Two Songs
I would not be surprised if this was the most listened-to song of the past five years in certain circles.
I was introduced to M.I.A. during my freshman year of college in the fall of 2007, just after the release of Kala. At the time, M.I.A. was certainly not an underground artist by any means, but she certainly had not gained the notoriety that she would gain after “Paper Planes” was featured on the trailer for Pineapple Express, for example. And I think it’s hard to hear “Paper Planes” in the same way now. I heard the song at a bar or a café the other day, it’s not really important where. And the song has held up fairly well in the intervening years, but here’s something that I do not think has held up:
M.I.A. third world democracy
I got more records than the K.G.B.
So…no funny business
It’s impossible, for me at least, to not find those lines ridiculous. Maybe I should have always found those lines ridiculous, but in 2007 I didn’t. This likely has something to do with me and shifts in my political views in the past several years, and it likely has something to do with M.I.A. herself and the difficulty in taking her politics seriously when, for example, this song is featured on the Pineapple Express trailer and when she told people to harass that New York Times reporter and when she made unsubstantiated claims of genocide, etc.
But I think another reason these lines are difficult to take seriously is that there has been a real change in our culture since 2007, something like a loss of innocence. In the summer of 2007, you could throw out phrases like “third world democracy,” which don’t articulate an actual political program but establish a set of political allegiances, with sincerity, there was room to do that. I’m not sure there is such room anymore. Or rather, I don’t know if there is such room to be heard as being sincere. Intentions don’t matter. I imagine M.I.A. is just as sincere as she was in 2007, but it’s become harder to hear her that way. Because of course you would say something about the “third world” and the “K.G.B.” and probably “George W. Bush” and “capitalism.” These words take scare quotes now because it’s not actually about the third world or the K.G.B. or George Bush or capitalism. It’s not about those political allegiances really, even if you do have those political allegiances. It’s about projecting a certain self-image, it’s about cultural capital. (I bring up cultural capital because I just read this article, about which I would like to say many contradictory things.) Irony has become more important in the intervening years, which isn’t to say that it wasn’t important in 2007, but perhaps it had a narrower scope.
There is one song that comes to mind and which I think embodies the sort of contemporary zeitgeist. A song that, to me, was designed to hit all the right buttons and appeal to all the right sorts of people. It’s “Better Off Without You” by Summer Camp:
I can’t hear this song as sincere, regardless of the intentions of Summer Camp. This insincerity isn’t a bad thing, though. It’s actually a very good song. But it’s too perfectly crafted. (The same goes for the Instagramed music video.) It’s a case in how to combine elements that were once cool into something that is “cool.”
There are many differences between “Better Off Without You” and “Paper Planes.” Thematically, musically, culturally they are drawing from very different sources. And so maybe it’s silly to try to compare them at all. And maybe I’m just full of shit. Maybe none of this makes sense, and I’m just projecting my own cultural prejudices onto “the culture,” which is a phrase I use so that I don’t have to do the work of defining what I am talking about. I’m sure there were people who always scoffed at M.I.A. And I’m doubtful that my analysis would hold up to any sort of serious scrutiny. But I also think there’s a chance I have something right.
