M.I.A.: "Bedroom to the Hallway to the Road to the World"

Crystal Castles, the band that was spitting out Nintendo samples and screaming through ski masks in all the dingiest clubs in Toronto like four years ago, are now doing a song with Robert Smith that sounds like a Robert Smith song. Kanye West and M.I.A. are going the other way, filling an effects bank with about 6 different samples and hitting them at random. Which is also the opposite direction of the title of this track, this being more of a retreat from the world into the bedroom.

If for Kanye this retreat is equal parts self-awareness and self-delusion—or at least properly reflecting in some way the insularity of his personality, then in contrast M.I.A. still seems to see herself as a populist. “Bedroom to the Hallway to the Road to the World”—and its inexplicable website, which repeats the same 8-second pixelated image of a pyrotechnic stage show—is like a day-glo version of Gerhard Richter’s Archive: it condenses history, geopolitics, and popular culture into a monolithic abstraction.

But if Richter attempted to document the collapse of morality in the face of ideological determinism, M.I.A. still seems to revel in it. Remember when post-modernism was being taken to task for being provincial and not reflecting the actual material conditions of the majority of the world’s population? Well, here’s proof that Third World-ism can bask in the same sense of alienation as smug, relativist high theory. Welcome, intifada, to your simulacrum. “I know Billie Jean / I know Bruce Springsteen / I know Palestine”: condensing a fictional character, an aging, idealistic rock star and a non-existent nation as all three were nothing more than equal measures of credibility.

But what’s really frustrating is that her music is still framed, positively or negatively, as if it were a matter of provocation when really any antagonism that exists lies solely outside of her music. The rhetorical platitudes are somewhere in the same neighborhood as late Moby, the only difference being she espouses them as if she was bored and/or couldn’t give a shit.