M.I.A. was right about Beyoncé
Controversial remarks lead to threats of a boycott
Internets,
As I may or may not have discussed in a past edition of Life in a Shanty Town (who can remember?), Beyoncé doesn’t deserve any credit for her attempt to co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement for the purpose of promoting her new album at this past year’s Super Bowl, because a truly worthwhile political statement would never be allowed at the Super Bowl.
The fact that they allowed Beyoncé to give the new limp-wristed black power salute and perform a dance routine with a group of girls dressed as members of the Black Panthers’ scantily-clad ho division was merely further proof that Black Lives Matter is being funded by George Soros to create political instability as an excuse for Obama to enact martial law, possibly during this year’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
M.I.A., of all people, should know. She was fined $16 million for flipping the bird to a camera at the Super Bowl maybe five years ago, and word on the street is that she actually paid, because she’s a billionaire. She’s got at least one baby by the Halfrican Canadian son of the guy who owns Seagrams, who may have also owned Universal Music at some point in time or another. Hopefully, they got out of that business.
Flipping the bird to a camera is hardly any more astute a political statement than dressing in a Slutty Black Activist Halloween costume and professing your love of hot sauce, especially if it’s not clear that your message is intended for the police. CACs watching the Super Bowl don’t understand why someone would be upset with the police. They probably thought she was flipping off her parents. Fuck you, I won’t tidy my bedroom! If your mom doesn’t work for a living and she forces you to clean your own room, arguably that is a form of abuse–especially for young boys, because it causes them to grow up with a fucked up sense of gender roles. lol jk
No but really.
Obviously the incident at the Super Bowl was the not-so-hidden subtext in the situation this past week with Afropunk London. M.I.A. seems to have since been quasi-blackballed. I’ve hardly so much as heard her named mentioned in the past few years, even last year, when Pitchfork would run an article on a ham sandwich, if it were a female ham sandwich, and then try to get her to downplay the efforts of the guys who actually wrote her songs–or applied the mustard, as it were.
M.I.A. addresses the fact that Diplo did all of the heavy lifting on her earlier, more popular recordings, as well as the fact that she duped that Seagrams heir kid into getting her pregnant and then skipped town with their baby, in an interview with the Evening Standard, in the UK, where she may or may not remain strangely popular, like a post-Dangerous Michael Jackson.
Elsewhere in the same interview, she shits on Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar and Black Lives Matter–my favorites, all of them–for not being sufficiently concerned with the plight of Muslims. I’ll go ahead and quote this at length, for your reading pleasure.
‘It’s interesting that in America the problem you’re allowed to talk about is Black Lives Matter. It’s not a new thing to me — it’s what Lauryn Hill was saying in the 1990s, or Public Enemy in the 1980s. Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? That’s a more interesting question. And you cannot ask it on a song that’s on Apple, you cannot ask it onan American TV programme, you cannot create that tag on Twitter, Michelle Obama is not going to hump you back.’
I must have missed when this became a thing on the Internets, because I’ve been working seven days a week for going on a year, after having never worked more than like 20 hours a week from the time I was born until I was 35. I don’t recommend it. Anyway, a few Black Lives Matter types caught wind of the fact that M.I.A. had been selected to headline Afropunk London, the inaugural furrin edition of the black rock festival, and they were like, fuck that shit!
A boycott was threatened. For a minute there, it looked like M.I.A. wouldn’t be playing Afropunk London. She said herself on Twitter that she wouldn’t be performing, because she’d been told to “stay in her lane,” and that this would be in the best interest of Black Lives Matter, as if BLM really is preventing black kids from getting shot by the police.
In another tweet, which was deleted shortly thereafter, M.I.A. pointed out that the founder of Afropunk is “mixed black and Israeli.” Whatever she meant by this (maybe the Evening Standard can get her to clarify), the fact that she deleted it arguably invalidates the point she was trying to make about Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar and Black Lives Matter. Everyone, it seems, has a limit to the extent to which they’re willing to keep it real.
It’s since been announced, in an official statement from Afropunk, that the show must go on, so to speak. Of course it was one of those things where they type up a text document and post a screencap of it on Twitter. I skimmed it. The gist of it seemed to be that there was no way that Afropunk could continue to be taken seriously if they canceled one of their headliners because (literally) two bored hoodrats on Twitter were upset about something she said about Beyoncé.
If I wanted to see a show where all of the political statements have been thoroughly vetted by someone in the marketing department at (((Columbia Records))), I’d cop tickets to Formation. Ticketmaster just sent me a coupon for $2.25 off.
Take it easy on yourself,
Bol
Originally published at tinyletter.com.
