“I think the best response is probably to enjoy the music when she makes good music, and maybe let her be flawed and make flawed gestures like anyone else? I don’t know. But I think it cedes too much ground to have lots of conversations about whether she lives up to whatever poses or gestures she wants to make about the world. I guess I’d rather just be skeptical about the nature of the gestures to begin with. I’d rather enjoy the art and not even entertain the allegation that she knows anything other people don’t.”
a grammar: M.I.A. and “politics.”
But there seems to be an enormously interesting (to me) way in which her flawed gestures are flawed in a way different than other flawed gestures. Like, you know the popularly espoused not-even-wrong adage? Like that. Like, she cops to inhabiting a form of life that is fundamentally different than ‘ours’ (whatever the fuck that means), yet she’s really, really in it. Like, she acts like a bratty pop star. This behavior does not seem like some Klostermaniacally Advanced shit. It seems like really point-missing behavior. And it’s more than annoying, I think. It portrays in full media regalia a weird indifference to truth-making devices. It’s the way an amnesiac dictator operates, waking up each day to a fresh reality to impose his stamp on. It’s the kind of politically incoherent posture that calls for the abolition of politics altogether. I don’t find the sort of empathy to her story that I for instance find in Thomas Sutpen’s. She’s running toward the vanishing point of race and poverty as an (for lack of better term) artistic device. But there’re circumstances that seem to make the repetitious trip a little more, I don’t know, bad.
Maya just seems to have some sort of higher-level epistemological framework that I can’t or don’t want to make sense of. It doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of the music, but it kind of does, too.
