Vicki Leekx

Danny: What’s your beef with M.I.A.?

Sean: I got tired of her shtick. The trashy, 4chan aesthetic. For someone who seemed very focused at first, she started to look like her artistic project was all over the place.

D: This mixtape seemed, in many ways, a corrective to the backlash to against  /\/\ /\ Y /\.

S: Which was also a pretty shitty record, objectively.

D: It was muddled and misguided unfortunately, yeah. Did Vicki Leekx correct anything for you?

S: It didn’t correct anything so much as it has cast her in a different light. It turns out that I like her mixtapes better than anything else. Piracy Funds Terrorism and this.

D: Why? Because they’re less calculated?

S: Partially. But also because it’s perfect for her aesthetic. Remember, at first, visually, she was all about street art and its connections to guerilla warfare. Then she just went off the map. But the eclecticism of a mixtape is perfect for her grab-bag style.

D: If you believe Lynn Hirschberg’s infamous New York Times profile of her, she became more interested in provocation than actual music. That Warholian notion of package and product over content.

S: I do believe it, in a pretty big way. She’s a concept artist.

D: Do the seeming contradictions that article raised matter? That she’s engaged to the heir to the Bronfman fortune and lives in Brentwood, and  yet espouses to “pull up the people, pull up the poor” and be this anti-materialist revolutionary? Is it hypocritical? Is it mutually exclusive?

S: I think as long as she lets go of this authenticity crap… “Authenticity” is always hypocritical.

D: She’s drawing from hip-hop tradition though, which is so deeply steeped in “keeping it real.” There was a scandal a few years ago when The Smoking Gun revealed that Rick Ross was not a outlaw coke-slinger like his raps claimed, but a former prison guard. Ross even tried to keep denying it, because it was so contradictory to his persona.

S: It makes me think of Dizzee Rascal, who used to rap about street life. Then, by 2009, he was releasing Tongue n’ Cheek, an album of party songs.

D: And objectively, that album was pretty shitty too.

S: It’s true, but I respect that he realized he was beating a dead horse. He said he knew he couldn’t rap about having a tough life anymore.

D: Success is a tricky trap for artists like that to work around. If you fold your fame and success into your work, it can become vapid and self-reflexively shallow very quickly. If you try to change your sound too much, you risk losing what made you special in the first place.

S: If rich people want to rap about being poor, that’s fine with me. Just drop the authenticity label. Art is inherently inauthentic.

D: We also know too much about artists now. I miss the mystery, before every sneeze, cough, and fart was being chronicled. So what about Vicki Leekx appealed to you?

S: It’s scrappy. I enjoyed it on a sonic level, and didn’t listen too much to the lyrics. I’m afraid that would make me dislike it again.

D: I love the fact that she rhymes “Springsteen” with “mujahideen” and “mangosteen.” No one else in music capable of raising those kinds of parallels.

S: House of Pain rhymed “McEnroe” with “smackin’ a hoe.”

D: And sonically, it is pretty fresh. I wish she’d gone in this direction for her last album. The inexplicable thing about /\/\ /\ Y /\ is that it wasn’t a bid for a bigger audience or airplay. It’s a weird, noncommercial slog with few standout songs and little momentum. And yet here, when she’s poppier and looser and trying less hard to matter, she’s far better.

S: I agree. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that some of these songs are about people being inauthentic.

D: I hate to break it to you–that’s true.

S: It’s just immature on her part.

D: Or defensive or defiant or deluded. Take your pick.

S: Her musical talents lie in the bricolage of different forms of popular culture. I heard some reggae, some kuduro, a little dubstep.

D: You can see why she and Diplo clicked so well. They’re both collators, curators. They share that same love of sampling very widely and reconfiguring newly. Music as a global buffet.

S: And her lyrical talents lie in light, breezy wordplay. But she takes herself so seriously as a political writer, and it’s just not there.

D: She’s not a deep theorist, no. But at the same time, I’m glad that someone’s tackling politics in pop.

S: I would rather no one tackle politics than tackle them this childishly.

D: I don’t know. There’s a fair amount of intelligence on this mixtape. For example, I appreciate the concept of personifying Wikileaks as Vicki, a female cyborg hellbent on bringing music to the masses. And I’ve always loved how M.I.A. explores and sometimes conflates the connections between sex and violence. You may be underestimating her.

S: I’ve been disappointed by her a fair bit in the past. I did love her at first because I saw these flashes of intelligence, but she’s become predictably polemic in increasingly uninteresting ways.

D: Look at her revision of Beyonce’s hook, “A diva is a female version of a hustler.” M.I.A. takes it one step further and changes it to “A hustler is a female version of a hustler.” Or contrast her and Nicki Minaj (who she cleverly shouts out to). At one point, the former says, “Your shoes could feed a village, you should think about that,” while the latter once bragged, “We can’t even rock them shoes if it don’t got a comma on the price tag.” At least, M.I.A. is an antidote to all the get-rich-or-die-trying rap posturing. Outside of overly serious conscious rappers, there aren’t too many people in the genre who are anti-bling and anti-hustle.

S: Is she really anti-hustle? She seems to be the embodiment of hustle.

D: She claims to be anyway. I like the fact that she makes statements like, “You can have my money, but you can’t have me,” even if it’s not true. I’d almost rather have the hypocrisy than the endless bragging about houses, jets, and stacks of paper.

S: Still, something about her feels superficial while pretending at depth. Maybe she’s just a human conceptual art project about the distance between what you say you are and who you are. A rapping Banksy.

D: She is in danger of neutralizing her more salient points by spending so much energy on crafting that self-serious persona. But this mixtape is a retreat from that in some ways.

S: Which is nice. Musically, it’s back in her power zone.

D: And a lot more fun than she’s been in a while.

S: If it’s fun, I really don’t care that much what she talks about.

D: I don’t know how I feel about that. I love the idea of pop being a potential smokescreen for big, hefty ideas. It just needs to be executed with a little more thought and nuance. Are there any current pop stars who are incorporating politics into their music well? No one is jumping to mind for me, which is a shame.

S: I can’t think of anyone right now.