M.I.A. trashes Lady Gaga: 'She's not progressive, but she's a good mimic'
Image Credit: Steve Double/Retna UK/LandovVia New York magazine’s Vulture site comes excerpts from an interview recently given to British music mag NME by everyone’s favorite Sri Lankan pop revolutionary, M.I.A., in which the “Paper Planes” singer more or less bitchslaps Lady Gaga back to her Catholic schoolgirl days. Here’s the juiciest part:
“Do you think those programmes [X-Factor] and the Internet have destroyed the mythology around popstars?
I don’t know. Again, there’s Lady Gaga — people say we’re similar, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! None of her music’s reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic. She sounds more like me than I f—ing do! That’s a talent and she’s got a great team behind her, but she’s the industry last’s stab at making itself important — saying, ‘You need our money behind you, the endorsements, the stadiums’ Respect to her, she’s keeping a hundred thousand people in work, but my belief is: Do It Yourself.”
Ouch. Obvs, the “Gaga is derivative of literally everything that came before her” argument is not a new one. Positioning Gags as a pawn in the mainstream music industry’s final push for relevancy, on the other hand, is a pretty fresh form of nasty, given the way Our Lady of the Crazytown Lake goes out of her way to represent for all the counterculture art-freak misfits of the world. And to me, this quote smells more like an axe being ground against a neon-colored stone than an actual answer to the question at hand. Although the “20-year-old Ibiza music” bit is hilarious.
What do you think, Mixers? Who’s gonna walk out of this High-Concept Pop Thunderdome alive?
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