The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (27 page)

On
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, M.I.A. doesn’t connect dots. She recites lists, mixing brand names with heavier signifiers—CIA, Google, Obama, Allah—in a flat, staccato rap. It’s hard to tell whether she’s genuinely trying to convince anyone of anything or just using what’s become default setting in contemporary fiction and Top 40 hip-hop: relying on the audience’s understanding of the connotations of certain brands or products instead of doing any real character development. We get a portrait of a consumer, not of a person, via symbols like champagne, cars, Izods and iPods.

The CIA is of course shorthand for the sins of American power, and that’s the focus of this album—America, or M.I.A. in America. (She settled in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles early in 2009.) Her previous albums spanned the world in sound and vision, setting their sights on the havoc globalism wreaks, but
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is myopic by comparison. It’s as though she’s been sidetracked into responding to personal provocations, real or imagined. On “Lovalot,” when she tauntingly says, “They told me this was a free country,” she sounds like a pissed-off teenager. When she raps “I fight the ones that fight me,” it’s hard to tell if she’s singing as America or as herself.

Despite its statement songs and bombastic production,
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often lacks gravitas—it’s so overloaded, and tries to do so many things, that it ends up feeling diffused, lightweight. M.I.A. gets on a roll, her music and her message pulling together, and then derails herself with misguided attempts at pop like “Teqkilla,” a hook-free tribute to whatever’s in the red Solo party cup you’re holding in the air. The chorus: “I got sticky sticky / Icky icky weeeed!” (Yes, really.) It feels long after two and a half minutes, and its actual length—six minutes and 20 seconds—represents a grievous overestimation of listener patience. Much of the rest of the middle of the album is just as aimless: “It Iz What It Iz” with its sour sung notes, “It Takes a Muscle” with its treacly synth-reggae uplift and some Auto-Tune to make it sound truly inconsequential.

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gives us a little of everything, and it feels like the potluck it is. Arulpragasam worked piecemeal with six different producers across the album (and more on the editions with bonus tracks.) The cuts with British producer and dubstep poster boy Rusko are interesting—his low-gear grind is pretty dazzling in any setting—but he doesn’t compose well for singers. His dark, wub-wubbing electro is so full of detail and WTF twists that it’s best taken on its own; despite his awesomely claustrophobic (claustrophonic?) sound, M.I.A.’s Bomb Squad he ain’t. The tracks were edited into song forms from recordings of epic jam sessions, and you can tell. With the exceptions of album highlight “Born Free,” which samples Suicide’s “Ghost Rider,” and “XXXO,” a straight radio-pop construction,
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sounds like something roped down from the ether and pasted together.

“You know who I am,” she sings on “Steppin Up,” and now and then it feels like we do.
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is as close to a treatise on her personal brand as she’s ever gotten—there’s a lot more about Arulpragasam, a lot more first person. Or at least as much about M.I.A. as she wishes to be known: a world-weary pop terrorist, a truth-telling Robin Hoodrat here to disabuse of us our first-world ignorance, a siren singer who’s seen the rewards of pop-chart success and is alternately burdened with and enchanted by them. “You want me to be somebody who I’m really not,” she sings on the hook to “XXXO,” but who is she talking to?

Throughout the album, Arulpragasam broadcasts her ID: immigrant, refugee, Pope hater, enemy of the bourgeoisie. She can’t leave out the part where she’s an international celebrity, even if she’d prefer to (“I don’t wanna talk about money, ‘cause I got it,” she sings on “Born Free”). She is perhaps more than ever doing as Robert Christgau wrote in 2005: making art of her contradictions. They’re what make her compelling, and why her rebel-girl image—calculated and genuine, with both halves magnified in the limelight—is so hard to take at face value. M.I.A. confounds us as a pop star and political artist, a slippery shapeshifter moving easily between two positions we’ve learned to see as incompatible: she’s an enemy of America even as she makes pop for Americans.

THERE IS NO GUYVILLE IN SWEDEN: FRIDA HYVÖNEN’S
UNTIL DEATH COMES

Chicago Reader,
November 2006

Frida Hyvönen is giving away girl secrets. Her lyrics are confessions, but not the kind you’d hide in a diary or write in a letter you never send—they’re the kind of things you’d tell another girl, so the two of you could commiserate about the things boys don’t understand, about the private frustration of being a woman in a man’s world. Her fearlessness makes me envious, even if I’m a little freaked-out that she just threw the clubhouse door open like that.

Until Death Comes
, Hyvönen’s first record, came out last year in Sweden and a couple weeks ago here in the States. It could be the Swedish equivalent of Liz Phair’s
Exile in Guyville
, full of clear-eyed tales of a hard-thinking girl who hops in and out of bed, drinks some, enjoys herself or doesn’t, believes in romance—and clearly knows the price of all of those choices.
Until Death Comes
doesn’t titillate like
Guyville
did; Hyvönen doesn’t seem too interested in the possibility that a woman singing dirty words could get a rise out of people. Plus, her record’s more casual about its autobiographical tone (read: untouched by shame or guilt.) Maybe in Sweden a woman who writes a song about getting drunk and hooking up with a friend doesn’t have to handle the topic like a live grenade.

Guest musicians pop up here and there, but for most of the album Hyvönen just accompanies herself on piano, playing with the freshness and unself-consciousness of an amateur who’s still in the “I can do anything!” stage of learning an instrument. She tends to alternate like a seesaw between left hand and right, plunking a chord or alternating between two notes. Her voice is plain and bright, and she hasn’t got any tricks. But the melodies are very pretty, and despite the sparseness of the music, the lyrics don’t overwhelm it; instead the two elements click together, the deft simplicity of one balancing the emotional complexity of the other.

“Once I Was a Serene Teenaged Child” unspools over a distant, resonant waltz figure, and for the first six seconds or so it sounds delicate enough—until Hyvönen matter-of-factly delivers the second line, “Once I felt your cock against my thigh.” Soon it’s clear that she’s taking on an experience I’ve never heard anyone address in song: the way a girl who wants to be a grown-up woman, yet still be able to stay one of the guys, comes to discover her sexual power over men. “You said a girl like me was torture for you / I didn’t know what to do about it and / Somehow it made me feel proud,” she sings, then mournfully repeats, “The feeling of pride and the loneliness to it” until the song fades. Her narrative is cool and observational—no one is painted as a victim. Instead she offers an epistemology of sexuality, a time-lapse film of eager and awkward teenage evolution.

Hyvönen sings as a free girl who does as she pleases, her desires no longer husked in naiveté. Her songs are mostly about herself, though some cover the topics of boys and her relationships with them. The album’s single, “I Drive My Friend,” is about taking a friend to the train station after a night out drinking together, a night that turned romantic. She giddily notices tiny details of their trip and promises to wait “a million years” for him to return, plumes of love rising from her hungover heart, but in the next breath she returns to her own life and its glories: “I have everything / A driver’s license / A car and a song to sing.” Just to make sure we’re clear on her priorities, she repeats the word “sing” 23 times. On “Djuna!” her promise is to herself, to leave the boys behind (“They make me regress and forget my aim”) and she pleads with a friend to remind her that life is “a piece of art and a hell to raise.”

What makes Hyvönen’s songs seem foreign is this combination of unapologetically unsentimental self-regard and head-rush romance. She operates entirely outside the gender dialectics of (American) pop music, where a woman’s power is conventionally measured by her ability to lord it over men or reject them, whether she’s an R&B balladeer, a singer-songwriter or an indie-rock It Girl. Objectification is a given; the male gaze is what mirrors women’s worth back to them.

Hyvönen not only does justice to the complexity of female desires but also allows her men three-dimensional depth—they’re not reduced to caricature, either scumbags or superheroes. Men simply don’t have the outsize importance to her that would justify demonization or worship—her world doesn’t revolve around the axis of one man’s erection or attentions. These are the songs of a woman who values her liberty and knows her own worth, whether anybody else does or not.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Tim Kinsella for having such faith and enthusiasm in this book. Thank you to my husband Matthew Hale Clark for helping edit this book and encouraging me to write full time. Thank you to my mom Susie Eaton Hopper for gentle editorial advice and being a model of what a working mom looks like and to my dads for being cool dads and encouraging me to do what I wanted; Steve and Louise Clark for childcare. Thank you to Jude and William for taking such long naps so I could work on these pieces and being the light of my life. This book wouldn’t ever have gotten finished if it weren’t for Jeanine O’Toole, America’s Coolest Babysitter. Props to my agent, Tina Wexler at ICM, for her stewardship, and Dana Meyerson and Kathryn Frazier at Biz3 for their hard work.

Many of these pieces would have never been written were it not for my editors at the
Chicago Reader
—Kiki Yablon, Philip Montoro and Alison True—who fostered me, and gave me many hours of their time so that I might learn how to write. My
Reader
colleagues David Wilcox, Miles Raymer, Liz Armstrong, Anaheed Alani and Leor Galil for being sounding boards as well. A debt of gratitude to Charles Aaron for taking a chance on me back in those fanzine days, and being the guiding light on many of the
SPIN
pieces included here, as well as Rob Harvilla, Steve Kandell and Christopher Weingarten who gave me assignments there and elsewhere. Maura Johnston, Robert Christgau and Brian McManus for Pazz & Jop opps, and Brian especially for saying yes to an R. Kelly piece that no one else wanted to touch, and to Brittany Spanos at the
Voice
and Andrew Gill at WBEZ for crucial support on that piece.

Respect is due to the editorial handiwork of the following: Daniel Sinker at
Punk Planet
, Ezra Ace Caraeff at
Portland Mercury
, Steve Haruch at
Nashville Scene
, Melissa Maerz at
City Pages
, Randall Roberts at
LA Weekly
, Cassie Walker at
Chicago Magazine
, Phoebe Connelly at
The American Prospect
, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd at
Hit It or Quit It
and for talking out ideas that appear in many of the early pieces included here. Special recognition to Kevin Williams at the
Chicago Tribune
for being cool in spite of the fact that I blew deadline every week while working on this book.

The insight of my sister Lauren Redding and the rest of the ‘list powered this book: Danielle Henderson, Estelle Tang, Lena Singer, Tavi Gevinson, Amy Rose Spiegel, Gabby Noone, Megan Fredette, Anna Fitzpatrick, JES, Hazel Cills, Arabelle Sicardi, Lola Pellegrino, Emma Straub, Marie Lodi, Jenny Zhang, Stephanie Kuehnert Lewis, Suzy X., Laia Garcia, Brodie Lancaster, Monika Zaleska, Gabi Gregg, Beth Hoeckel, Rose Lichter-Marck, Krista Burton, Naomi Morris, Dylan Tupper Rupert, Pixie Casey, Jamia Wilson, Sandy Honig, Cat Donohue, Tyler Ford, and Maja Demska. How anyone writes a book without a
Rookie
cheerleading crew, I do not know.

A debt of gratitude to my best friend JR Nelson for being DFW for the last 15-ish years, for helping me figure out ideas, filling in my knowledge gaps and accompanying me to almost every show mentioned in this book. Cindy Duckworth for superhuman feats of transcription. James Yates and Yung David Turner for research assistance. Aside from being my friends, the following people helped me dig deeper over the years, and to think harder on pieces included here: Nora Brank, Kate Rose, Morgan Thoryk, David Schied, Michael Catano, Jane Marie, Cali Thornhill DeWitt, Ben Fasman, David Dark, David Bazan, Kevin “Whatever, Kevin” Erickson, Al Burian, Joan Hiller, Sean Daley, Becky Smith, Josh Hooten, Kelly Nothing, Robin and Ian Harris, Marianna Ritchey, Joe Gross, Miles Raymer, Teeter Sperber, and all my colleagues and peers who challenged and inspired me. Thanks to Rob Sheffield, Sara Quin, Teenboss, and Carl Wilson for their acts of generosity. Michael Renaud, David Sampson, Jason Sommer and Zach Dodson for their efforts in making this book come true.

About the Author

Jessica Hopper’s music criticism has been included in
Best Music Writing
2004, 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011. Her first book,
The Girls Guide to Rocking
, was named one of 2009’s Notable Books for Young Readers by the American Library Association. She is Senior Editor at Pitchfork and the Editor-in-Chief of
The Pitchfork Review
. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two young sons.