Professor G on the DL: Is M.I.A. hip-hop's future?

Let me introduce my posts called PROFESSSOR G ON THE DL. If you don't know what "DL" means, ask! The conclusion will be called BITIN' APPLEBUMS. The "Bitin'Apple" part is a twist on the power Eve unleashed when she bit the apple (CHOICE/ FREE WILL; See Laurie Anderson's Langue d'Amour). The "Applebum" part is a signification on "Bonita Applebum" the first single from A Tribe Called Quest's debut album People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. Early hip-hop artists like ATCQ wrote love songs to black women, not pimp songs to our asses. "Applebum" was a synecdoche signifying men's articulated attraction to black women (with a part was representing the whole) but now things have devolved into hyperbole and exaggeration of our hind parts in videos. It's all about the vulgarization of women's asses as objects in lyrics and images (R-E-S-P-E-C-T ain't been what it means to me). The impact on black relationships is damning. But as Upton Sinclair once said: “If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. It's time to think about what hip-hop means to real women, to real men, and to the real world. Let's set it off...

I just got hip to M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" from a tweet on Twittter from NecoleBitchie blog. At first, it reminded me of these throwback videos to the 80s and the influence London had on hip-hop's reception globally: Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Gals and Neneh Cherry's Buffalo Stance. I suspected Paper Planes was coming out of London. I suspected it was categorized as hip-hop too but I resisted it at first.

Billboard Chart History M.I.A.'s Paper Planes

• 2008 Paper Planes Hot Rap Tracks 13
• 2008 Paper Planes Pop 100 11
• 2008 Paper Planes The Billboard Hot 100 4 (and counting...)
  

I thought, this ain't good hip-hop, I said to myself. She can't rap. She sounds crappy, but the look and the feel is real interesting. Thank God, my first thought ain't the last. So, I did some homework. I invite you all to do the same. It opened my eyes and ears in a way my own opinion will never do. I started by checking out Wikipedia. I also checked out her myspace page and watched the remixes of Paper Planes as well as her other videos. My favorite is "Bird Flu"
cuz the editing of the local Indian kids dancing makes it captivating and speaks to a global hip-hop connection.

WHO IS M.I.A?

From Wikipedia: "Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam (born July 17, 1977)^[1] better known by her stage name M.I.A., is a British songwriter, record producer, vocalist and visual artist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent. Her music encompasses various genres with lyrics that voice politics, social realism and humour."

"Arulpragasam was first exposed to Western radio in London, hearing broadcasts emanating from her neighbours' flats [apartments] in the late '80s. Her liking for hip-hop and dancehall developed from there, finding a common identity with "the starkness of the sound" of [check out these videos if you've never seen them] Public Enemy, records by MC Shan and Ultramagnetic MCs.

Making her CD Arular largely in London, in a bedroom, Arulpragasam built tracks off her demos with programmed beats she wrote on the 505.[29] Her work attracted artists such as the rapper Nas, who by early 2005 stated, "Her sound is the future." M.I.A. now resides in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Politics and global ideas are prominent in M.I.A.'s art. On the political nature of her work she has said,

"I have to be true to that--I can't take certain things away. I do have a political background. I’m only in England, learning this language and building a life in this society, because of political reasons. Why would I deny that?"[42]

M.I.A. has talked about the fusion of politics into her music.

"Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked."[64]

BITIN' APPLEBUMS: Why M.I.A. is important to a study of hip-hop on YouTube is the following mentioned on Wikipedia:

File sharing and airplay on college radio of songs like "Galang" and "Sunshowers", with the fast propagation of them in clubs and around the Internet by word-of-mouth made [M.I.A.] a household name to international music listeners before she had graced a stage, leading commentators to herald her as one of the first successful examples of doing so, who could be used to study and reexamine the impact of the internet on the way listeners listened to and were exposed to new music.^[21][2]

Sometimes I think only a woman from outside the U.S. and only hip-hop outside the U.S. will seriously challenge the choke-hold hip-hop's "bitch-ho" mentality has on U.S. hip-hop's potential to really be poliical. M.I.A.'s work is political and remains danceable and appeals across many audiences in the way hip-hop can and has always done. But M.I.A. captures the punk connection with early hip-hop in NYC as well as the political message and the identity and region border crossings of the people and music associated with it. What do you think?