January 20, 2008
album of the year: the five-paragraph essay
Kala is not the album of the year because it has three great songs (“Bamboo Banga,” “Bird Flu,” “Paper Planes”) and at least three very good ones (“Hussel,” “XR2,” “World Town”). Neither is it album of the year because it’s more interesting than the sum of its parts, a more body’n’mind moving listen if one goes straight through, an album as the concept endures (weakly, it seems). Those facts have something to do with it — but Kala is the album of the year because it is the soundtrack of a world turned upside down.
For decades, “world music” has basically been reggae.* Not in the sense of accent on the three, but as a structure of feeling: songs of freedom punctuated by melancholy domestic plaints, built on a foundation of rhythm guitar and percussive lilt, with a sense of patient endurance and occasional exhortation. A liberal-progressive politics of hope with a beat you can nod along to, convivial both to doobie and dinner party. That in fact describes the other current hero of world music, Manu Chao; you’ll notice that his international breakthrough, Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, is practically named “Politics of Hope.” Manu Chao is excellent, and he is also reggae — sometimes in fact, and always in feeling. He released an album this year with stacks of cred and critical air support and it tanked. And for all its particular failings and delights, it tanked because it required the fantasy of reggae: that the world out there is going to love us into changing; is going to be stalwart and righteous til we get it; that we’re moving forward together, especially if we’re cool and progressive and down; that a better world is not only possible but is seven hugs and four joints away. This was never true; the “world music” we liked sure helped us pretend it was anyway. No more. At a minimum we need a new fantasy, though we suspect here that we’re getting a little closer to the real. The world fucking wants us dead.
Kala might be thought of as an attempt to destroy the softimism of world music™. Hands up guns out — represent now world town. The album moves past the bubbly syncretism of Arular; goes looking for beat and a form and a hook for the enraged new world and finds a proliferation of each, which is its wonder. Listening to “Bird Flu,” one has to suspect Maya’s been reading (or reading about) Monster at Our Door, the Mike Davis conjecture about the eventual arrival of deadly H5N1 influenza at America’s doorstep. It’s the exact kind of thing that Brooklyn sharpies who are also expats twisted on geo-social hard times like to read on trans-oceanic flights. You listen to the nervous squawks and fearsome, irresistible clatter of the track and you think, that’s not a song, that’s a revenge fantasy. And quite brilliantly, it locates blowback not in the romantic figure of some lone terrorist, but in global structure itself: terror as an inevitable outcome of evil voodoo poured relentlessly into the world-system. In Davis’s account, bird flu when it arrives won’t be an exotic catastrophe we couldn’t predict, but America’s bad faith returned to it after a mutating tour of the planet of slums, the world-ghetto. Funny thing is, that describes Kala exactly.
After all, the album opens not in the depths of some necrojungle around the horizon, but on Route 128 when it's dark outside, Roadrunner Roadrunner! That’s not just the beginning, it’s also the end. Roadrunner has her radio ooonnnnn, and the beat is beaming in from a Tamil movie soundtrack. Roadrunner is listening to M.I.A. and she’s back with a bamboo banger; she’s knocking on the doors of your Hummer Hummer. The song, and its album, have no time for your liberal-progressive pot-smoking ass, no space for your medicinal groove, no vision of freedom and no politics of hope. It is the bad faith of the U.S.A. returned to it after circling the globe, and that is what world music is now, and that is what M.I.A. has to say to you.
The album is certainly a bit resistant, even pleasurably recalcitrant: a pop challenge that finally wants to live under your skin. The question is, what alien life can it smuggle in there. M.I.A.’s döppelganger remains Neneh Cherry, she of the multi-ethnic world-ghetto avant-pop, flying hiphop as a flag of convenience. The first difference is time: Neneh and Maya are poised exactly on opposite sides of the Great Rest, 1989-2001, that brief one-power fantasia while the structure of global imperial conflict shifted from “Cold War” to the current conjuncture. This is not to conflate M.I.A. too easily with “terrorism”; this would be foolish and casual, merely the millionth desperate equation of cultural commodity with political action (if there is a hope remaining in M.I.A.’s world music, it is exactly the hope surviving in some part of her audience that culture can still have political force). But by the same token, it would be foolish and casual to find such gestures merely empty; to imagine that an artist who has had exposure to actually existing terrorism (here we recall that the Tamil Tigers invented suicide bombing) means nothing by raising its spectre, or means the same thing as someone without such experiences. To suppose such a thing is little more than a strategy of containment, as if the thrust of history itself could be parried because "Galang" was in a Honda commercial. That's a way of trying not to know something; Kala is a way of trying to know. One may of course decide for oneself that if it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it, it can’t be the sound of the world turned upside down; this is finally to decide that pleasure must be empty by definition. That ain't music's problem, it's yours.
* Our man Alexander notes rightly that the distinction between conventional world music and Maya's was sketched judiciously in this article; we mean to add only some remarks on the historical substance of the shift, and the particularities of political affect that underwrite it — in short, to grasp something about specific conditions that the music is after.
Posted by jane at January 20, 2008 04:02 PM | TrackBack