Comments
Samples from Suicide’s “Ghostrider” apparently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4KY2n-pZok
Which informs me of two things:
1. That Henry Rollins song on the Crow soundtrack was actually a cover.
2. I really need to explore more of that whole No Wave scene.
I was totally confused by “Ginger genocide”. Now I get it. Not a bad track, but the sample sorta takes over. I prefer the tribal beats, and would like to hear more of her voice.
The fat guy that’s screwing in the bed (2:00) is the same naked fat guy that plays a naked fat guy on Tim and Eric Awesome show.
I like her stuff, but there’s definitely a nagging part of me that thinks everyone (myself included) is a bit too PC about her and that if any other artist without the whole political bent that she has, relied so heavily on whole-song samples like she does that they’d never get taken even a fraction as seriously as she does as an artist. And let’s be honest, even her rhyming skills are fairly limited. If she weren’t rapping about rebel politics in Sri Lanka, most of her stuff would probably be pretty groan-worthy from an aesthetic point of view.
Other than Paper Planes, which I honestly can’t fucking stand, what other songs does she take whole song loops from? I like her more grime-centric noisy stuff. I hadn’t heard Suicide before, so I was initially thinking this was an incredibly cool step forward for her — as though we could expect to hear more of this type of sound from whatever she’s got next. I was a bit disappointed to find out it was a sample simply because it’s then not any sort of indication for a future direction. That disappointment was short-lived, however, cause then i went and downloaded Suicide and it was awesome.
She uses Where Is My Mind on one song (I forget the names of them)…another is just a herky jerky sampling of the Sanford and Son theme…..there are a few others. Also I saw some comparison somewhere that showed that even all the songs whose samples are recognizable are pretty much lifted from other culture’s/country’s pop songs.
I just feel like if her whole deal weren’t so political and socio-cultural that as far as music and rhyming skills….she’s just not as good as we want to believe she is. She’s not a good singer, she’s not a good MC….and even the things I like about the background music are all her producer’s and not her.
From my understanding, her first album (my favorite) was just all her. The second album I like half of (though my intense love of Bird Flu more than makes up for it’s failings).
MIA upsets my brains and makes me feel incredibly anxious. I used to share a studio with someone who played Arular all the time, and I always had to leave because it made me feel really awful (and that’s without knowing any of the words or anything – just the way the music parts sounded). So. This is an unsettling video and a song that makes me feel jittery. Blah.