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/\/\ /\ Y /\’s worth:  Pick It Up and Look At It.

Maya (M.I.A.) was very successful at a very successful rate only a few years ago when she came to the mainstream with the hit “Paper Planes”.  Before that she was only a sleeper for little bit really while having released a record by the same name as her father, Arular, before releasing the record with the song on it, Kala, rocket-shipping her into everything not the ghettos of Africa or the slums of Sri Lanka.  She fit herself into all the cracks in all of our music collections solidifying a place, for the most part, at least in the honorable mention category as some lazy – I am being a tad glib here – positively, unimaginatively charismatic person who makes music.  I happened to like it too.  In fact I wished more music personalities had this “thing” about them.  The unimaginatively charismatic – thing.  As someone who has never been able to hear the blown out subwoofer of some red, dilapidated, possibly stolen African brand hatchback rolling down a street Johannesburg doing its damnedest to let everyone else walking down the street “in” on the latest kwaito jams, I think M.I.A. is totally worthwhile.   So, years later she has become a mother, actually political in as much as most political polls could ever be, toured with everyone, made offensive Youtube videos as well as inexpensive ones all the while the internet has been beating everyone to the punch – we’re all struggling to hold on.  At the same time, swimming through all what the internet is leaving in it’s wake we remain confused but only as much as we let ourselves become too engrossed in what we are doing.  It sure ain’t hard to find any and all information you could want to on what kinds of things there are in the world to terrify, enthrall, inspire, shake down, educate, waste or paranoi you. It grows and topples onto you.  The information on any given subject starts to form a mountainside with a cannon embedded in it’s slope.  It’s a tidal wave rushing at you until it just collapses on you and itself.  It spits you out of the other side and whats behind is just the horizon of the rest a calm ocean.  There will be another wave but you don’t know when or how big it is going to be or if you’re ready to ride that one any better.

The empty future was able to really ignite punk rock in the seventies.  It made the whole world buy houses in the eighties, lied to us when it didn’t end in the nineties and has led us back to just pick up the pieces in the new millennium.  I’d say the prospect of the empty future now is what we all needed, something to not give a shit about and to start enjoying ourselves.

Maya has essentially delivered us music that she seems to be partial to and has packaged it in a way that is less about where it is from and more about why American hip-hop was one of the last great things to happen to folk music in the traditional sense of the word while  maintaining that it was much less culturally homogeneous to The States and rather culturally significant to the rest of the world.#1 So we all won for a while.  Now with /\/\ /\ Y /\ it may be proving to be harder than she thought to push things forward in a discernible, exegetic direction.  It’s even more difficult to do it naturally.  What’s more is it’s near impossible to make it seem to everyone else that the change is natural.  This is where /\/\ /\ Y /\ has corked the ability to allow us to inject enough of our own preferences into her music.  It’s the soundtrack to an uninteresting YouTube video about a night in a nightclub.  The camera of the album’s composition makes you a little seasick and when the narrator of the events gets on the mic you start watching the video more than listening to the voice.  When the internet lays a precious egg on you of a Corgi belly flopping into a lake in slow motion you want to tell your friends.  When you are curious while watching “RE: Man Says To Exterminate White People” it stays in the vault of your short term memory awaiting the next dump cycle.  /\/\ /\ Y /\ punches but never kicks.  It’s also hard to even hum along to.  Its odd when people build stories around a certain Beatles song when they drove by themselves for the first time.  Or how people think a song is great for purely nostalgic or personal reasons.  However people do dance to “their” songs at weddings.  That’s not strange.  It’s only strange when you don’t like the particular song that is theirs and don’t know why it’s theirs.  That sure doesn’t make a song less credible.  Or the artist for that matter.  In fact a case could be made that that makes for it being more significant, kind of.

One of MIA’s most endearing traits (for people who care about that kind of thing) are all of the bits of old folk/religious melodies (Mary Had a Little Lamb, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, This Land Is Your Land, Row-Row-Row Your Boat, The Saints Go Marching In for peat’s sake!!) and chops them together with amateur glue as some sort of hope and a promise.  It sounds like her music is second nature to anyone really.  Making music like M.I.A is not easy or all that natural in the digital sense of things.  Some people could misconstrue those types of melodies or structured childhood things as a crutch and they’d be happy to say it.  It don’t change that fact that most ethnic/folk/kwaito music has been made in a way where the only word I can think to describe it as is Oral Tradition.  The cheap Casio keyboard sounding hi-hats or the bizarre undercutting of that plonk! wave file that would usually be accompanied by a “UGH!” or “YEAH!” is something really special with music like M.I.A.’s.  You can love something like that for all of its imperfections.

/\/\ /\ Y /\ has none of those things I just mentioned on it.  Instead it seems to have all of these song like ideas on it.  Some songs talk about, “I just give a damn.  I just give a damn, damn, damn,” while others call into question the whole damn anatomy racket or just the “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” song.  It is postulated that Google may be involved and accordingly the Government.  M.I.A.’s lyrics never were really worthwhile and I am one for the idea that most lyrics are not worthwhile for things other than just letting you know when and where to stop listening to a song.  Iggy Pop being the king of lyrical kingshit would not have much to say about the lyrics on /\/\ /\ Y /\.  Nothing suffers from it really.  However I don’t know when to start listening to the record and when to stop.  Things like this are important only if you do music that is not club music so in the case of /\/\ /\ Y /\ nothing is lost.  But what is unclear is that maybe it’s not club music, entirely.  It sure sounds like the carrying-ons of trance or house which inherently drone on and just grind into the next song but /\/\ /\ Y /\ has like a chorus here and refrains – those are some of the times though.  When a track ends you’re surprised because you didn’t know it really hit the jump.  Most of the time M.I.A. seems like she has been taking advice from an advisory board that consists of cast members of Jersey Shore and Donald Trump’s unsuccessful YouTube series “Are You Drunk Enough Yet?”.  I haven’t perceived this much demographic pressure since watching a YouTube video of a sit-in Montgomery.  Pressure is not a bad thing.  Sometimes those people who do the pressuring know exactly what they want.  When people pressure other people to do something or when someone doing something perceives that someone could potentially be pressuring them, the compulsion to become confused just starts to compound like someone trying to guess their way through the serving size for a stack of pancakes to be eaten by hippopotamus needing to gain weight.  A lot of what is on /\/\ /\ Y /\ does not seem confused for someone who realizes that the demographic for their music are club going indie people, with the propensity to be listened to also by the frat, sorority, college group (i.e. other club goers).  What is confusing is how trite it all is in the scope of things that M.I.A. has done in the past.  It’s not cool to compare records but the real problem is that if this album were a human being it would find itself being listened to only because of the comparison of it with its past incarnation of the same creator.

( I just had to take a break after writing that last sentence because of the velocitude of it’s implications on how I am so depressed with no apparent reason right now.)

It’s all a little too confused but a case where not much emerges from it that you can take home and tell your enemies about.  Maybe in the past when listening to Kala or Arular you could never really explain as to why you liked those records so much.  It is apparent that in the case of /\/\ /\ Y /\ that M.I.A. may not know either.

1. In the past two decades we’ve seen hip-hop reach it’s gold watch wristed hand across the world blending into any cultural background and becoming something entirely unique at any point.  If the changing of the seasons and the pain of love caused people to wrap catgut over fret boards and tell the story of their their lives then these days poverty is a far sweeping enough concept that the whole world could understand at least one aspect of Hip Hop and want to tell their stories in a new, genre specific and stylized way.

Posted: September 16th, 2010
Categories: Review
Tags: /\/\ /\ Y /\, Arular, Jersey Shore, Kala, Kwaito, M.I.A., pitchfork.com, zak mccune
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