How M.I.A., Kelis and Christina Aguilera let the world down

Duncan Day-Myron

If necessity is the mother of invention, then what is the mother of reinvention? Publicity, record sales, creative exhaustion? It isn’t uncommon for any public figure to hijack or reevaluate their own careers. But it doesn’t always work out for the best.

Christina Aguilera’s career is a testament to the powers reinvention: from 1990s girl next door virgin, to intemperate sexual predator in her “Dirrty” days, to the jazz inspired 2-disc behemoth Back to Basics. For better or worse, Aguilera’s image has been nothing if not au courant. But regularly changing your musical MO to keep you on the charts doesn’t exactly bode well for your artistic reputation, something Aguilera yearns to have. To wit, in recording her newest album Bionic she brought in some of the most respected writers to help her out: Le Tigre, Ladytron, Sia, M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj all assisted. However, Aguilera’s caterwauling doesn’t service these songs well and the result is poorly calculated, constructed, and insincere, not pop enough to fit on the radio but not experimental enough to warrant serious critical thought. Both sides Aguilera tried to impress ended up short changed, and the album ended up universally displeasing and disingenuous, saved only by the kudos you could give her for attempting something new.

One of Aguilera’s honchos was the pride of Sri Lanka, Maya “M.I.A.” Arulpragasam. Her newest album, the absurdly titled /\/\ /\ Y /\, hits shelves soon. Hotly anticipated, music journalists for everywhere from Pitchfork Media to the New York Times have been on her trail generating hype since it was announced. The first song released, the dark and dense “Born Free”, in which M.I.A.’s distorted vox ride a wicked Suicide sample, was accompanied by a controversial, exceptionally violent short film. The song itself was passable. You couldn’t dance to it like half of Kala, but it had the same sense of immediacy that always made M.I.A. interesting. Not as interesting as the video, however, as people wrote expositions on its possible meanings (genocide? immigration?) and the song took a back seat.

The rest of /\/\ /\ Y /\ falters almost all the way through. It grinds more than it bumps. It drones for minutes at a time. It’s Metal Machine Music on MDMA. “Teqkilla” clocks in at over six minutes of sirens and repetition. Unfortunate that it follows the first single (and the album’s only high note) “XXXO”, but it sets the stage for the rest of the album adequately. M.I.A. feels more concerned with getting as much stock political rhetoric between extended avant-garde samples and 808 loops than she does making the kind of music that got her to the point where people cared about her politics in the first place.

M.I.A. and Aguilera have, in the past, served two separate markets, two separate purposes, two separate masters: the status quo, and the elite. They were both meant to dominate playlists, tastemaker music blogs and magazine covers for the next four months. But both of these albums fail in the same way, in that these masters became their own ideas of artistic ambition.

That’s not to say that a musician to pander to public expectations of their music, but the only defense of these two mediocre albums is the political and ideological defenses their creators put behind them, to reinvent both perceptions of them as artists but also of the music they create, be it Top 40 pop or college radio electro. When the dust settles, their well-publicized artistic ambitions will be lost, and all that will remain is the product itself. Artistic intent and biography are ultimately irrelevant to any cultural production, and the same is true of popular music. As noble as lofty ambitions might be, they don’t make good music.

There’s the cliché that art is defended by people by saying that an unfavourable audience simply didn’t get it. But, especially for pop music, if the audience didn’t “get” it, then it’s the artist who has failed.

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