“Spin” Comes Around To M.I.A.

anono | November 26, 2008 10:00 am

Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who’s contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Spin:

So Spin puts M.I.A. on the cover of its December 2008 issue, some four months after Your Correspondent suggested that the Sri Lankan provocatress would be a bigger risk on the newsstand than, say, a milk-fed Welsh lass proffering pasteurized soul music.

Swell: YC believes Ms. Arulpragasam to have made astounding, magnificent music, and she thus deserves to be known by a greater variety of humanity than the beat freaks and crit-lit crowd of the blawgerati. Yet not only only did she not appear on the mag’s cover last year when Kala was released, it seems like a better time for a Spin cover would have been around this summer, when “Paper Planes” broke out via the Pineapple Express trailer.

If Lorraine Ali, the Newsweek scribe who penned the cover feature “M.I.A. Pow,” asked her interlocutee whether she’s troubled that the only reason that “Paper Planes” was picked for the trailer is due to the fact that it reminds people of the Clash’s “Straight to Hell,” the reader knows not. The reader also may be curious why M.I.A. continually makes reference to “the system,” a shorthand term for dark oppressive forces that conspire against the proletariat that YC has not heard used in common parlance since he was born. (Here YC should say that M.I.A., the daughter of a onetime radical Tamil Tiger, has led probably led a much more eventful and less comfortable life than he, and thus her views on various political and economic injustices have some weight.)

Ali gets around to discussing the tension between M.I.A.’s beliefs regarding the “system,” and her new in-laws, the Bronfmans, a clan that sold the Seagrams beverage corporation and briefly owned the entertainment conglomerate from whom she now records. Ali does not address the latter fact in the piece but does mention the former: “…her late grandmother was an avid drinker of Martell cognac…’she was, after all, Seagram’s number-one customer,’ ” says M.I.A.

Ali also makes a point that “the unlikely hit, which includes the hook “all I want to do [bang, bang, bang, bang ka-ching] is take your money,” leaked into the American consciousness right about the time those mortgage companies—who’d been taking our money—imploded, bringing the economy down with them.” YC certainly never made that connection, but he’s all for entertainment journalism that limns artistry to the wider world: luckily for Spin, this reference still resonates in light of deepening financial despair. In any case, Ali is a pro, and the story is a fine one, notwithstanding YC’s quibbles.

Now, some quick notes…

1. Chris Norris, a writer who YC holds in great esteem, doesn’t get much out of Elvis Costello in “The Spin Interview.” This could be because a.) there has been so much written about Costello for 30 years that he’s pretty much exhausted as a point of interest, or b.) your average rock writer becomes a genuflecting, slobbering sycophant in his presence, since Costello embodies their fantasies of what they would do should they have any talent of charisma. (YC has done just that while interviewing Nikki Sixx a number of times.)

2. In “Heaven Down Here,” Marc Spitz–a former Spin staffer and playwright who evinces a consuming, almost unreasonable interest in high-haired, ghostly-pallored, and mopey 1980s “indie” bands from the United Kingdom–tells the story of Echo & the Bunnymen. Spitz did not succeed in changing YC’s mind that the band is frightfully dull: YC believes that Echo & the Bunnymen’s recorded output, combined with that of the Cure, does not remotely amount to this one song.

3. “Crazy/Beautiful” finds a former Idolator curator spending time with Toronto hardcore terrorists Fucked Up. Good piece, which is probably all that YC, whose band is discussed in Herr Raftery’s new book, should say.

4. Finally, one Matthew Newton explores the decline of sampling in a front-of-book piece titled, ahem, “Is Sampling Dying?” Newton presents evidence that, in light of vanishing revenues in the music biz, copyright holders are making the practice at the very least prohibitive. He also interviews the RZA, who proclaims that “without sampling in hip-hop, it’s really a soggy-ass form of music.” YC believes that recontextualization in music and all art has resulted in lots of great shit, but RZA’s words sound a lot like Jeff “Skunk” Baxter or some other rock guy claiming that “if there’s no guitar, it’s not rock and roll.”