If you haven't read Lynn Hirschberg's savage, dead-on takedown of M.I.A. (as a person, not as an artist, she is frank about her musical talent), it's a fantastic way to spend an hour or so this weekend. I started reading it on my phone on the way back from a happy hour and quite literally couldn't stop. It's completely excellent, possibly the definitive piece about artists who want to be political gamechangers without doing any political work.
I'll admit to having been predisposed towards it. I like M.I.A.'s music, and I have her two previous albums. But I've always found her fairly supremely grating, in particular when she went after Lady Gaga a while back. Both women make popular music. Both have issues in which they're invested: M.I.A. cares about Sri Lanka, while Lady Gaga is interested in gay and trans rights and feminism. But their primary work is essentially the same job, even if performed very differently. M.I.A. is undoubtedly musically more sophisticated than Gaga, but she's also in the midst of her third album, so full-on comparisons don't seem warranted yet. For M.I.A. to see herself as wildly different than Gaga seemed sublimely un-self-aware.
What Hirschberg does brilliantly is not only reveal the contradictions in M.I.A.'s stated politics and her lifestyle, whether it's the conditions of her son's birth (she initially said she wanted a natural home birth because her pain was nothing compared to what happened to people who gave makeshift birth in concentration camps, but delivered in a private, very exclusive ward) or the way she treats actual economic struggle when she encounters it (she goes to a photoshoot with a no-name photographer who works out of his home in millions of dollars of jewelry). Instead, she goes after M.I.A.'s political impact, and talks to experts who say her advocacy has actually been detrimental to the situation in the country she claims to love so much, and that her uninformed analysis has lead people astray. Lady Gaga's decision not to address rumors she was a hermaphrodite may not have been helpful to trans people, but she's mostly done a lot of work to raise money for HIV and gay-oriented charities. Hard to find a lot of fault there. But Hirschberg found something assessable, she's taken M.I.A. at her word, and found her wanting by that standard. It's hard to take more damning action than to hang someone by their own rope, and with their own assistance tying the blindfold.