Me and M.I.A.: The Glass Half-Political

At her show at Terminal 5 this past Friday night, M.I.A. came on stage to a seriously thumping bass, nearly blinding all of us in the crowd with her sequined jacket, reflective tights, and sparkling Converse sneakers. As the lyrics to “Bamboo Banga” shot through the venue—“Road runner, road runner / Going hundred mile per hour / With your radio on / With your radio on”—I began to move with the rest of the crowd, feeling the pulse and relishing the moment. In those seconds I loved M.I.A.: her bombastic style, her ’90s kitsch, her attitude, and her persona. And then the next lyrics came out, her voice still seething with rhythm and submerged in the song, and I was reminded of why that love is conditional: “Tamale in Ghana, Ghana, Ghana / India, Sri Lanka, Burma, bamboo banga.” In one song and in less than a minute, M.I.A. went from master stylist to political novice. When the show ended an hour and a half later, I left the venue with a distinct sense of ambivalence, a taste of sweet and sour. A question remained: Can I really endorse M.I.A.’s politics?

This question is not asked often enough, especially given the fact that much of the imagery and posturing M.I.A. adopts positions her as a political actor. During her set at Terminal 5, video footage projected onto the back wall of the stage was as likely to feature graphics of guns and tanks as video sequences of dance sets she recorded in foreign countries. And just before she opened with “Bamboo Banga,” a video clip endorsing revolution in an unnamed country set the stage for her entrance. These political subtexts at her show only underscore political preoccupations very much evident on her latest album, Kala. Tracks with names like “Bird Flu,” “Mango Pickle Down River,” and “World Town”—not to mention “Bamboo Banga” itself—solicit a certain kind of reaction from listeners— one that conflates M.I.A. with an extremely general notion of world politics. As she raps on a song called “20 Dollar,” “I put people on the map that never seen a map.” She herself describes Kala with a string of words: “Shapes, colors, Africa, street, power, bitch, nu world, brave.”

Thus, at her shows and in her music, during interviews and in album reviews, it is clear that M.I.A. begs to be read as a political artist. Doing so, especially for a fan like myself, can be trying: I don’t like what I find when I actually take a moment to think about M.I.A.’s politics. My problem is less with her controversial connections to Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka and more with her general practices of political representation—and “general” might be the key word here. To read M.I.A.’s work as a political text is to read it as general, for no clear statement of political will ever comes through. In and of itself this is not a problem—M.I.A. is an artist, not a politician, and that is okay with me. What is less okay is that as an artist, M.I.A. commits many of the same transgressions often committed by politicians and other powerful individuals. For her, there is an identifiable space outside of the metropolitan West, but it is largely undifferentiated and basically exotic. It is, in a word, a “general” space. The lyrics of “Bamboo Banga” are proof enough: Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, and Burma exist not as unique places and people, but simply as abstract notions of foreign places. M.I.A. considers them together, with the word linking them being, unfortunately, bamboo.

The basic premise behind this borderline offensive formulation underwrites much of M.I.A.’s work—she produces foreign people and places for consumption in the marketplace, thereby destroying any agency she might have given these people. The children dancing in her video footage are not speaking for themselves, nor are they acting for themselves. We do not know what country they come from, and we do not know their stories. They disappear after her show, and we do not hear of them again. But they are smiling for M.I.A.’s camera lens, and for M.I.A. this seems to be enough—they will give her the kind of credibility she wants. In this sense, M.I.A. is roughly analogous to the Bonos , Angelinas, and Mia Farrows of the world—except that unlike those advocates for some abstraction of “Africa,” M.I.A. is not involved with any identifiable projects that are actually trying to improve conditions on the continent. M.I.A.’s stance, then, is politics-lite, a thin attempt to imbue her music with political energy. In the case of M.I.A., “Africa” sells, and we certainly buy it.

So it is that I am left to confront probably the least important question of all: Where does this all leave me? Last Friday, it left me sweaty, smiling, and looking for more. Despite my problems with M.I.A.’s pop politics, the sense of ambivalence I had upon leaving Terminal 5 was largely an intellectual position, not the kind of thing that prevented me from rushing the stage when people began getting up there to dance. I enjoyed every moment in spite of myself. Maybe this makes me a hypocrite, or maybe it makes me a fan of good music. For while M.I.A.’s politics definitely need some fine-tuning, there is a lot that she does right.