Oh, Carlos.

“The oddity of using a garment linked to mercenaries to convey a very different message seemed to elude Maya” was the key sentence of Lynn Hirschberg’s controversial M.I.A. profile, I thought.

Hirschberg spends all this time constructing the idea of M.I.A. as, essentially, an insanely ambitious, lucky, clever, double-talking nonartist whose one real talent is figuring out what combination of things will pique the interests of the right people while enraging the wrong ones — and then repeatedly implies that M.I.A. doesn’t understand exactly what she’s doing. It comes across as sloppy, like Hirschberg’s desire to write an anti-fluff piece got the better of her ability to figure out who this person actually is, which is — I guess? — the point of this kind of profile.

I don’t care at all what M.I.A.’s politics actually are; I’m sorry, I know I should, but I just totally don’t. I don’t care what her motivation was for performing at the Grammys 9 months pregnant; whyever she did it, it was an awesome and truly empowering spectacle to witness in an entertainmentverse that’s chockablock with fake “empowerment” for women. I don’t care that she sang about pulling up the people, pulling up the poor then moved to a mansion in Brentwood with a rich dude and ordered truffle fries. I guess anyone with radical politics who makes any money should give away all that money and live in a hut, like Lynn Hirschberg undoubtedly does. But even if I wasn’t already, in a vague noncommital way, a fan of M.I.A.’s aesthetic and schtick (and NAILS, my god), I still would have been skeeved by this profile.

“It’s weird to me that M.I.A. knew to focus on the “truffle fries” line. The profile portrays her as oblivious, but it seems to me that an oblivious person wouldn’t know that eating truffle fries is wrong. I’ve written lots of pieces that included lines like that, where the point is ‘look at this clueless, hypocritical monster,’ and invariably the monster’s too clueless to know,” Leon wrote earlier.

The whole queasy business of knowing when to deploy that damning detail has been discussed at great length over the years by people with far more expertise than I’ve got. I guess my general feeling now is that it barely fazes me anymore to see something like this done by a 24 year old journalist-come-lately who has various excuses, but when someone experienced does it I’m still shocked. It’s cool that I can still be shocked, I guess. Yay.

Maya was so clearly baited and set up by Lynn Hirschberg. The fact that the reporter herself is the one who ordered the fucking french fries is enough to discredit everything else in the article as a copy-and-paste job to make the artist look as bad as possible. And the whole thing has this undercurrent of — what is it, even? Seething jealousy? — that makes it seem like Hirschberg has a very personal axe to grind. Like she’s Mr. M from Election.

Posted May 31, 2010 at 8:24pm || home