heartbeats

On M.I.A, Artists of Color, and “Selling Out”

thesociologicalear:

Of course I watched the Superbowl half time show yesterday. How could I not? I’m no fan of Madonna (for what I’d like to think are pretty legitimate reasons), but the promise of Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. sashaying their stuff on the same larger-than-life stage was enough for me to tune in.

Thankfully, I did get what I expected and was delighted in the imagery and production of the show (I can say what I will about Madonna but at least she has wonderful taste in art direction), and was even moderately surprised when M.I.A. managed to upstage Madonna for the second time in three days by flipping off nearly all of America. A strange sort of glee occurred in me at that point, because—to paraphrase a person on my dashboard—there’s just something so rich and wicked about artists of color displaying non-acceptable, pre-approved behavior that is regularly set in place for artists of color (there’s also something to be said for how “unladylike” the gesture was, but since that is not the objective of this post, I’ll digress.) 

As I reveled in the aftermath of the gesture, my glee turned into a combination of annoyance and confusion. Watching the reactions of fans of non-fans alike made me wonder what exactly people expected from M.I.A and, by extension, artists who operated within her genre and on her level of fame. It’s no real secret that Maya has a weird association with popularity in America; although she does not actively seek mainstream success, it has happened to her with the rise of 2007’s Paper Planes. But because her later singles did not attain the same level of success, Maya has never really had the chance to formally introduce herself or even explain herself as a musical artist to the mainstream public, an opportunity usually missed by regular mainstream “one-hit wonders.”

For a lot of people, the Superbowl half time performance was a re-introduction to the artist M.I.A., and some people were able to use “Paper Planes” as their base idea of what to expect. In “Paper Planes,” Maya is an immigrant hustler, selling sandwiches and collecting money; she is cool, determined, and with little worry. She is, more importantly, the anti-thesis of the mainstream female pop artist in both appearance and in demeanor.

That has, in actuality, been M.I.A.’s schtick for some in her entire career. She is not the (socially-acceptable) beautiful, popular female artist and she does not operate in the mainstream. She is the “opposite” of Britney Spears or of fellow collaborator, Madonna. I suppose that if you view M.I.A. on these terms, it’s very easy to point the accusing finger of “selling out.” If you believe that M.I.A. is meant only for the underground and does not operate as a pop artist, it would be very difficult to imagine the idea of her working so closely with someone like Madonna.

This would, in effect, explain the myriad of posts I saw of people sighing in relief when Maya flipped the bird. To the “selling out” crowd, that middle digit was a sign: Maya was still tough, still underground, still cool to like and to enjoy, and that Madonna had not brainwashed her into mainstream success. For some, Maya had effectively saved her street cred by flipping off the world.

I’ll be real: that kind of shit perplexes me. I don’t really view Maya on any of the terms listed above—I can recognize, above all things, that she is a pop artist. I realize that her image can sometimes be put on but is also largely an extent of her experiences as a woman of color and a non-American. The glee I felt in watching Maya “misbehave” had to do more with the fact that she was a woman of color misbehaving, not because I was concerned for her street cred in the underground world.

The entire concept of “selling out” is a strange one; it can be used to effectively police the ventures and interests of a white artist (by possibly affecting their fanbase), but it is a limiting, almost arbitrary concept on the careers of artists of color. In Maya’s case, “selling out” is almost too ridiculous to entertain. The more I thought of the relief people displayed in the two second clip of Maya flipping the bird, the more I realized how much people wanted and expected Maya to stay underground as some kind of weird, super-cool collective secret.

But why Maya? And how does “selling out” affect artists of color?

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