One of the sources of creative vitality in Third World popular cultures is the uncanny ability to seize on local or global events and use them as symbols or metaphor, or simply to re-purpose names and words from the news for the purpose of entertainment that, by virtue of this method of assembly, is never completely innocent and certainly not mindless.
Also evidenced, not coincidentally, in the best hip-hop, this instinct to appropriate the signifiers of large and possibly uncontrollable events and redeploy them in the service of local meaning results in a constant renewal process in which, as one signifier runs its course, another emerges to supplant it, bringing with it new nicknames for objects in regular use — minibuses, beer bottles, bank notes, lengths of cloth — and new jokes and new dances and new fashions.
With “Bird Flu,” her new single, your girl M.I.A. taps into this endlessly rich seam. Vaguely mysterious, unpredictable, global in scope and potentially catastrophic, the bird flu that moved across several continents in 2006 was perfect for semiotic appropriation. Especially since birds, especially poultry, in various stages of ecstasy or distress have long been inspiration for dance moves — the Funky Chicken and the Dirty Bird come to mind. So it’s a chicken stuttering across a dusty village street that sets, in the video, the rhythm for the song, and much dancing, declamation, and additional avian imagery ensues. No connection to the “real” bird flu, and yet, all the connection in the world.
It’s a cool song, but before we rush to celebrate its originality I want to share with you another Bird Flu song that actually predates homegirl’s.This one came out in Côte d’Ivoire immediately after the disease scare passed. The hot style there now is called coupé-décalé; it’s a dance-driven pop that has taken French-speaking Africa and its diaspora by storm, supplanting soukouss as the let’s-get-down party sound of the moment. It’s also a very democratic music: the production values are pretty liberal and pretty much anybody can make a track and see if it catches. A guy called DJ Lewis did that with “Grippe Aviaire” (Bird Flu), which generated a little mini-crazy of people flapping like chickens wherever Francophone Africans congregate. Watch it here: the video is grainy and homegrown but it makes a cool compare-and-contrast exercise with Miss Maya’s track and imagery, with different beats, moves, and locations but a similar and salutary gonzo energy.
Bonus cut: the definitive treatment of the Funky Chicken, by Rufus Thomas at the classic 1972 Wattstax concert.
both videos are insane! love it.
Now that’s some ish! Fantastic! Many thanks for the links.
I love it too! Leave it to Siddhartha to do an M.I.A. post 🙂
Anybody know where the M.I.A. video was shot? For some reason, the styles struck me as more African or West Indian — or even Latin American — than something you’d find on the subcontinent. Those were clearly desi people, but the kids in the brightly colored, oversized shirts, the bandanas, the dance moves… it was like a futbol commercial! (Am I trippin’?) I’m loving this festive-without-being-bollywood direction though…
nice tracks….
From here:
A fisherman, eh?
Thanks rasudha. I’m a northie, and apparently I haven’t seen enough of the south 🙂
MIA’s video and music is reminiscent of the “dappangoothu” style very popular in T.Nadu and shown in most movies set in small towns or villages. If you watch tamil movies from the 80s and early 90s, you will see that. she does a good job on making it totally energetic and fun.
I dug both tunes and definitely smiled when I heard the tavil sample in MIA’s song.
Prabhu Deva video here
Just a quick find here. If you put Prabhu Deva as a search in Youtube, you will find many
This Tamil music totally rocks! I love how all this stuff is so not within the corporate pop structure.
M.I.A. gives ammunition to us 2nd geners from the Drrty Drrty who are trying to poke a hole in the cultural hedgemony imposed upon us by our brothers and sisters from up north.
Amazing stuff! Thanks!! The beat makes you move.
Anyone has the Bird Flu lyrics?
my word!!! that was desh, dear – and i think you need to dust off that passport and take a trip down south. once you go tamizh, you wont be thinking zhati’. even tho’ mathangi says ‘south coast of india’ – that was very much tamil nadu – from the guys with the hefty pecs to the roosters to the badass urchins. tamil nadu has thankfully escaped the colonial clutch ™ IMHO – i guess you’re relatively fresh eyes are seeing the difference.
Fantastic post – had me “desk dancing.”
Bird Flu lyrics
[Link]
Read more about her here.
Thanks tamasha. 🙂
Her support for tigers is definitely not subtle.
agreed. she is a bit of a putz. still, she’s a musician and entertainer. hopefully she cant do any real damage. of course, to have a brain is to never be young and one can admire her tenacity and passion and be young once again.
Can you do that?
the little kid in orange doing the pelvic thrusts has stolen my heart.
any time, all the time – youth comes at a price – one is only as old as one’s history known to others – purge all ties and relationships and you’re come into the world fresh as a daisy, pure as a baby.
the notion extends to musicians as well. mathangi is young – if she’s parroting the same themes two years from now, she’ll turn into an old amma reminiscing her glory days staring across from a bottle of scotch. that’s where the good musicians distinguish themselves – i love u2 for this reason, and appreciate of gorillaz and randy bachman and dave grohl and even that singer of spirituals who turned up one day in bondage gear on a talk show (forget his name). turn turn turn.
but of course – it’s an adman favorite – showing kids or monkeys doing adult things is so funny/cute. a prodigy gone old is like bad cabbage. imagine the guy twenty years later doing the same thrusts against a randaom bottom by the side of the street. the guy would probably be stoned. of course – positive reinforcement at this age is probably setting up this kid for the same fate. anyway… back to your regular programming.
Point happily taken! And this little Bihari thought Bengali culture was all there was to envy. No more! (Yeah, that’s right Siddhartha, I’m done with you Bongs :P) I’m packing my bags and heading down south.
of topical interest – yellow fever by fela kuti – linking the practice of skin lightening to the diseases plaguing the continent (hope you can see where the mind’s at or i’ll just seem a troll). ok i’ll just shut up now. g’day folks.
LOVE these!! Thanks Siddhartha. btw, when I was in europe this past summer, some of the hottest french rappers were women, I got totally hooked!
visit http://www.beatofindia.com and see the fantastic initiative they have taken in preserving the folk songs of India. You can listen to a bhojpuri song here (lyrics included).
Punjabi folk songs by Swarn Noora here.
Amazing folk songs (by Kabir, Meera, Surdas) from Malwa here.
Shruti, if you haven’t you should go to Kenduli to hear the Bauls. 🙂
🙂
MC Solaar. Even my wife likes him.
‘Bird Flu’ is complete terror chic.
The bird flu dance:
I would be annoyed by the bit about making bombs with rubber bands, except I actually couldn’t follow most of the lyrics without help! (Sometimes unintelligibility is exactly the right way to go)
Still, the beat rocks, and the use of the Tamil village style (“dappangoothu,” as someone said earlier… I’m going to remember that word) is brilliant — especially for her. I was worried her second album would be too slick and London/flash/pop. Clearly, that’s not where she’s going.
It’s raw and totally hardcore — it makes you want to forget bhangra.
M.I.A really milks the hype. I remember her as a stuck-up cokehead hanging off trendies left, right and centre. If she’s big enough to allude to Tamil Tigers in almost every video, why doesn’t she just spell out her position on that. It’s an issue you don’t wanna f*** with. Its serious and not just fodder for trendies with little information on Sri-Lanka’s history to jerk off to.
don’t care much for this gangsta posturing…there’s already too much of it in Canada & UK. I guess you can sell just about anything with a catchy tune.
About the dance, it’s pretty typical in Tamil Nadu. I associate it with ecstatic Murugan & Mariamman worship, but apparently it has found its way into secular life. Nothing phoren about it
Cool videos…It’s nice to see an alternative. Sriram, represent!!
M.I.A.’s lyrics are not only troubling (“I go on my own making bombs with rubber bands”) but just BAD…like 7th grade composition Bad going back to her earlier stuff (though not as juvenile as her label mate at Interscope records, Gwen Stefani). What do the lyrics have to do with the serious issue of Bird Flu? Please tell me I’m missing something?
“A protocol to be a Rocawear model? it didnÂ’t really drop that way my legs hit the hurdle
A protocol to be a rocker on a label? it didnÂ’t really drop that way our beats were too evil”
Oh…didn’t catch this…so M.I.A. is capitalizing on another serious issue (LTTE and now Bird Flu) to get her music across…how inspirational.
The raw and hardcore part comes from indigenous music. The question is, what does M.I.A. add to the mix, other than dumb posturing?
tamasha, how could you read those lyrics without getting nauseous? The background is totally ridiculous 🙂
This video was fun! I loved the little kids, and the sound. Maybe I am a sucker for M.I.A., but has she ever had profound lyrics? I mean, “Galang”.. what does that even mean? I don’t know, but it gets my ass shakin!
I’m going to be one of the few people here who does not like this video. I find it painful, annoying and very unoriginal. As usual, the lyrics make no sense whatsoever, but perhaps this is just not my genre of music.
To the recent comments: my thoughts exactly. There was something so contrived about how Maya capitalized on her past to get her record deal and sickening to see white, middle class musos write about her profile and glorifying it to bleeding death. I’ve met the girl, who is actually about 30 years old, before she got signed and she really isn’t that intelligent.
The situation in Sri-Lanka is tragic and those of my dad’s generation are saddened by the shit that’s been going on between the Tamils and Sinhalese, something that didn’t exist for a thousand years until white colonialism reared its ugly head. How dare she compare the PLO to the LTTE? And how annoying it is to see a brattish fashion victim pose with village kids and claim to be underground. The beats are tight, but the pseoudo-political message, capitalizing on tragedy which doesn’t belong to her, posing and then claiming to be cooler than thou just make my tummy turn.
I don’t necessarily disagree with any of the past few comments. I agree with Amardeep in that I can’t understand what she’s saying, but I’m not that interested in finding out. I definitely take issue with her support of LTTE, but I don’t think anyone can go so far as to say that her music lacks any artistic merit. It’s important that there’s an artist out there creating dance music that has an organic quality and political awareness, even if it might be somewhat disingenuous.
M.I.A’s father belonged (belongs) to the LTTE. Although I like her from a musical point of view, I am a bit confused about some of her lyrics. My hope is that she is trying to promote peace and show how crappy life is with war, terrorism, etc. Or, at the very least, not glorify violence.
Wow, so the MIA-haters come out of the closet just as the the Galang-fever started to wear off…
I’m not saying MIA is the most intelligent, fully representative voice of our generation or even our community but then…who is? The only reason she’s repeatedly held up as THE go-to rebellious brown hip hop girl is because she’s one of the few out there making the trek from indie to mainstream.
I don’t think that saying ‘she isn’t that smart’ is v helpful because she never seems to have said she was, and frankly, from reading her MySPACE BlOG!!! OMG EATING MANGOES in the DARK! IN THE MOTHERLAND! fucking LOVELY and IVE GOT A GUN and some MONKEYS outside in the GARden YO!!!!’… I think she’s being pretty open about just being who she is.
Like it or not, there’s a lot of people who like that, a lot of people who just wanna hear good beats and fun music, lots of people who connect with her music. In fact the whole point of her music is to present politically important issues in the format of hip hop. She said herself ‘I wanted to sound like I was saying nothing’ by using simple lyrics to get her message(s) across.
I’m not trying to create big pro-MIA/anti MIA fight, just saying that in reality there’s a lot of (so-termed) middle-class – even though growing up I don’t think she was – postcolonial people out there who shouldn’t be shot down for highlighting issues that may not directly affect them. Maybe she didn’t stay in Sri Lanka and get shot/raped…but that doesn’t mean she can’t write and sing about the situation there. A lot of people in this site haven’t grown up in South Asia afflicted by poverty and war but that doesn’t mean we can’t discuss those issues either.
Maybe her shit’s not that great to some but at least she’s got her own voice and her own spin on things. It’s nice to see a brown girl in a big grey hoodie and purple tights instead of some tacky-assed chick in a see-through Bollywood outfit/sad Beyonce getup!
I’m just finding the whole thing very selfish and thats what makes the music sound like cacophony. It doesn’t have to be that way – she could be spreading peace and getting respect for it. As a Sri-Lankan, I certainly don’t respect her.
Tash, you are missing my point. Bopping around to tribal beats here are cheap and self-serving. Cool outfits and don’t warrant respect either.
MIA at the outset was trying to glorify the LTTE but then it seemed she realised that that was getting her no where. The USA denied her entry into the country over her perceived support for a terror group banned there. That must have come as a sharp, stinging slap to her. She must have realised that supporting terrorism and violence wasn’t going to do her any good, because in her recent interviews she doesn’t appear to sound like a brainwashed idiot spitting about a conflict that she was never a party to. Moreover, people are identifying her as Sri Lankan and thus nullifying her separatist shenanigans. In my view, artists should promote peace and harmony and not violence, terror and hatred through their productions. One can only hope that MIA will continue to provide us with tantalisng music, minus the gangster propaganda.
Lani, you’re not getting mine either. I respect your opinion that MIA is making ‘tribal beats’ sound cheap in some apparently selfish way. I’m just saying that she’s an artist, creating an individual representation of her views through her her music. She’s not acting in any way as a politician or a representative of the Sri Lankan, or any other, community.
I’m just saying that while not everyone has to like her art, we could just respect her for expressing her own voice in the ways she knows best. Frankly, flawed as she is, I’d rather hear what she has to say as an individual artist than listen to someone like Shilpa Shetty who’s painted herself as some sort of anti-racism beacon of hope for the South Asian community, because MIA’s someone who doesn’t mind being controversial. Do I agree with her appropriation of terrorist symbols and motifs in her lyrics and music videos? Not always.
But in a way what she’s doing reminds me of how Marilyn Manson was targeted after the Columbine high school shootings, and his response in Bowling For Columbine – was he really the villain or was he just someone who was an easily visible representation of ‘evil’ while state terrorism ensured that Kosovo was bombed to pieces at the time of the shootings? Like Manson, MIA might be an easy weapon to target because she openly mentions the Tamil Tigers and her own views on terrorism. But at least she puts her shit out there in the open. It’s people who hide their views who I think really deserve to be the targets of your (justified) anger.
I also think, that at the end of the day, within communities like this blog, her influence is amplified because this is a South Asian blog. To most people out there she just seems like an indie, danceable artist who meshes Tamil, Brazilian and other beats in a quirky way. Rest assured, any alleged terrorist sympathies she sends out are never going to reach as mainstream an audience as Gwen Stefani, Fergie or other female solo artists.
I do know what you mean about her flaws, I’m just saying that at the end of the day, she’s a hip hop artist and she’s creating her own art and dancing around like a crazy, loud, rude, independent brown girl. And even if that doesn’t warrant your respect, it does still earn some of mine.
Too bloody right! No wonder ‘galang-fever’ never really happened in the UK. Her music isn’t underground at all it claims to be but isn’t, her politics are a mess and have got her into a mess and she is supposedly so opinionated I’m spposed to let it slide because she’s brown like me. I don’t think so.
MIA is a talentless hack, excuse my French. Anyone with half a brain can string together something resembling her “profound” lyrics. Click clak daba daba sack mango in a rack – there’s mine. Now let me dance around like a moron on crack and have boing boing noises and clop clap beeps and call my song “mango in a rack” and when people interview me I can go on and on and on about how my daddy is a rebel and how, omg, he doesn’t want to know me, and, omg, I am a “freedom fighter.” I much prefer the music of other Desi artists in the UK. Swami are a hundred times better.
I think she cares more about her next pair of reebok classics then any blown up tamils or sinhalese. I love Fundamental, I remember seeing them in the Anti-Nazi League festival in Brixton in 1993 when all that racist shit was kicking off in UK and the rest of Europe. I was only 12 but man, that music had power.