emrgency:

note: mishtun just commented to me that it attempts to be a commentary on the saudi ban of women drivers. and then i read through 300 blogs posting it to find explanation from jalopnik: “It’s called hagwalah and nine times out of ten you’ve seen it in grainy cell phone video shot from the side of a Saudi highway.” pretty much any information i got about this video, i got from car blogs. thx internet.

when i watch this, i ask what i’m looking at and why i can’t quite make sense of it every time i do. in an email to kim i mentioned that maybe it was that this was one of the few times i can recall that i’m listening to an m.i.a. track that isn’t political in the way other tracks have been, but somehow what i’m looking at has cultural overtones and i’m looking at it with no context. what am i watching? i keep thinking.

it was much easier to read what may have been intended in romain gavras’ last video for m.i.a., the not-safe-for-gingers “born free” – “bad girls” isn’t that, though. i feel like, because it’s her, it should be a comment about something, but i can’t discern (and maybe i don’t need to, and maybe i’m thinking about this way more than i should) exactly what i’m supposed to get out of this other than being stunned by what i’m seeing, like i were watching fast five. those cars look like figure skaters in their perfectly synchronized falls and spins. there’s guns. there’s fire. she’s filing her nails nonchalantly on top of a car driving on its side. what??

but like i said: maybe i’m looking for something that isn’t there. maybe these visuals, like the song, are just eye candy to accompany a near-perfect banger. maybe this is what i should’ve expected, all the tropes of a hip-hop video filtered through m.i.a.’s viewpoint to a desert in morocco. maybe i should just enjoy it when those beemers dance with each other and don’t crash. maybe the only point is for me to cop the attitude she has at 3:48 (i’ma say this once, yeah, i don’t give a shit!) maybe i should stop reading and just see.

Some guy posted on that link with: “What a terrible song. MIA marries a billionaire, has a kid, and then tries to rap about being a “bad girl” and chanting “live fast, die young?” No wonder she couldn’t come up with any other words.”

Now, I have to admit that I’m not nearly as whiny and cynical as homeboy internet super commenter but…I do think that I have a much harder time taking MIA seriously ever since she married a billionaire heir. I mean, I’m all for being with who you love, it’s all good. But…I look at her videos, see her shtick and think that it’s sort of hilarious in a sense to be all “fuck the world” when you’re concocting your rhymes on your father-in-law’s yacht or something heading to the island he owns someplace. (It’s the mental image that I think about, not whether it’s actually happening or not.)

Like, it’s forefront on my mind when I watch her doing her thing that it’s like…difficult for me to really embrace her “third world first” jamz as I might have back when she was producing her own stuff to mixed results on Arular.

The beat is hot, the video is sort of crazy awesome and the track is okay so long as one doesn’t read into it too much. But it does come to mind. Whether that’s a slippery slope or whether it ought to matter is another issue altogether.

But…I thought it and decided to write it. That’s what blogs are for after all.