"The Third World deserves freedom of speech just like everyone else. We want to fight the battle to say what we want, whether to be serious or just make fun of ourselves. Thats what 'Worldtown' is about, that's what 'Paper Planes' is about. It's what people in the third world live through." - M.I.A.

Unlike your humble author, M.I.A. has been busy lately.  After having a baby and gracefully getting through an interview with the man-child known as Bill Maher, the British-via-Ceylon hip hopper officially endorsed a British Euro Parliamentary candidate.  While the independent Jan Jananayagam promises to help get aid to the war torn Tamil people, M.I.A. offers all of Jananayagam’s supporters a free song to get them pumped for the election.

First, lets talk about Bill.  One would think that Mr. Maher would try to explore more deeply the topics that M.I.A. succinctly dished out to the ever-intelligent and ever-eloquent Tavis Smiley.  However, Bill did what he is best at and proved, once again, that he is one of the worst liberal talk show hosts out there.  After complaining about the general ignorance of the American public (although he made an exception for his viewers, his viewers were the exact same people that he was belittling), Bill revealed his own egotistical unawareness.  First, he made some vast generalizations about minority issues around the globe, clumping all minorities into the same boat and claiming that they all have similar problems.  This is the exact myth that scholars like Mohanty hope to rectify.  Bill hasn’t been keeping up with his reading.  Then he betrayed his lack of preparation for the interview by making the assumption that the Tamils have been the majority in Sri Lanka, and who are now being walked over by the minority Singhalese—a false statement that M.I.A. graciously corrected.  But enough about Bill…  The only redeeming aspect of the otherwise dumbfounding interview was the emotion that M.I.A. revealed as she discussed her family’s (as well as other families’) attempts to escape the long standing violence on the island.  But M.I.A. is not someone who simply gets emotional about the suffering of thousands—she gets political.

Following in the footsteps of other hip hoppers, most obviously the ubiquitous Will.i.am, M.I.A. voiced her support for a minority candidate who promises many changes.  Unlike Will.i.am, M.I.A. didn’t settle for re-using her candidates slogans or simply gathering Britain’s youngest and hottest celebrities to make a bland and stupefying music video (I do have to admit that Will.i.am’s video was at least pragmatic in that it got a lot of people pumped up for Obama, and it was a little bit touching).  Instead, M.I.A. has penned and recorded a completely new song, and if a rough draft of one of the song’s verses is reflective of the quality of the rest of the song, this new tune should fit in perfectly with her catalog.  Here’s the lyrics, which appeared within a poster for Jananayagam that was published on M.I.A.’s blog:

“so u wanna hear about my politics?
well i can show u things that can make u sick
theres a saterlite above me thats takin picks
the people from the east hav started sendin migs
and im sat in America doin twitts
and the armys lookin at me like im a bitch
but im thinking bout the babies lyin in the ditch
thinking if they had a kite fone u ll see the shit”

"This woman is a G" - M.I.A.

As usual, M.I.A. manages to dish out a variety of issues as she simultaneously manages to reveal the connections between these issues.  Instead of simply informing us of the political candidate she is in favor of, she decides to build a lyrical bridge between her current life and the life of her homeland.  She is disgusted by the amount of media attention that is focused on her (and other celebrities), and she is even more sickened by the lack of media attention that has been focused on the fatal violence that has rocked Sri Lanka.  Knowing that powerful nations and their media outlets are not going to challenge the Sri Lankan Army’s convenient ban on journalism, she hopes to become that “kite fone” in the sky, looking down on “babies lyin in the ditch.”  She also hopes to get a candidate elected who promises to send aid to those ditches.

Hip hop has always been a political force, but M.I.A.’s move is one of the “harder” (to use foreign policy lingo) demonstrations of hip hop’s power in recent memory—“harder” in the sense that it is being directed at one candidate and one specific issues.  This hard power mixed with the soft power, which is constituted in the many communities that hip hop helps to form and to connect all over the world, suggests that the music genre may become more of a political force than rock ‘n’ roll was in the post World War II era.  This is a pretty grand claim, which will take decades to judge.  Luckily, we can all watch the results of the European parliamentary elections tomorrow.  Even if Jananayagam loses, the song should leak sometime soon.  More to come…