perfidy

A few weeks ago I got it into my head to write a piece about popular music and political violence. You know, from "John Brown's Body" up through Bob Dylan's Masters of War and Rage Against The Machine's Bomb Track, plus Irish songs like "Rising of the Moon," and Fela Kuti too. But to do justice to a piece like that would really take a mound of sociological and demographic data that I neither have, nor would gladly research and cook down just to put on the interweb for free. So the piece I had in mind lolled and languished, half-started and nowhere near any conclusions. Everything I grasped at dissolved into air.

The problem is at the end of the day bullets have killed approximately a billion more people than guitars have. Including the unfortunate cases of former Yardbird Keith Relf and former Shadow John Rostill, both electrocuted while playing the guitar, I think the score is something like bullets: a billion, guitars: threeish. That disparity has to be accounted for. It seems that words draw less blood than weapons, and the very question of how to relate music to violence is a difficult one to frame. As Frank Zappa said, music is just decorated bits of time.

But then again that is letting musicians off the hook too easily. Sometimes music can matter, or Union soldiers wouldn’t have sung an anthem to a domestic terrorist (“John Brown’s Body”) when they marched into battle against the Confederacy.

The reason I started the now defunct piece in the first place was because of M.I.A. M.I.A. is a 28 year old conceptual artist from London who came by a secondhand drum machine and started creating beats and laying down tracks. Those tracks eventually became an album, Arular, that has become a chart hit in the UK and a critical sensation on this side of the Atlantic.

M.I.A.'s real name is Maya Arulpragasam. She was born in Sri Lanka and grew up dodging bullets and capture by the Sri Lankan army before escaping to London with her parents at age 11. She spent her teenage years in some truly dire London council estates (that's "the projects") and at first found she could not start school because her English was not good enough. Safe to say, she has had an "interesting" life, if by "interesting" you mean dangerous, bizarre, and difficult. The nickname “M.I.A.” is a double entendre which in London is understood to primarily mean “Missing in Acton,” Acton being (I am told) the council estate she grew up in.

As for “Arular,” that’s her father, a former member of the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan dissident group recognized as a terrorist group by several nations including the United States. This is the reason for her family’s flight from Sri Lanka and the direct inspiration for a good amount of her music and artwork.

M.I.A.’s music amalgamates an entire world's beats into one exhilarating stew. Imagine a Sri Lankan woman from London rapping Jamaican dancehall style over Atlanta crunk spiced with Indian bhangra and you get the picture. Her debut single "Galang" is a rattling minor masterpiece that some people have hailed as the harbinger of a new era of world music. And it does seem that M.I.A.’s naïve newcomer approach has resulted in a truly “world” music that does not make distinctions between bhangra, crunk, baile, dancehall, and techno.

However, I have a problem.
More to the point, I wonder why other critics don't see a problem with the daughter of (what some would call) a terrorist appropriating the rhetoric and imagery of war and terrorism for the sake of pop music? Watch the video for "Galang" here and then come back. It's actually worth it; the song really grows on you. I'll wait.

Check it out. Graffiti, stencils, spraycans, chainlink fences, tigers, tanks, Molotov cocktails, Hueys, burning palm trees, and bombs. Being that M.I.A. grew up in a war-torn nation and then saw the worst of what Margaret Thatcher's England had to offer newcomers, it's not particularly surprising that she draws her inspiration from what she's seen. But something about how she, a grown woman, deploys this imagery of war and suffering comes across to me as unspeakably crass. You see, the Tamil Tigers invented the suicide vest and the modern practice of suicide bombing, and in light of this, lyrics like "I got the bombs to make you blow" don't read as ambiguously political party starters. They read - whether M.I.A. meant them this way or not - like half-assed slogans from someone who hasn’t thoroughly thought through the politics of the suicide vest. Given her past, I seriously doubt that's the case, which makes her lyrics all the more puzzling.

It is possible for political music to be fatuous. For example, Madonna cemented her slide into cartoonish irrelevance on stage at Live8 with the cry, "Aah you ready foh a REVOLUTION?!?" and "We Are The World" was a study in smug self-contradiction. But on "Galang," M.I.A. does the opposite, turning a slight but entertaining slice of clangy pop music into something strange and slightly disturbing.

Some critics have discussed M.I.A.’s background, but very few of them have addressed the contradictions she seems to embody. The closest anyone has come has been Robert Christgau writing in the Village Voice:

Sinhalese depredations have been atrocious. But my reading suggests that more Sri Lankan Tamils want equality than want Eelam, and from this distance I'm not pro-LTTE. Hence I strongly advise fellow journalists to refrain from applying "freedom fighter" and other cheap honorifics to M.I.A.'s dad. But I also advise them to avoid the cheaper tack taken in last week's Voice by Simon Reynolds: "Don't let M.I.A.'s brown skin throw you off: She's got no more real connection with the favela funksters than Prince Harry." Not just because brown skin is always real, but because M.I.A.'s documentable experience connects her to world poverty in a way few Western whites can grasp. Moreover, beyond a link now apparently deleted from her website to a dubious Tamil tsunami relief organization, I see no sign that she supports the Tigers. She obsesses on them; she thinks they get a raw deal. But without question she knows they do bad things and struggles with that. The decoratively arrayed, pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck her album are images, not propaganda--the same stuff that got her nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize in 2001. They're now assumed to be incendiary because, unlike art buyers, rock and roll fans are assumed to be stupid.

M.I.A. has no consistent political program and it's foolish to expect one of her. Instead she feels the honorable compulsion to make art out of her contradictions. The obscure particulars of those contradictions compel anyone moved by her music to give them some thought, if only for an ignorant moment--to recognize and somehow account for them. In these perilous, escapist days, that alone is quite a lot.

I respect Robert Christgau, and much of what he writes above is dead on the money. But I feel he gives M.I.A. too much leeway. By minimizing the symbolic freight carried by pastel tigers and burning palms, he trivializes both M.I.A.'s art and experiences and the real world events those stenciled images refer to. Moreover, by simultaneously assuming that M.I.A. is fully in charge of how these symbols are deployed, and arguing that these pastels (and the rest of Arular) show that she is undoubtedly deeply conflicted about South Asia's history of violence, he gets to have it both ways.

But "[G]uns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians" can be both empty images and incendiary in exactly the same way Che Guevara or Red Army t-shirts can, or swastikas, or the idiot slogan that from time to time appeared on blackboards in my high school: “The south will rise again!” Similarly, M.I.A. can namecheck the PLO, the Tigers, and bombs to make you blow. But this duality doesn’t any of these things more profound or less crass.

Whether or not M.I.A. is using them as mere decoration, people still have the right to ask if there’s something more for these images to say. Journalists have been having a joyous field day with M.I.A.'s exotic background, and rock fans are stupid. But if we the listeners have to confront the contradictions in M.I.A.'s music, that goes triple for M.I.A. herself given that those contradictions originate in a war whose participants have contributed, however inadvertently, to the ongoing misery that rocks Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and now London.

A grenade is a grenade, a tank is a tank, and terrorism isn't much more fun in a club track then it is on stage at a white seperatist convention. M.I.A. is using political violence for her own artistic ends, and it's impossible to tell what - or how unserious - those ends are. In a way, political violence is the "momma joke" of the music world. Christgau wants to give her a pass for that; my gut won't let me.

I'm not here to indict M.I.A. for anything; Christgau is right that she doesn't come out and endorse the Tamil Tigers at any point. I also agree that it’s vanishingly unlikely that she has any designs on using her music as a PR campaign for such a cause. Moreover, I really like "Galang" a lot. But to use terrorism and revolutionary insurgency in the service of pop music in this day and age is either a pop-culture triumph of the highest order or a tasteless and ill-considered act of exploitation, and I can't for the life of me figure out which one.

[wik] This post also appears on blogcritics. All good sentient creatures read blogcritics.org daily for the latest in entertainment and other news, opinions, and kvetching. You are sentient... aren't you?

William Rehnquist has been report as saying he's "not dead yet. I Feel Fine! I think I'll go for a walk!"

[wik] See you again Thursday.

[alsø wik] Ooh, there's some lovely filth down 'ere!

[alsø alsø wik] Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?

[see the løveli lakes...] Hat tip to QandO.

[the wøndërful telephøne system...] Anyone want to bet he's sticking around to try to body-block the cowflop hurling toward the fan? Might as well try to hold back the tide with a teaspoon, I say.

[and mäni interesting furry animals...] Including the majestik møøse...

[a Møøse once bit my sister...] For Buckethead, "Do you embarass easily?"

[No realli! She was Karving her initials øn the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law -an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"... ] Tits, winkle, and vibraphone. Grunties.

[...It's...] I think I'll be done now.

When, in the course of human events, a blogger becomes so sclerotically enclotted with oversized ideas, high dudgeon, and essays that have metastisized beyond reason or control that he cannot face the prospect of one more minute of research nor one more hour teasing nuance from a dependent clause of a dependent clause, there is only one thing to do:

Linkfest!!!!

-- From Slate: "In just two short years, [The Department of Homeland Security] has clearly found its core mission – reorganization."

-- From Winds of Change's Armed Liberal: A contrarian look at what drives terrorism, from University of Chicago's Robert Pape

[Robert Pape:]The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them here.

RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

-- From James Taranto: a piece from OpinionJournal's Best of the Web that contrasts nicely with the foregoing:

Why Do They Hate Us?
That's the question we've all grown sick and tired of hearing since Sept. 11, 2001. It's not that the query is inherently objectionable; understanding what motivates the enemy is obviously helpful in wartime. But the people who ask this question almost never genuinely seek to understand; rather, they have their own axes to grind against the U.S. or the West, and seek to use the prospect of terror attacks to scare the rest of us into supporting their views. This we have dubbed vicarious terrorism.

Now and then a terrorist actually takes the trouble to explain his motives. London's Daily Telegraph reports on the trial of the man who allegedly (and now confessedly) murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh:

Mohammed Bouyeri, a baby-faced 27-year-old with dual Dutch-Moroccan nationality, broke his vow not to co-operate with the Amsterdam court by admitting shooting and stabbing his victim last November.

"I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion," he told its three-strong panel of judges.

"I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same." . . .

Bouyeri then turned to the victim's mother, Anneke, in the public gallery, and told her he felt nothing for her. Mrs van Gogh watched as he read out from what appeared to be a statement: "I don't feel your pain. I have to admit that I don't have any sympathy for you. I can't feel for you because you're a non-believer."

This had nothing to do with Israeli "occupation" of "Palestinian lands," America's "unilateral invasion" of Iraq, "torture" of prisoners at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, the widening "income gap," or any of the other litany of complaints that the terror apologists trot out. Islamist terrorism arises from religious fanaticism and hatred, plain and simple.

-- From Balloon Juice: John Cole is doing yeoman's work on the Plame affair, starting with the premise,

" Valerie Plame worked for the CIA, was stationed in Washington at the time of her outing, and previously had been a covert agent.' If you agree with that statement, say "Yes" and nothing more. If you disagree, state "No" and why you disagree (with reputable links to back it up)."

He moves forward from there. We are currently debating whether step 7 can be generally accepted as fact:

7.) Shortly after the State of the Union Address, Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, addressed the UN Security Council, presenting the administration's case regarding Saddam Hussein.

The Security Council did not provide the authorization the United States had sought, yet Coalition forces proceeded to initiate Operation Iraqi Freedom on 20 March 2003. In the aftermath of the invasion, no WMD stockpiles were found.

This, and other developments we will discuss in other points, led to renewed focus on the intelligence used to advocate for the invasion.

[Yes, or no?]

-- From Boing Boing: The story of pyrotechnics experts who get together every year to have a - no kidding - fireworks war. And not in the sky, either. [wik]: Link fixed!!

-- From EDog's Everything Page: Loyal Reader #0017(EDog) handicaps our chances in our current war based on past performance. Although any prospectus will tell you that past returns are no guarantee of future performance, I still think our chances are pretty darn good. No permalinks; scroll down to July 7.

-- From Yahoo! News via Loyal Reader #0017(EDog): A chilling story of rampant falsified research among our medical research community, including several instances of falsified data and entirely fabricated studies making their way into peer-reviewed journals. Yeeesh. Make sure to have a private dick check out your PCP before your next checkup!

-- From Obsidian Wings: A treatise on the incredible silliness of Fox News' favorite new term, "homicide bomber" and its various extractions, including the gobsmackingly tacky phrase, "...the first homicide attacks in Western Europe."

-- ... and finally, from Slate once again: A defense of the smoking hot but irritatingly perky (tweeked? caffeinated?) Food Network host Rachel Ray. There's nothing wrong with cooking with what you can find at the local Stop 'n' Shop (Safeway, Ralph's, Giant Eagle, what-have-you).

I see from the comments that few people got the point of my last post. Well, you got the point about Ebbers, fine, but not my little gedeankenexperiment. I am glad that all of you are upstanding, law-abiding boy scouts. I am an upstanding, law-abiding boy scout. I'm with you.

I know that none of you would want to steal from the little people, or leave the sick and hungry old without their pensions. The shame of being incarcerated for something like fraud would bring you to your knees. You don't even get the street cred of a felony murder rap. Fine.

Let's assume that some perverse trillionaire makes you an offer. He will staff an unused prison with felons on loan from the penal system. He will hire guards. He'll buy a set of free weights and subscribe to basic cable. How much money would you need to stay for three years in this facility that is in every respect just like a minimum security federal prison except that when its all over, you don't have a police record to sully your good name?

How much for a similarly staffed and equipped facility that instead models a federal maximum security prison?

What is the minimum amount that would make you say, "All right. I will risk my ass for that kind of money?"

The asswipe former CEO of Worldcom, Bernie Ebbers, was just sentenced to 25 years for $11 billion in fraud, the largest in corporate history. (Though still a distant second to the UN Oil-for-Food scandal.) This is all to the good. Ebbers will be stripped of everything but his house and $50g. He won't be eligible for parole until he's 85.

Discussion of this topic around the campfire at work led to some interesting speculation. Assuming that you would receive a nominal three year sentence at a minimum security prison, how much would you be willing to steal? In other words, how much money would make that three year sentence worth your time?

Parameters: Being stolen, that money would be tax free; however you could expect some restrictions in exactly how you could go about spending it due to continued gov't attention. The minimum security prison would offer your fellow inmates minimal opportunities for prison rape, but would not guarantee your safety. You'd have access to the prison library, exercise equipment and cable tv. You'd probably end up working in the prison laundry or some other, similar job while in prison.

What's your price, beeyatch?

Going further, how much would make it worth your while to spend three years in general population in a large, maximum security prison for violent felons? I think we all know what conditions are like there. Now how much will you need?

And a big round of applause for David, my sister's first kid, who joined us just after midnight, July 13 2005. Three weeks late, and if he's anything like his mother I'm sure it was out of sheer bullheadedness... "the hell I'm getting out of here!"

[wik] For a moment I pondered being the jerkwad dinglebrat I am and posting this under the category "Darwin Award Contender," but then I thought to myself, "why not give the kid a fighting chance?"

The Holy Father may not approve of the Harry Potter books. But I am eagerly awaiting the arrival by parcel post on Saturday of my copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I spent too much time explaining to the more religious members of my family why D&D was not actually Satan worship with dice to worry about what a German thinks of the morality of a fantasy novel.

For those interested in some of the (skimpy) information available about book six, you can go here and here. It's not much - who'd a thunk that scholastic books could keep a secret better than the CIA? Maybe we should put them in charge.

The OpinionJournal has a different take on the Rove matter than my esteemed colleague Johno.

I heard on the news last night that Rove was talking to Cooper on the agreement that what he said would be "deep background" and not to be used in reporting. If it is the case that Rove was telling a reporter that the story he was pushing (that VP Cheney was responsible for sending Wilson to Africa) was incorrect, then this is not such a big deal. You have to knowingly and with malice out an undercover agent for their to be a crime, and it seems that that particular line may not have been crossed. Are we even clear that Plame was actually, really, an undercover agent? I seem to remember that there was some confusion about that back when this story first came out, and before Wilson's credibility was shot.

Rove is a political operative. But that does not mean that he eats babies or that every single thing he says is part of some machiavellian scheme. This story frankly annoys me, if for no other reason than because it means I have to watch Kerry speak on the news again. Plame was not some daring agent on a secret mission behind the Iron curtain, whose unveiling could have resulted in death. Wilson is a self-aggrandizing hack who lied about what he did, when, and why in Africa. Rove is an oily political operative, but every president has one and it's rather pointless to scream, "He's an oily political operative! Fire him!" This is just an excuse for Democrats to scream at Bush, not that they really needed one.

Columbus (Ohio) has finally made a stand against freedom haters, terrorists, drug thugs, indecency, communists, and people who don't celebrate diversity as enthusiastically as they ought.

Columbus has taken a stand against the scourge of our times. Columbus has finally acted. Columbus is doing something. Columbus has outlawed...[jarring chord] assault weapons!

The federal assault weapons ban (AWB) was allowed to go away last year but several states, including the cradle of liberty Massachusetts, have passed state laws that mirror the AWB's provisions, thereby ensuring continued inconvenience, price gouging, and suspicion of lawful gun owners.

Characteristic of lawmakers who concern themselves with firearms legislation, the Columbus City Council doesn't have a fucking clue, especially if this dude is their best source of information:

The Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence (OCAGV) provided support for the ordinance and testified in the public hearings. Toby Hoover, Executive Director of OCAGV, congratulated the City on its progressive action to make Columbus a safer place to live and raise families.

Said Hoover, "Assault weapons are semi-automatic guns that are made to spray fire a high volume of bullets. Assault weapons are not hunting guns. They are people killers and we should never forget that we are talking about people, both victims and survivors. These guns are an assault on us all and we congratulate Columbus for regulating them."

Where to begin?

-There is no semi-automatic weapon on planet Earth that will "spray" anything. "Semi-automatic" means one pull of the trigger, one bullet goes downrange. No different in action from about a gazillion types of hunting rifles, target rifles, and yes, military issue rifles.

-What is a "high-volume of bullets"? You know, the ones being sprayed about willy-nilly? Probably more than 10 in a magazine, which is a characteristic number in these situations. In MA, for example, 11 is bad. Ten rounds in your rifle is fine, but 11 makes it the Devil's Tool. If seombody could explain that to me, I'd surely appreciate it.

-"Assault weapons are not hunting guns". Well, you'd first need to explain precisely what an assault weapon is, which you've not done satisfactorily yet. And guess what? Military rifles are oftentimes underpowered compared to hunting rifles. Read about it on your own; stats and discussion are easy to find. If beefier military rounds make you jumpy, guess what? They're all sporter rounds: all your flavors of .30 caliber (.30, .308, 30-30, 30-06) originated in military use and are still in use around the world. But if powerful weapons and powerful cartridges are the real problem, as this quote and associated line of thinking suggest, we'd be better off banning hunting rifles and sporter rounds like the 7mm Remington.

So which is it? Do we outlaw sport ammo or military ammo? 'Cause it's oftentimes the same thing.

-"They [assault weapons] are people killers". So are the hunting guns you suggest are OK to live with in society. So are the bricks on your patio. So's your car. Everything's a "people killer". Either you learn to live in our world, or you get yourself a helmet and never leave your bunker.

-"We congratulate Columbus on regulating them". Um, yeah...guns are already regulated. If you are refering to full-auto weapons, which I think you are when you talk about "spraying", they have been minutely regulated for years. You need special licensure, huge fees, probable legal hassles, and the BATF looking up your ass for the rest of your natural life, which is more regulation than any American ought to put up with.

But alas, foolishness rarely exists in a vacuum. Consider:

Sue Ann Schiff, Executive Director of Legal Community Against Violence (LCAV), agreed: "Assault weapons are designed to kill humans quickly and efficiently. The Columbus ordinance is directed to military-style weapons designed for rapid spray firing, not to standard sporting firearms."

Isn't any weapon conceivably a "military-style" one? And anyway, if it's style you're about, the military ain't the place to go for it.

Ms. Schiff, assault weapons- whatever those are- are not designed to kill humans quickly and efficiently. If you're talking about military-issue weapons, they are designed to throw a regulation cartridge a regulation distance consistently, take alot of abuse, be simple to maintain and operate, and be lightweight. I don't even know what "rapid spray firing" is, but American military rifles haven't had a full-auto capacity in about 20 years. And killing quickly and efficiently comes from training- marksmanship, trigger control, breathing control, shot placement, fieldcraft; otherwise, we'd just let the weapons loose to fight for us.

And again, "standard sporting firearms" are oftentimes much more powerful in terms of range, munition, and accuracy than any military issue rifle. Those are ok though, right?

Look, I care about certain aspects of gun stuff, so I read about it, and can speak as a learned amateur on some of those topics. I recognize alot of people don't care though, and my topic and tone will sound overwrought and nitpicky. That's fine, really.

But this bit doesn't even pass the common sense test:

The Columbus ordinance bans the possession and transfer of assault weapons while continuing to allow the use of the weapons at licensed shooting ranges and in officially sanctioned competitive shooting events. Individuals who lawfully owned and possessed assault weapons before the ordinance's effective date may keep their weapons but have 90 days to register them with local authorities.

Ooookaaaayyy...

So the same people, who still own the same weapons, can continue to do the same activities with them now as before the ban, but have to tell the state government they own them.

If the weapons were already "lawfully owned and possessed", what's the real problem?

Here's a whole site devoted to the exposure and ridicule of weasel words, no matter the source.