My way-tubular, totally eligible friend Anthony says when he hears Victoria Legrand of Beach House sing he likes to pretend she's singing to him. That's sort of what most pop music is for a lot of people—it's either someone singing to you or for you. It's not enough just to hear it, we need to squeeze ourselves in there somewhere.
There are issues with this, of course. Each one of us probably had our own distinct epiphanies, but mine came one day during recess when my friend told me that Britney Spears didn't even write ""...Baby One More Time."" This cute girl I was totally ready to sit next to at lunch and let share my Capri Sun was actually a 27-year-old Swede named Max Martin. How cute.
This paradox isn't all that complicated, and what I'm really talking about is the concept proposed by French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes known as the Death of the Author. He argues that we cannot ascribe any biographical background to any form of art. When we hear Britney Spears or Kelly Clarkson, we shouldn't be connecting the individual personality with the art.
It's supposed to be different in indie music, though. The ""indie"" tag is supposed to denote an independence from the nameless, faceless, generic songwriting that makes playground kids wax romantic over something an overweight chain smoker in Gainesville, Fla., wrote. (I know, that does sounds like the genesis of ""To Catch a Predator."") Indie music is supposed to be more personal.
That's why everyone was so hard on M.I.A.'s latest release, /|/|/|Y/|, isn't it? It was supposed to be her most personal album to date, but all it did was expose her political beliefs as ignorantly militant and based on the same fear-inducing premises she was rallying against. The New York Times profile didn't help, either. Reading about the Sri Lankan refugee eating fast food, living in a mansion and marrying into the bourgeois only reinforced what we were already telling ourselves—M.I.A. is a fraud. We couldn't separate Maya Arulpragasam from M.I.A., so we couldn't understand how M.I.A. might stand for something different, something bigger.
That capacity to embody more than individual parts is exactly what art is about, though. Art takes ephemeral experiences or stimuli and floods them with latent significance. Anyone can do this, and that's the point.
If the author truly is dead, then Die Antwoord killed it. Die Antwoord are a rave-rap group from Cape Town, South Africa, from the ""zef"" side—which is really just a progressive and geopolitically specific way of saying ""white trash."" When their lyrics aren't outright sexist, they're lewd and potentially racist.
But the two primary minds behind Die Antwoord, Ninja and Yo-Landi, are not really any of those things. The two are married with children and openly admit that DA is a projection of fabricated personas—much to the chagrin of imaginations everywhere.
While their charade doesn't necessarily unearth any grand social paradoxes, they do an incredible job of getting the elephant out of the room. The creators are irrelevant in our consumption of the art.
So when we talk about /|/|/|Y/|, we need to stop talking about Arulpragasam's descent into American culture and start talking about how M.I.A. forgot to write a pop hook. All the same, this column doesn't mean I'm an aloof illiterate who can't form cogent thoughts, it just means I stayed up all night studying and had to meet an afternoon deadline.
Still convinced Britney Spears is singing just for you? Let Kyle know at ktsparks@wisc.edu.
