Self-Destructive Impulse: Listening to M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes"

I was scouring blogs the other day, looking for MP3s on the Best of 2007 lists posted last month, when I had a chance to reacquaint myself with the song "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. (Pitchfork's fourth-best song of the year), a pleasant and buoyant number about selling illegal visas and taking hostages that features a chorus of what sound like children singing of their intent to murder the song's listeners and steal their money. The chorus, which is repeated three times during the song, unravels with devastating rhythmic precision as the children sing "all I wanna do is," then three gunshots and the ching of a cash register culminate in the refrain of "take your money." It is dark and unsettling and, for some reason, deeply satisfying to hear, over and over.

Of course the more one listens and craves the tuneful, synchronized chime of gunshots and cash registers, the more menacing the song becomes. M.I.A. has the reputation of posing a challenge to the U.S. government and its so-called War on Terror -- her (distant) affiliation with the Tamil Tigers (a proscribed Sri Lankan terrorist organization), lyrical references to "piracy," and trouble last year obtaining a U.S. work visa have contributed to her depiction in the press as a minstrel of what, in "Paper Planes," she calls "Third World democracy." But what kind of challenge -- if any -- does she pose to Western hegemony? M.I.A., at least, has referred to the chorus of "Paper Planes" as "a joke" about her "stupid visa problem" -- and the absurdity, as she says, of "them thinking that I might [want] to fly a plane into the Trade Center" -- adding of the song, that it's "up to you how you want to interpret" it. I interpreted it as a joke, although a sharp and double-edged one; its humor undercutting its apparent celebration of violence and apathy in the same motion as it condemns the real, economically-derived violence and apathy diffusing across so-called developing nations. Yet a message this nuanced is effectively bulldozed by the momentum of the song's banging, hypnotic chorus. Like any successful pop single, "Paper Planes" is overwhelmed by -- and ultimately reduced to -- its most outstanding effect, namely: a juxtaposition of mechanized rhythm and the brief, repeated flash of an appealing melody and lyric. Everything else is auxiliary.

This doesn't make "Paper Planes" any less violent. The recipients of its most violent gestures, however, are not the Eurocentric structures of global capitalism, but the listeners who have paid (or deliberately, and possibly illegally, avoided paying) for the privilege of hearing it. It is "you," after all, who are taken hostage and executed, almost ritualistically -- three times over the course of "Paper Planes" -- by the imperative of its danceable, electronic beat: a comment, perhaps, on the tension between forces of consumption and production, though primarily within the context of contemporary pop music; between its listeners and the creators of their favorite mass-produced songs.


Readers can find an mp3 of "Paper Planes" here -- and watch the video on YouTube.