A piece of food has never generated so much controversy. Blame it on an infamous truffle-flavored french-fry that sparked a Twitter rebuttal, a blogosphere debate, and a New York Times Magazine retraction. Holding said fry is U.K.-born singer M.I.A., no stranger to controversy of late as she gears up for the summer release of her eponymous album ///Y/. A recent profile in the aforementioned publication – “M.I.A’s Agitprop Pop” by Times journalist Lynn Hirschberg – subtly critiqued the artist for speaking from an ivory tower of privilege.

The most telling section of the article detailed how M.I.A., also known as Maya Arulpragasam, chomped on fries over lunch at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, as she proudly talked about being an outsider, sometimes perceived as a terrorist. M.I.A. fought back by posting Hirschberg’s phone number on her Twitter page, promising her own personal account of the interview. In the weeks since, M.I.A. has posted her own audio clips from the lunch with Hirschberg on her N.E.E.T. record label website. The clips reveal that the writer insisted upon ordering the fries in question. A subsequent retraction from the magazine acknowledged that certain quotes by M.I.A. were taken out of context and re-arranged by Hirschberg. Nothing was said about the fries.

The ugly spar between the two women, however amusing, has forced a broader re-examination of M.I.A’s music. Bloggers and critics are once again asking if she’s the real deal, or a poseur playing at a game of calculated identity politics. As a refugee of Tamil descent who escaped persecution in Sri Lanka, M.I.A. often speaks to issues of racial profiling, media stereotypes, and state policing in her work. While her unconventional beats have always garnered significant praise, some critics have questioned the messages underlying them. The strange activity on her Twitter page and tirade-fuelled interviews in several magazines provide further head-scratchers. Her motivation may be righteous anger, or a move to gain publicity… or perhaps a mix of the two. And as M.I.A. becomes increasingly mainstream, has the art and the artist been co-opted by the very systems of consumerism that she rails against?
alt text

Case in point: when club-goers drunkenly mimic shooting one another during her “Paper Planes” number, the political weightiness of connecting immigrant exploitation and migrant labour is obviously lost on the audience. In the same vein, does the artist have a say in how her music is used when a sleek Honda Civic television advertisement blares “Galang,” a track that in actuality examines drug trafficking and police/gang retaliation? Does she cease to be edgy when a song she wrote for Slumdog Millionaire is nominated for an Academy Award? In short, I am interested in how M.I.A.’s output becomes something that can be taken up as an affectation – a political idea that can be bought, consumed, and trotted out in the name of “resistance.”

Chris Berube, the host of Electric Boogaloo, a weekly open-format music program on CIUT 89.5, agrees that M.I.A.’s lyrics and politics need to be closely examined by her listeners, particularly because of the openness of social networking sites. On-line interfaces like Facebook allow consumers to publicly display their musical and cultural affiliations. However, he points out, “by doing so in a Facebook profile, you are making a statement, conscious or unconscious, about the kind of social group you would like admission to. Perhaps it is possible to enjoy M.I.A. privately, and purely physically, but as long as we project our enjoyment of her in some public forum, we must own up to the consequence of what that entails – we end up owning her message as our own.” Indeed, it may be necessary for her fans to think about what it means to admire her outspokenness, and for what reasons they may find it appealing.

Hirschberg is not the only one to bear the brunt of M.I.A.’s vocal and Twitter-mediated putdowns in recent weeks. Lady Gaga and tween obsession Justin Bieber have also been called out for their contributions to pop music. In an interview with NME Magazine earlier this year, M.I.A. took Gaga to task for purported vocal mimicry and selling out to the corporations. M.I.A. pointed out excessive and blatant product placement in the music video for “Telephone”, in which Gaga collaborates with Beyoncé saying, “Lady Gaga plugs 15 things in her new video. Dude, she even plugs a burger!… people say we’re similar, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic. She sounds more like me than I fucking do!”

The divide between the two female singers – both signed by Interscope Records – may not be as vast as Arulpragasam claims. Odessa Parker, the editor of Toronto-based style and culture publication Plaid Magazine regards the M.I.A./Gaga binary as two sides of the same coin: “She and Gaga are of the same ilk; neither, I think, are really that talented and go to extreme lengths to let everyone know just how different and groundbreaking they are.”

In essence, Lady Gaga sells her image and name for branding, while M.I.A. packages a politics of resistance that can be just as easily consumed by an audience. By way of producing within a system of advertising, selling, and profiting, M.I.A. cannot remove herself from these same networks of labour.

Shock value also reigns supreme in the world of M.I.A.’s resistance art. Her recent “Born Free” music video engendered outrage and squeamishness in its depiction of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. The video, directed by Romain Gavras, is set in an unnamed dystopia in which armed forces infiltrate a ghetto, round up pale red-haired individuals (“gingers”), and deploy them to an internment camp. There, the prisoners are utilized in a brutal game of human target practice, with the officers in hot pursuit. The video’s most talked-about moments feature a young boy being shot close-range in the head, and a man’s limbs and torso being blown apart as he steps on a mine.

YouTube and Google had purportedly removed the clip, although in some areas it is available and labeled with an age restriction. Parker sees this as a very strategic and deliberate move on the artist’s part – “Every time M.I.A. does something, she looks more and more like the shrewd business woman she undoubtedly is. Are you telling me she didn’t know YouTube would ban her video, thereby making it the topic of every media source’s conversation for days?” she says. Ostensibly meant to be an analogue to the ethnic violence that occurs in Sri Lanka and other countries, the reaction has expectedly been divided as to whether or not the piece was effective at all.

Ricky Varghese, a PhD. candidate in the Sociology & Equity Studies program at OISE, looks closely at M.I.A. and Lady Gaga, and has examined the controversial music video in question: “Both M.I.A. and Gaga are interesting figures in many ways. An interesting long-term project would be a comparative study on the public, social and/or political perception of M.I.A. and Gaga[…] I find it fascinating – both interestingly and troublingly – in how Gaga has become an important spokeswoman for feminism. While in many ways I might not entirely disagree with the position per se, I was wondering to myself what if Gaga was a woman of colour? How would a female body of colour be received if it was doing the same things that Gaga was doing? Similarly, how would an audience receive something like MIA’s “Born Free” video if she had been white?”

In her work on the representation of black bodies, feminist scholar bell hooks has argued how women of colour present a problem for film production and cinema studies. When these bodies appear in popular and academic commentary, they are coded as unfamiliar or racially different. This is a key point to consider when M.I.A.’s gender, her political background, and her ethnicity are constantly invoked in biographies, write-ups, or interviews to contextualize the significance of her music. This is, perhaps, the double-edged sword of producing art within spaces and domains coded as heterosexist, white and seemingly neutral. Accordingly, why is Lady Gaga’s national/ethnic “background” never discussed while arguing the merits of her artistry and politics?

When M.I.A. is conceptualized as an immigrant, a rebel, a troublemaker, or a South Asian – does she willingly play into these roles or does she resist? In fact, the media and her audience may rely on these very labels to make some sense of her. Anupa Mistry, a contributing editor for the culture blog The Ashcan, observes that write-ups of M.I.A. regularly reduce her to “an exotic, small brown girl.” Yet it is those very identifiers that “strip her of any power her words may hold[…] regardless of whether the intent is to humanize her or serve as a means of sexism/racism. That said, she also others herself — and rightfully so, as Sri Lankan-ness is fundamental to her worldview and her aesthetic — but because she’s one of the first of her kind to make it, this leads to factual discrepancies and fetishization from the journalists/critics that write about her.” To be sure, M.I.A.’s privilege and position allow a degree of flexibility in inhabiting such unfamiliar and newly-made spaces for female, non-white artists.

Yet this is, arguably, what makes M.I.A. so compelling. She has the leeway to adorn herself with certain labels, and also to remove them in the same vein. With the exception of “Jimmy” (a throwback to retro tracks dominant in ‘60s and ‘70s commercial Indian film musicals), she avoids the conventional Bollywood motifs altogether. Yet references to hustling, gangs and drug trafficking run rampant in the majority of her other tracks, and her persona takes on a multitude of complex intersections. Therefore, the question of cultural or ethnic authenticity is no longer clear-cut in legitimizing the worth of an artist’s output. This is very likely what makes it so difficult to write about M.I.A. and frame her work in a more straightforward, unfettered manner.

The “doubleness” of her art and politics can be perplexing. Her dubious flirtations with violence and gun culture remain frustratingly oblique. Furthermore, it is difficult to make sense of her attacks on the music establishment and other artists when she profits from producing and merchandising through her clothing line and record company. It would be an interesting project to see if M.I.A.’s art, her image, and her politics could possibly be looked at individually on their own terms. It would also be fruitful to keep track of how her next album is received in the press and among her listeners, and if anything changes in the wording.

Several months ago, M.I.A. notably took issue once again with a New York Times article entitled “The 31 Places to Go in 2010,” which framed Sri Lanka as the number one destination for curious tourists. M.I.A., objecting to the depiction of the country as a visitor-friendly paradise, shot back via Twitter with photographs of victims of the country’s internal civil war. She also wrote up and performed an impromptu musical protest track named “Space Odyssey,” suggesting that the writers might take “a moment or two/to introduce my point of view” – a mix of spectacle, understandable outrage, and undeniable talent.

M.I.A. remains an artist who profits on the proliferation of new media. Whether fans download her work, watch her music videos or attend her concerts, there is no way of denying the fact that she has become a brand. She is a product that can be experienced, in the same manner that her politics can be purchased. No matter how serious her message, it is important for her to also acknowledge her place in that dynamic, alongside the Gagas and Biebers of the world.