OBLIGATORY M.I.A. POST

I don't like M.I.A. very much at all. I think she's stupid (and I'm not just talking about her entitled-art-student interview persona; her lyrics are forehead-slappingly clumsy, something none of her apologists, from Robert Christgau on down, has managed to explain away or defend convincingly), I can't stand her fashion sense or visual style, and though this has no bearing on her art, I shake my head in bafflement when people call her beautiful or sexy. (In media culture, once you become famous, you get declared sexy by default, I think.)

I bought each of her first two albums, right when the hype surrounding each had built to a sustained scream. They were available very cheaply at Target; otherwise, I might not have bothered at all, especially not the second time. Arular was primitive and intermittently fun; Kala was less primitive, much more calculated (experiments had calcified into a style), and less fun. But I bought them and listened to them because I felt obligated to do so. Many writers I knew personally, and even more of the writers I read (and considered my peers/competitors), could talk of anything else. I let my intellectual inferiority complex get the better of my taste (at least, where Kala was concerned, since I'd already heard Arular and should have known better).

(This was basically a repeat of what happened to me with Dizzee Rascal, by the way; I listened to a bunch of people whose taste didn't overlap with mine at all, really, but who were getting their opinions printed in places I wanted to someday see mine. I bought both the first and second albums, and liked one or two songs, but was the guy a genius? Not unless that word has been so devalued as to be like the ribbons everyone in a kindergarten soccer game gets for trying. I learned my lesson more quickly with dubstep, because I'd enjoyed various albums on the then-Brooklyn-based label WordSound Recordings years earlier and was able to file dubstep under "similar to WordSound, but not as good, and I'm over that anyway.")

So anyway, M.I.A.'s new album /\/\/\Y/\ came out yesterday, and the big news is that Pitchfork, which had been pretty relentlessly championing her since her emergence, even letting her take over their Twitter account for a day not long ago, panned the record. Hard.

Now that I've actually heard the record, I don't agree. Indeed, I think it's her best album to date. Of course, that's saying very, very little, because as I said at the outset, I think she's stupid and I don't like her first two albums at all. But this one has some pleasing qualities. Its noisiest tracks crib from industrial; there's a sampled air-gun (you know, the kind you'd use in a garage, to change tires) on "Steppin Up" that reminds me of the Revolting Cocks' "Stainless Steel Providers," and the drum assault that opens "Born Free," before the Suicide sample kicks in, is a straight steal from the beginning of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral. Some of the quieter, softer tracks remind me of Primal Scream's "Higher Than the Sun."

I don't know how many times I'm gonna wind up listening to /\/\/\Y/\. But if that number is higher than three, it'll be a new record.

PUSSY GALORE DESERVE BETTER

I wish this article was better.

I like Pussy Galore, a lot. I have almost all their studio releases in my iPod (I've never heard the live album, and I don't like Historia de la Musica Rock), and some of it is really thrilling stuff. Right Now! is so simultaneously jacked-up and sagging, it's like a series of seizures. Same with the early EPs. But Sugarshit Sharp and Dial M for Motherfucker demonstrate real accomplishment. Skip past the cover of Einstürzende Neubauten's "Yu-Gung" on SS; check out "Sweet Little Hi-Fi." That's just a flat-out good song. So are "SM 57" and "Dick Johnson" from Dial M. This crew knew what they wanted to achieve in the studio, and they did it. They were a good band.

I saw them play in Los Angeles in 1989, on what I think was their final tour; Julia Cafritz wasn't even in the band anymore, it was just Jon Spencer, Neil Hagerty and Bob Bert. They played at one A.M. on a Monday night, to a barely half-full club. I bought a T-shirt from Bert for five bucks; it started out red but wound up fading to the color of an old ketchup stain, all stretched out of shape and warped-looking by the time it finally found its way to the trash a half-decade or so later.

Anyway, as much as I love the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St., I also own and have occasionally even listened to Pussy Galore's version, and it has some aesthetic merit, especially early on. It gets worse—noisier, more half-assed, like the group has lost interest in the joke but feels compelled to reach the end—as it goes on. But it's worth hearing. It's worth analyzing.

This Quietus piece provides no analysis. The author clearly thought his idea (to claim that PG's version of Exile is superior to the original) was, in effect, too good to check. Reading this, I'm not even sure if he even listened to the PG Exile before writing the column. He offers no description of any value to anyone who might want to seek it out (it's all over the Internet, naturally), instead coughing up this hairball from an old issue of Forced Exposure: "four track tape feedback, guitars that are out of tune and time, voices telling you to go fuck yourself, versions of previous epics retroactively aborted back to unformed foetuses drowning in sonic uterine discharge, convulsing over exploding tape heads..." Jesus, what year is it? Are we really still trying to be Lester Bangs and Byron Coley? I don't wanna get all Robert Christgau here, but for hell's sake, stop masturbating and start writing.