So after working on her two biggest albums and then jumping ship before the just kinda meh /\/\ /\ Y /\ (was that ever a chore to spell), producer Diplo and M.I.A. are no longer friends, and just to nail that point home, he gave an interview in which he pretty much said that girlfriend really doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about when it comes to politics.
“Maya left herself open for attacks,” he says. “She’s not an easy artist to criticize because she’s very left-leaning, she’s progressive, she’s a woman. She’s good in a lot of aspects, but when it comes to die-hard, facts-on-the-ground politics, she’s at zero. She’s nothing. I told her at the beginning of the third record, like, do not bring politics into this. Obama’s the president, for one. You just can’t glamorize terrorism, it’s not cool … you can’t hide behind that sh-t. But she totally did. She didn’t have a plan B. I told her from the beginning, it’s not going to work. And Lynn Hirschberg just ate it up. If she didn’t, the critics would have ate her up anyway because the record wasn’t good.” READ THE FULL ARTICLE
In all fairness, it’s kind of hard to disagree with him here: Sure, M.I.A. has made some amazing records, but if you actually listen to the lyrics, a lot of them are just kind of extremist without making much of a point. Even her Vicki Leekx mix tape, as much as I adored it, had little to nothing to do with the actual Wikileaks scandal other than her directly sampling Julian Assange quotes and putting them into songs devoid of context. So basically, M.I.A. is that really annoying chick at college who lectures you about Darfur despite not being able to find Darfur on a map and only caring about it because George Clooney talked about it.
