Link

I have a feeling most people consume rap in this way also:

For what it’s worth, I like listening to M.I.A. but feel a little embarrassed about it, like I am trying to prove something. I wish there was more pop music like hers so that listening to M.I.A. wouldn’t stick out and seem like a statement of some kind. I sort of think of her as Fela lite. I don’t pay much attention to her politics or her lyrics, largely because I can’t decipher them and also because I don’t care about the meaning of lyrics generally. I just want them to sound right in context. In the grand scheme of things, there’s probably not much difference between the lyrics of “Paper Planes” and those of “In Da Club.”

Sometimes you can be something politically without being conscious of it:

The problem with Hirschberg’s article is that she sides at a deeper level with capitalism, marginalizing and dismissing Maya’s efforts to embody the contradictions, as it were, as simple hypocrisy. M.I.A. struggles obviously with being a sell-out; Hirschberg has been a sell-out all along and now enforces for capitalism and the Establishment against those in the gray area. The same old story: character assassination and ad hominem attacks on the messenger so that the message will be ignored or invalidated.