When M.I.A. popped up in 2004 with her candy colored imagery of terrorism, war and third world violence and lyrics in the same vein set to ass shaking beats, lets be honest, I think people (of the Americans/Western type in general) responded to someone taking the fright out of symbols we had all been made to feel deeply frightful and nervous about since 2001. It wasn’t like we were responding to some sort of glorification of terrorism as much as we were some neon colored deconstruction of it. She made us dance to things we had been afraid of, you know? I don’t know if that’s what she intended, but it happened.
So it’s kind of interesting that we’re now all that concerned about her flashing the relatively innocuous symbol of the middle finger, and now Pitchfork douche-in-chief is basically telling to stop “being an asshole” and make us all dance again. Whatever. I think there’s still a demand that she make us feel “comfortable” about certain things through her work, or whatever, and I think she’s kind of gotten sick of it.
