To those who attended the MIA show,
I apologize if you think she cut the show short after I almost knocked her over. I apologized to her after the show and she didn't seem to mind at all. Here is a segment of my virtual note to her, which I would rather have communicated to her if the setting was more appropriate. By the way, I'm not washing my mouth for a month.
But ultimately, like all great art, M.I.A.??s musical soul packs more punch than the actual event or the three-minute single. For every Galang-led car commercial, there??s a 13-year-old in Melbourne googling the word ??Tamil Tiger? after class. A legion of young coloured girls whose eyes light up at the sight of a brown-skinned Asian on MTV instead of endless carbon-copy Kylies. A generation of fellow culture-hopping 20-somethings who hold the catharsis of childhood discrimination and assimilatory afterthoughts about our cousins back home in Malaysia clutched against our hearts. Countless young women throughout Sub-Saharan Africa contracting monogamous HIV from polygamous partners whose deaths may not be in vain. Because, M.I.A., future ??Queen of pop music? or whatever hype-laced headline you want to call her, is not really all that futuristic. Our world as a whole has been consistently raping and oppressing young coloured people for a handful of centuries at the very least by this point.
As Maya herself says: ??I'm chipping away! You ready for something new, hurry up.? Well keep chipping, M.I.A., knowing how many of us are behind you.
A raw, sexy, angry, cataclysmically beautiful voice is being unleashed upon an unsuspecting mass audience. And she is shouting into a microphone, over and over again, with a chorus of hundreds of passionate converts surrounding her:
??Pull up the People! Pull up the Poor!?
In it's entirety here: itslateagain.blogspot.com
