying something. My reward for plowing through all that frightful context is that I get to tell you that my favorite song on this piracy funds terrorism mixtape is called you are a cutie. Oh my goodness. What a delightful collection of syllables, that is. I spent all weekend just now going,

did you, did my mobile phone, you broke my man and wreck my home. And my kids are like, what did you just say, Dad? And I'm like, nothing. For those of you raised on 70s or even 80s television, yes, that is the Sanford and Sun theme song, being delightfully and gratuitously sampled there. An uncleared sample initially, I suspect, though this explains why Quincy Jones now is a writing credit on an MIA song. Here on Piracy Funds Terrorism, MIA is hooked up with Diplo, the genre-hopping and vaguely

skeezy American producer who dabbles gratuitously and sure, sometimes delightfully, in various global music genres from Jamaican dance hall to Brazilian bale funk. And Maya and Diplo write together and produce together

and are romantically involved for a while until they aren't anymore. And for a while there, they'd occasionally sniped each other via the internet about who deserves credit for what and who discovered who, et cetera. And you know what? I only got time for so many boondoggles here today.

It seems notable that Diplo has enjoyed a way less politically confrontational and therefore far more lucrative pop career. Low these past 10, 15 years via his work with Major Laser and Justin Bieber and then one

Usher song I really love. Climax, also on my short list of the best songs ever. But why don't we stay out of it? Generally, I'm a Diplu agnostic, but I will say Diplu apparently put out a country album in 2020, and no way am I listening to that shit. You can forget about it. I got to draw the line somewhere. Chorus. Delightful. Gratuitous. Very necessary. Many of these piracy funds terrorism tracks, including eventually URA QD as a bonus track will reappear in shinier but not too shiny form on MIA's 2005 debut album which is called a ruler and is named after

is named in honor of her father and here's where rock critics really flip for MIA and who can blame them that song's called Pull Up the People Did she just say I got the bombs to make you blow? Yep. This album, A Ruler, peaked on the Billboard album chart at number 190. That's 190. It fared quite a bit better critically. And in fact, in the 2005 Village Voice year-end Pazzenjop poll, critics voted at the second best album of 2005, behind only Kanye West's late registration, the octave jump on the chorus to pull up the people. man the playful insusience be honest with yourself you knew this person would flip the bird at the super bowl years before she actually did it you can just tell calling this sort of pop music edgy feels wildly

insufficient doesn't it calling this sort of music world music feels painfully reductive doesn't it a ruler is saturated in war imagery but there is a palpable an audible gulf between listeners who've had the war zone experience and listeners whose knowledge of the war zone experience comes from asking and reading and listening. This record keeps you off balance. This record keeps you pinned to the ground. This song is called sun showers. And yes, we just jumped from quit beating me like your Ringo to like PLO, I don't surrender in two seconds. And here again, the enthusiastic rock.

critic has to be like MIA's father reportedly trained with the PLO in Lebanon in the 1970s. There is too much going on here. Too much context. Too much conflict over how to even accurately describe the conflict. Or maybe this music is the only possible way to accurately describe that conflict. Sunshowers has a lovely, hokey, chewing gum for your brain type chorus. Shout out Dr. Buzzard's original Savannah Band. for the sample, but it feels relevant to me how frail that chorus seems melodically.

The drums are constantly threatening to overwhelm it and maybe overwhelm everything. My favorite song on this record, though, is called $10. And even that little part right there is so infernally catchy that your impulse here, sorry, my impulse here, is to submit to surrender, a war zone word that is also a pop music word, surrender. I've spent the last 19 years or so walking around going, oh, uh, uh, hey, and this splendid cosmic joke of this song and this album, and really all the music made by this person is that even when the topic of the song

is very, very obvious, I still don't have the foggiest real world idea about, what I'm singing about, and I don't even know what I don't know. My ignorance about how other people live has been delightfully weaponized against me. There is nothing especially sneaky or subversive about $10. What's subversive is how MIA manages to get it stuck in your head for the next two decades. Sorry, I meant my head. So it's time for MIA to make another album. Yes, a new album that maybe ideally will do a little bit better commercially. A brief word then, first of all, about what didn't happen. For her second album, Kala, released in 2007,

MIA planned to work extensively with Timberland, with pop super producer and national treasure and fearsome commercial juggernaut Timbaland. But MIA encountered extensive and pernicious and very public visa issues, and thus was denied entry into the United States until very late in the recording process, which means that this record has only one song

that involves Timbaland, and thank goodness for that because this is that song. Hey, baby girl, you and me need to go to your TV. I'm going to stop you right there, sir, no, no, no, thank you. Yes, thank you, sir, thank you, Timbaland, your extraordinary contributions to American culture. Work it by Missy Elliott, another legit candidate for my favorite song of all time.

But respectfully, no, no, absolutely not. Step away from the TP. This song is called Come Around, and it is the last and also worst song on MIA's second album, Calac. Come Around is in fact so inferior to all the other songs, to the preceding 11 songs,

on this record, that it feels like a delightfully sneaky and subversive commentary. On the kind of record, Calla could have been but isn't. And the kind of artist, MIA, could have been, but will never be. Just as a ruler was named for her father, now Cala is named for her mother. And you might then superficially expect it to be a more peaceful and less abrasive album. And you would, of course, be extremely hilariously wrong. This song is called Bird Flew in the The chocphony, the clatter, the glorious abrasion is very, very much the point. Cut off from America for so long, MIA recorded Kala in Trinidad, Liberia, India, Jamaica, Australia, and Japan. She worked extensively with the London producer Switch, along with briefly Timbaland, Diplo, and a few others.

She is joined on one track by the Nigerian-born rapper African Boy, and another track features a group of indigenous Australian rappers called the Wilkian. Wylkanium Mob, who were, I believe, all between the ages of 9 and 14 when they first attracted public interest. I don't suppose that the Wokaneum Mob song called Mango Pickle Down River is anybody's favorite song on this record. But given this record's commitment to keeping you off balance, I do think this song is pretty important. I believe the last line there is, and when we get home, we play some didge, as in the didgeridoo. In a 2008 spin magazine cover story, MIA says, quote, the first album, I wrote it to be really cheeky, to say, I'm so outside of this, I don't even care if I throw a dirt ball and get killed for it.

I got nothing they can take from me. Then I started thinking that I don't just want to go on about coming from a war and guns and bombs and blah. de blah, blah, blah. I wanted to talk about economy and education. Now the first world is collapsing into the third world, how everything's changing. I wanted to be part of that. End quote. Caliphany is a collection of quite jarring noises, of discordant textures, of extreme volatility, of surprise. This record is conversant with the ultra mainstream rap and pop, but the conversation this record is having with ultra mainstream rap and pop boils down to, Why are you like this?

I hate money because it makes me numb. That song is called Hustle, H-U-S-S-E-L. I don't think I'd noticed before that she sings, I hate money because it makes me numb. Speaking of which, I'm looking at this Kala album cover and realizing for literally the first time ever that it says fight on, exclamation point repeatedly in a circle around the image of MIA,

wearing sunglasses. I probably should have noticed that earlier. This record is not a crossover attempt. It is not a softening. It is not a concession of any sort. If you ever accidentally play two unrelated YouTube videos at the same time in two different browser tabs and you're super disoriented for like 0.3 seconds, this record makes me feel like that the whole time. That song's called Boys with a and that's not even a particularly complicated or abrasive song. It's not like hyperpop or anything. But I associate this record with just a ferocious density, musical, textural, philosophical.

It's just that I've read so much about this person. And maybe that's it. Listening to Kala is like trying to read five think pieces about Kala at the same time. And so I find myself grasping for some sort of respite, some sense of calm. and then, quite unexpectedly, I get it. I do find it hard to describe how soothing, how exhilarating, how refreshing paper planes sounds to me as track 11 on this record, where the previous 10 songs are pure bedlam,

and the 12th and last track is the TP situation, the ease of this song. Sure, the swagger. This song is like taking off your socks at the end of a long day. See, hard to describe. Shouldn't have tried. MIA has credited Diplo with the idea to sample the clash here. Shout out Diplo, still not listening to your country album, but good job.

Ideologically, I do think something snaps satisfyingly into place here. The psychic connection between Joe Strummer and MIA. The poetic conversation Joe Strummer and MIA seem to be having about immigrants, about the demonization of immigrants. The gunshots that sound fake but somehow feel real, the recreation of a war zone experience for a suddenly exponentially growing listening audience that has in large part not actually had the war zone experience. Paper Plains is not not a stoner jam also, hence its kinship with Pineapple Express.

It's not a celebration of wealth and the bursts of violence required to obtain wealth, hence its kinship with various famous rappers. It's not that I think we've overthought MIA as a culture as a rock critic establishment versus most other pop stars there's plenty. There's far more than usual to think about, write about,

argue about, be dismayed about. I personally enjoy overthinking this person, but I also just enjoy the way she sings some I murder, some I let go with a bunch of extra syllables. Yeah, pretty good song. Here's what we'll do.

Here's the deal I'll make with you. We will discuss now briefly MIA's various public exploits post paper planes, but I get to tell you about my favorite song on Kala while we do it. My favorite song on Kala is called $20. The super concussive and also somehow quite soothing bass kick on $20. First of all, MIA is in fact the first artist of Asian descent to be nominated for both a Grammy and an Oscar in the same year. In 2009, Paper Plains is up for the record of the year Grammy, while Osaya, her collaboration with a superstar Indian composer, A.R. Raman for the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack,

is up for the Oscar for Best Original Song. She loses both awards and does not attend the Oscars because three days after performing at the Grammys, on her due date, she gives birth to her son, Iqid Edgar Arruler Bronfman. At the time, she is engaged to the baby's father, Benjamin, Bronfman, a musician and philanthropist, an heir to the Seagram's fortune. But that doesn't work out. Let's leave it at that, shall we? I love this song. I don't know any other pop star who's going to tell you how much AK-47s cost in Africa, even if you can't exactly fact-check this assertion, even if that assertion is quite broad. $20 is such an arresting, such a hypnotic song to me. I have this weird, pointless, vivid memory of walking around Manhattan

listening to this record and being so blown away by this song in particular. Fifth Avenue and 13th Street, just west of Union Square. I was heading south. I turned my headphones all the way up until the bass drum blurred my vision. MIA spent years, spent decades talking about the Sri Lankan Civil War in the mistreatment of the Tamil minority. She called it a genocide. She got called a terrorist in part for calling it a genocide. She was often not taken very seriously on account of being a pop star. That documentary Matangi, Maya, MIA, there's an agonizing clip where she's on one of Bill Maher shows, where everyone yells at one another, and she's trying to explain the situation in Sri Lanka to Bill Maher, who looks smarmy as hell, and just wants to know if everyone

from Sri Lanka has a cockney accent. It makes you want to punch a wall. Intense frustration is another key component of the MIA experience, and sometimes it's you experiencing her frustration vicariously, and sometimes it's just her frustrating you directly. That part's not frustrating at all. I just like the way she sings, but we still like T.I. but we still look fly. Like M. I.A. says she sings it a bit weird, but not that weird. The next M. I.A. album is called Maya, and it comes out in 2010, and it's extra bonus abrasive, and it occasions a truly accursed New York Times magazine cover story about MIA, written by infamous pop star takedown artist Lynn Hirshberg,

who writes the following sentence about MIA. Quote, I kind of want to be an outsider, she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry, end quote, pandemonium. The quote that launched a thousand blog posts nay, a million blog posts, the Truffle Fry affair. All the MIA art school discourse, the Seagrams discourse, the Sri Lanka versus London discourse, the experiencing a war zone as opposed to just reading and asking about it, discourse encapsulated.

In the words, I kind of want to be an outsider, she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. I was at the village voice at the time, and this was all any. could talk about or at least write about for weeks. They had us working in shifts. MIA asserted that Lynn Hershberg herself had ordered the truffle fries. That's a pretty good argument. And also, she tweeted out Lynn Hirshberg's phone number. That's a less good argument.

It was chaos. It was ridiculous, but it mattered at the time, man. You know what else? Before this album, Maya came out. MIA's publicists reached out to me and they were like, do you want to ride in a limousine around Manhattan while listening to this album? And I said, yes, and then I did.

This struck me as too bizarre an experience to qualify as a journalistic conflict of interest. I'm like 20% sure that they offered me champagne in the limo and I declined, but I did eat some peanut M&Ms instead. Probably I'm inventing that detail because that's funny to me, but it does sound to me like me. So maybe that did happen. I took this limo ride with my good friend Zach,

who was also working for the voice at the time. And I texted him just now to ask if he remembered this. And he said, I feel like the limo let us out somewhere inconvenient. The limo let us out into the East River, perhaps. I simply don't recall. I put people on the map that never seen a map strikes me as a remarkable boast for a person.

person who spent a lot of time on stage with famously super boastful people. Sometimes I do a thing where I stall for time until I have no time left to talk about stuff I don't want to talk about. It's subconscious. No, it isn't. It's very conscious. Last two things. The video for bad girls off MIA's fourth album, 2013's Matangi is one of the best videos of the century so far. That's one thing. The other last thing, MIA now, right now, has some rather inflammatory and dismaying opinions

about, say, vaccines and cancel culture in the 2024 United States presidential election. It's so tempting to say don't get involved and be done with it, but few pop stars of her generation were more adept at getting

people involved in global politics, which is why her more recent opinions are so dismayed, an inflammatory. She is also deep breath. She is also selling via her fashion brand

Omni, O-H-M-N-I. She is also selling a $100 tinfoil hat amongst other purported radiation blocking articles

of clothing. That's what this product is called and that's what it costs. Tinfoil hat. $100. Quote, with its unique

atomic structure, copper offers exceptional electrical conductivity, deflecting electromagnetic waves, such as Wi-Fi and 5G, with up to 99.999% shielding effectiveness. End quote. My favorite sound MIA has ever made is right here. The sound is ha. That ha is so beautiful to me. Truly. This song $20 interpolates two 500 ton pop songs Blue Monday by New Order and Where's My Mind by the Pixies? And I hardly even notice

because of that ha. Is she joking with this $100 tinfoil hat business? No. Is she trolling? No? No.

I'd like to know the exact science behind that 99.999% shielding effectiveness. But I don't think she's even necessarily trolling. But she's even necessarily trolling. but she knows that you think she's trolling. And maybe that makes her extra good at being extra frustrating.

And if you are frustrated, and if you have been continually extra frustrated by this person, I think that she's thinking good. Our guest today, we are thrilled to welcome back editor and writer Pugia Patel. She has been editor-in-chief of Pitchfork and Spin, and she's written for Deadspin, The Village Voice, Wondering Sound, and many other fine publications. Pugia, welcome back. Hello, glad to be here.

Deep sigh. Well, the last person we talked about was Gwen Stefani, and I'm just realizing that we have hard conversations, you and I in this format, and I'm sorry about that. We need to do an easier, easier one. Yeah, you're really exercising my trauma through this fun. I'm sorry. I'm not doing it on purpose. You sent me a list last night of times you have seen MIA live and it's very, very impressive. It's at least half a dozen times it looks like. How is this person as a live performer? Well, it depends on what era you were catching her in, to be honest. Yes, I'm sure. That's true. When's the first time you saw her? I'm pretty

sure that the first time that I saw her do a full live set was at the 930 club in D.C. where she was either opening for co-headlining with LCD sound system, which is a wild lineup. Okay. And it says here that you danced on stage with her. This was a stream of consciousness list that I sent your way. I'm realizing. Yeah, at some point, she kind of was like, if anyone knows this song, like, if you're a writer, come on stage. And I was like, I'm a writer. And ran up on stage and it was like doing the galang, galang dance, which is kind of like making yourself look like a bird. You know the dance, right?

Sure. That's a good way that I do know. Yeah, I can't do it, but I can imagine. I'm doing it right now. There we go. It came back. It's like riding a bike. Right.

Yes. It's very intuitive, the Galang dance. Is that the only time you've ever danced on stage with an artist at that artist's show? You know, I think I've done it with L.A. more than once. That's not surprising to me. Yeah, but that's because, okay, I'm from Baltimore, went to college in D.C., and she was in Baltimore all the time. working on music around that era.

So it was more of a natural coincidence than you might think. Okay. I don't think so, no. I think I limited it to MIA. We probably should talk about MIA now eventually, but I don't feel I doing that right now. And so when you first heard her, when you first saw her, like, what did you make of her? Did she strike you as a potential like pop star? And did she strike you as somebody who might one day break your heart?

I mean, when I first heard of her, it had to have been around piracy funds terrorism. And I was just so, so, so excited. I mean, thrilled beyond belief. And at the time, obviously, I was like really interested in kind of like the northeast of the United States and like the DJ culture and the club music that was coming out of Baltimore and Philly in New York. And she came through to us because of Diplo and Hollertronics, which is like a kind of scene that I was tangential to at the time. So to see this South Asian woman come with this sound that was unlike anything that existed. And also just very,

like loud and colorful and fun, I was so excited. Yeah, I think a lot of people were. And I sort of wondered, like, if you were really knew, you know, those scenes at that time, like, did she come out of nowhere? Like, was it something that you'd never heard before? Or was there sort of a logical progression that led up to her? She was unlike anything that anyone had heard, for sure. And I think, like, part of the appeal there was that so many of her. references while they were kind of confounding at times were also super reflective of like

a culture that I, I mean, off the top of my head, the I salt and pepper my mango. Like, you only do that if you are a person from a certain part of the world where that is normal, you know? Yeah. And so that was really exciting. But also, like, she, there was so much. happening then. Like there was, you know,

I said I saw M. IA. at 930 Club. I also saw Dizzy Rascal at 930 Club around then. Right, right, right. With Lady Sov and there was this huge grime scene and she's from London, Grime is from London and it had this kind of like Dizzy's big

song had the same kind of I don't know, like spiritual impulses, I want to say as that she kind of had two like did you remember hearing I love you the first time? It was like so wild. That was another one that didn't sound like anything I'd ever heard before. And my sort of natural inclination there is like, oh, I'm just not cool enough to have heard all the music that came

before this that sounds kind of like this. Like it comes out of nowhere for me, but maybe not for other people. But maybe he was another one that was sort of sweet generis. Well, I mean, yes and no, because the grime scene was already mashing up like jungle and garage and sound clash and all of this stuff. But then at the same time, obviously, am I working with Diplo? Like, Diplo was making kind of his whole ethos out of pulling samples from all over the global South, I would say. And like right around then, there was also like the Thivali rhythm, which Thivali is a Hindu holiday. And that rhythm is, is like the West Indian response to like Soca and dance hall. And like Sean Paul and like all of these other dance hall artists, like Wayne Wonder

were using this, this like West Indian rhythm. And then by the Funk was booming and then Baltimore Club was booming. And so I think that like the combination of Diplo already mining from that stuff and then am I being South Asian and being from London combined, it made sense. It did make sense. They were brilliant for doing it. But there was definitely kind of a buzz of all of this stuff in the background too. When I go back and I read the writing about her. I think a lot of critics who immediately loved her and wrote a lot about her, and I include myself,

like we hadn't previously known or at least we hadn't written about, you know, say the Civil War in Sri Lanka. Like, has the conversation about her always been as much political and cultural as it's been musical? Yes, but like,

I mean, yes, but in a kind of shallow way, I would say. Definitely. I think definitely, yes. Shallow in the way that, you know, half of the audience and the critics that were responding to her music had no idea what was going on there. They just kind of were like, broad brush revolution, let's fucking go, you know. Right, right.

But like she also really leaned into that. And I think there were some, like, very genuine and organic things she was pulling from. And then the kind of other end of that, which was like branding, the branding and marketing and, like, freewheeling stream of consciousness. End of that, too. So when you're dancing on stage with her at the 930 clubs, does it occur? Do you think that she's... Do you think this she could potentially be a huge pop star, you know, with like a top five pop song? You think, I'm going to see this person at the Grammys, you know, with Jay-Z and Kanye and everybody.

Like, does the success of paper planes shock you or does it seem inevitable from the first time you heard her? I don't know. I honestly don't think that I thought she would be that big. No. Though with MIA, it wasn't just about the music, right? It was about the ethos and the culture, and it was about the fashion. I remember, like, I was a kind of marketing intern for the fader in 2004. And she was on the cover of the fader with Cameron on the other side, like as the other cover.

All right. And it was like that felt exactly right. Like she could become as famous as Cameron. Yes. But not as famous as Jay-Z. Yeah, yeah. You know. Is Carla her best album?

I don't know. I have personal strong feelings about Arular. Yeah. Yes. I think when I listen to the whole catalog, I still stick with that one. $10, you know, like, yeah, I think. Banana skit. that's that's a great one get yourself an education that's a great skit that is a

that's a Cameron worthy skit right there absolutely I it really is between Kala and Arular I think I have such nostalgic feelings towards Arular and I really do enjoy the skits and the kind of mixtape feeling of that but Kala does have just banger after banger on it. There's, I mean, there's like six bangers on it and then six throwaways to me personally. So I'm torn between the two. Because I did, I wanted to ask you about Jimmy, the song on Kala, you know, which is this very explicit Bollywood thing. And again, like, you know, you've read a ton about MIA. You've written a lot about her. And you know a lot more about her source material than the vast majority of people, you know, who are writing about her. Like, how much better does

she sound when you've got a much better idea of where she's coming from and like what she's drawing from? I think she sounds intuitively much better to me simply because it sounds like a lot of things I grew up on. And I almost, you know, in thinking about the like dull drummers or the kind of barat band style of a lot of of the production or rather a lot of the instrumentation on some of those songs. It's like how someone from New Orleans might feel about second line or how someone from D.C. might feel about Go-Go or it's just kind of like built into you.

It's funny that you mentioned Jimmy because that is a song that was from this like 80s Bollywood hit called Disco Dancer. And I, you know, my parents like that song. So when I played my parents, the MIA version of Jimmy, they were like, why did they ruin this great? Why did they ruin this song? You know. But for me, it obviously hits different, right? Even, you know, even being from Baltimore, you hear the song X-R-R-R-E-R-R-E-R-E-R-E.

too and it samples the think break, like from Lynn Collins, think about it, which is a staple of Baltimore Club music. So I feel like it obviously hits different if you know and have grown up on some of what she's pulling from, but it obviously hit with a lot of people. It hit with you. I okay so you've seen her live a bunch of times like how does her live show and just the environment of her live show change as she's getting bigger and bigger as the stages are getting bigger and bigger and especially like pre and post paper planes now that there's a big hit song you know that everybody's waiting for like sort of what happens in that room and at that show that's different from you know when you first heard her I think it's all about the venue because I really was lucky to see her play with DJs. You know, I saw her play with DJ assault, and I saw her play in a tiny room with Scotty B and Black Star and Diplo. And those rooms felt, you know, really of the spirit of the kind of like mashup club culture when you were in them.

And it didn't matter really when in her career those rooms were happening. It still felt that way. I do think, I remember, I think I covered this for you. actually, Rob, when she headlined maybe, it was either Govball or Hardfest or something.

And it was deontword and sleigh bells. It was like the idea of the festival was loud. You know? Yes. Yes. Was you're going to blow out all of the speakers.

Yes. But I I remember seeing that and that was post paper planes and the sound was bloated and the vibe was just like big and ostentatious in a way that wasn't working.

You know, like she had lost some of the RIS in the big stage format. And I also, you know, okay, like, what year did paper planes come out? The album was out in 07, but I think it, Paper planes was not one of these immediate things, right?

Like it was sort of a slow burn. So I think it's it's not until 08 that it really starts blowing up. You know, like the Pineapple Express and all that shit. Right. But I was just like trying to figure out why paper planes got so big, you know, in this delayed way. and it's just truly that you're going to kill me. Like, it's the same kind of anxious nonchalance and like nihilism and apathy and confidence as Brat Summer. You know, she, it was like.

All right. But it was like right around the like, it was post-Katrina, post-Kanya, post-Kanya saying, George Bush doesn't care about black people, the height of the angst of the war in Iraq, conversations about WMDs, and like Obama was running for president, and white kids love to love to play gangster, as Diplow said. It is true. Did Diplo say that? I think he said some version of that in that Lynn Hirschberg, New York Times piece.

And, you know, he would know. So, yeah. Yes. I feel like there was. The financial crash too, I would add to the things that actually really helped this song. A song about taking all your money is going to hit different. And just like the kind of like casual like I'm running loose in New York City selling weed. I've got more records than the KGB.

Like what? Yeah. I think that it was the compounded just like sense of like youth apathy and nihilism and then like her swaggering in talking about anti-capitalism and and like taking over the world. The Brad, thank you. The Brad Summer thing is beautiful. I'm so sorry for saying Brad Summer. I'm so sorry.

I'm really so sorry. Brad Summer has never come up on this show. did I ever tell you I saw MIA open for Gwen Stefani? No. Basketball. At Oracle Arena in Oakland. No way. Whatever the Love Angel sex baby, whatever that Gwen Stefani record was.

She opens for Gwen Stefani. People were baffled. People, the vast majority of people just could not understand what was happening. It was delightful. I am pretty sure that she. tried to get, like Gwen tried to get MIA on a remix of Holo Back Girl. I'm sure that's true.

I think that happened. That would have been a very shrewd move. So that makes sense. Yes. Wild. You mentioned the New York Times magazine article. I did want to ask about the Truffle Fry affair, which was just such a crazily huge deal you know, among like

music media at the time. Like you've been a writer, you're an editor and editor in chief. Like, what do you make of the wildly adversarial relationship, she's always had, you know, with the media. Obviously, she's always been provocative, but was she trying to be that provocative? Was eating a truffle fry provocative? I mean, no, no. I think tweeting out Lynn Hirshberg's phone number afterwards, but no. It's funny that the truffle fry thing went as far as it did because there were,

maybe 20 other things in that article that signified the kind of distance between her politics and like class position. The branchment of it all, yes. I don't know. Something I have thought about her and I think that we probably know about a lot of singular artists in their both youth and prime is that at some point, like their narrative and the performance of their politics and their actual reality kind of collapse into one another. And that piece really did an incredible job of showing that she was struggling how to navigate all of that.

I mean, I also remember when she called out pitchfork for celebrating the idea of male genius because of how they positioned Diplow or Holler, electronics again, like within her work. Rob, I will also note that I went back into their archives and saw that the first like five or so MIA releases on that site were reviewed by people named Nick, Matt, Mark, Scott, and Tom. A vast cornucopia of experiences, yes. That's very funny. But yeah, I think she's never fully known. how to articulate where she is. And sometimes I don't know that she even knew exactly what her

politics were. Like, I remember in early days, there were lots of conversations about how her father was part of the liberation tigers. But then later, she said he's actually part of the Sri Lankan government. And in fact, like, the Sri Lankan government was trying to prevent her from, you know, so there was just like this kind of cloud of confusion around a lot of her life, like from the beginning of all of this. And I think she never really found the like through line there that she could spend time with to navigate and explore and define holistically. Like it's very clear that she, I don't think that she was trying to be provocative. as much as I think she lost the plot several times, you know?

The truffle fry thing is jumbled up in my head with the Born Free video, which I think is certainly the wildest and most provocative things she'd done up to that point and maybe ever, you know, artistically at least. And also like that hard fest show you mentioned, like I have a vague memory of that of people really hating it. Yeah. They're being like a huge backlash to it. Yeah.

You know, and so it just, it just seemed like all of a sudden, like it's a mess, you know, just everything is going wrong, you know, with the rollout of the Maya record,

but just, but as you say, she's just sort of lost the plot and she's too big now, you know, and it's, it's, she's not articulating herself,

you know, she does know how to articulate herself to an audience this big, you know, and this hungry for another, pop song. Yeah. And we've seen so many artists kind of hit that wall, right?

Right. So. Yes. I mean, Kanye hit that wall. Yeah, I was going to say. I didn't want to say it. I don't want to be the person to bring a brat summer in Kanye in one episode. I was going to, you did Brad, I'll do Kanye.

Yeah. That's fair. I mean, I think, you know, we've seen, Rob, that most of our. biggest pop stars and celebrities are successful on the back of not saying much at all. And now it's really commonplace and mainstream to interrogate why billionaires like Beyonce or Taylor or Rihanna are not explicit about their politics or like it's commonplace to interrogate them publicly about their positions versus their, you. privilege, you know, and when MIA was doing that, initially, she was much more forthright and,

you know, radical, but also didn't have the framework to really explain herself most of the time. And now she's selling $100 tinfoil hats. And tweeting, I guess she's like tweeting, she's like tweeting, increasingly repellent shit. Yeah, yeah. Legitimately upsetting and worrisome, especially if you've always loved this person. Like, we're sort of back to the same question we always ask, which is like, does this change the way you hear her or remember her? Like, what, if anything, can we do about this at this point?

I mean, I have to say my interest in MIA started fading when my interest in her music. did, to be honest, which was probably right after the bad girls era. I think that's true of a lot of people. I think there's a pretty steep drop off from there. And there's also just like there was a massive change in the producer she was working with and everything so that all of that tracks. And I think like that's also around the time that the 5G discourse became like her running platform.

I got to say, like, there's something just so intertwined between my youth identity and the arrival of MIA and just like the possibility that she signaled that I still feel really happy and excited to hear anything off of piracy or Aurela or Kala. But she's not someone that I'm like playing playing in my house, you know. And I fully have not paid attention to her public kind of endeavors in the last maybe even decade, really, absent when I was running magazines and had to cover it for news. So, I mean, I think it's the same way that I feel about Kanye, where it was like there was this real true genius at work. and there's also a lot of things that they're very visibly going through that I cannot I can't hang with like unfortunately unfortunately that part of my my like fan worship of them is

dead now sad it is and again the next time we talk we we'll talk about whatever you want And it'll just be the simplest, easiest. Uh-huh. Pick someone not at all problematic, and we'll talk about them. I dare you to find someone who isn't. Right. I say that and now it's like, how thoroughly am I going to have to vet this person? I'm going to milkshake duck all my favorite artists.

Yeah, once you get to. Totally non-controversial. Once you get to like. reading their tweets dead in the dead of night 60 songs that explain 2022 like you might have better luck

but yeah that's going to be in 2030 where I'm going to be older then I don't know if you'll be older then but I certainly will I'll be decrepit thank you so much for this Pugia

this has been awesome thanks for having me thanks very much to our guest this week Pugia Patel thanks as always to our producers Jonathan Kerma and Justin Sales. Thanks to Olivia Kriri for additional production help and Julianna Rest for fact-checking. Thanks very much to you for listening.

And now, let's all go listen to Paper Plains by MIA. We'll see you next week.