M.I.A. : Kala

M.I.A., born Mathangi Arulpragasam, is a highly polarizing artist of Sri Lankan descent. Arulpragasm, orginally an acclaimed visual artist, essentially stumbled into the music industry. Her first album, Arular, is critically acclaimed by several media outlets for its mix of pulsating beats, unique style, and symbolic lyricism. The main themes of that album are politics and society. With Kala, M.I.A pushes even further.

After listening to the Kala, I could clearly tell that M.I.A intended several main themes. Oppression, feminism, and politics are the key topics of the album. The album is a true counter-narrative; the song "Mango Pickle Down River" is mostly filled with raps from Aboriginal youths known as the Wilcannia Mob. The chorus, sung by these youths, talks about going to swim when it's hot and going fishing. I'm fairly sure that no mainstream musician would even consider children, let alone Aboriginal youths, basically have their own song.

M.I.A. continues the theme of making a voice for the unheard and neglected with many other songs.

"I don't read, yeah I just guess,
As the world turns, don't bother me with your mess"
-"The Turn"

"Sick of all the shit that's keeping me down,
If you're dead from the waist down, it's easy staying down,
I never thought about it twice,
But you do pay the price"
-"World Town"

While the two songs have similar messages, they take different approaches. "The Turn" is probably the closest thing that M.I.A. will have to a ballad. Its sparse beat already leads you to the conclusion that it is a sad song. The idea of the song is to learn and move on from ignorance. On the other hand, "World Town" is an extremely catchy and fun song that challenges oppression with the chorus of, "Hands up, Guns out, Represent, The World Town".


"How many no money boys are crazy, how many boys are raw,
How many no money boys are rowdy, how many start a war"
-"Boyz"

"People judge me so hard cause I don't floss my teeth set"
-"$20"

Both "Boyz" and "$20" have feminist points. Her words on "Boyz" in essence state that rich men start wars. Her lyrics on "$20" proclaim feminism and challenge the ignorance of popular culture with the lyrics such as,
"Like do you know the cost of AK's up in Africa, $20 ain't shit to you but that's how much they are."


The song I caught the most meaning from was "Bird Flu". While I didn't find the actual music and beat catchy or particularly interesting, I saw a ton of symbolism and messages in the lyrics. There are many examples, such as:

"Big on the underground, what's the point of knocking me down,
Everyone knows I'm already good on the ground"
-This alludes to the fact that she thinks she deserves mainstream stardom but gets pushed back.

"I need a man for romance,
Streets are making em hard, so they selfish little roamers,
Jumping girl to girl, making us meat like burgers"
-This is truly feminist; it speaks on the sexism of men

"Bird flu gonna get you, made it in my stable,
From the crap you drop on my crop when they pay you"
-We created our own problems as a society

Almost every song had a thumping, crazy, throbbing beat. M.I.A.'s use of many unusual instruments and sounds make Kala extremely different from normal hip-hop or dance to the point where it is fairly difficult to even classify it. From rare Indian samples to unusual Jamaican instruments, M.I.A. did her best to be truly distinct. When you combine it with her lyrics, M.I.A. is beyond a counter-narrative, alternative musician; she is in her own class.

Class, please let me know what you thought of the album. I didn't think it would be right to go through each song one by one and point out narratives so I just picked the ones that were most appealing to me. Overall, I enjoyed "World Town" the most.

Post by Eric Samaniego

The Language You Cry In

The film "The Language You Cry In" was a powerful film that portrayed the journey home for a woman from America, and the people of Sierra-Leon.  Their connection: an ancient funeral song passed from mother to daughter for generations.  The damage the slave trade did to the African culture and its people, is being felt today.  Music was a man source for the slaves to express themselves and helped them endure life.

This incredible journey began with Amelia Dawley in 1931, a 50 year old woman, singing an African song with a haunting melody.  It was the longest African text in the United States at the time.  The words contained Mende dialect.  Anthropologists went throughout Africa playing the song to many tribes looking for recognition of the melody.  Finally they found a small tribe in Sierra-Leon, where a woman, Bendu Jabati, remembered the song that her grandmother had taught her.  She had told Bendu that one day an individual would come to the village that would know the songs of their family and they would be her brother and sister.  The uniqueness of this situation stems from the fact that it is extremely hard to trace one's lineage if you were brought here as a slave.  Very few know which tribe or where in Africa they originated.  The only reason that anthropologists were able to trace Mary, Amelia's daughter, to Sierra-Leon was because of the song Amelia taught her.  Mary as a child treated it as a game, as a rhyme that she would sing to herself.

This is common in history with children's songs and rhymes and even stories.  Ring-around-the-rosy is a famous children's song but its root are more morbid than a simple child's song.  It is from medieval times when the black plague was ravaging more of Europe.  Another less known piece of music that has a double meaning within it are the Shostakovich piano concerts.  Shostakovish wrote them during World War II where his village began learning of the horrors that were occurring to the Jews and to his countrymen.  The themes within the music have an almost crazed, forced happiness about them with an underlying sinister bass line.  As the music reaches its peak of forced joyfulness and psychotic cheerfulness, there is a climbing bass of impending doom.

Musicians use music to express their pain, their life experiences, and their sorrow.  The most memorable pieces that have survived the ages are the ones with the most profound meanings, and most of the time, these meanings are no longer remembered just as Mary did not understand the words she was singing only the significance of the history surrounding it and her ancestors.  

October 21st 2008
We Choose to Only Use
Today in class we were asked if we use the internet as a source of getting information. Everyone raised their hand. Then when we were asked if we have ever made a web page, very few could say they have. It made me think.....why is it that we choose to use the internet multiple times a day for numerous reasons, yet never take the time to contribute to it? Today the world wide web is one of the most powerful sources in the media. Anyone can put almost any type of information out there for people to receive. Why is it that we will take what people give us, but not so often give it back. Then again, there are many aspects of life that are similar to this idea. I believe the idea is known as "paying it forward." When someone does a kind or considerate thing for you, it is only right to commit a self-less act for someone else. Now, don't get me wrong I don't think creating media outlets and posting things on the internet can really be considered self-less,everyone has their own agenda,but the concept is similar. Someone is putting information out there that you use on a daily basis and you don't have to do a thing in return. I know personally, I don't have the time/patience/knowledge/ability to create a portal of information for someone else to use. But in most cases, could it be the fact that it is so easy to choose to only use?
So...
I'm gonna throw a huge ball of honesty out there and say that this blog is actually a bit embarrassing because writing is definitely not one of my strong points, so I'm sorry guys,hope this wasn't too unbearable to read and I hope you understand the point that I was trying to get across. Thanks!

Free Enterprise

Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant by Michelle Cliff was focused on the story, rather the history of Mary Ellen Pleasant. While reading this novel, I found myself focusing on other characters, rather than just Mary Ellen such as, Annie Christmas, Clover Adams, and other minor characters in the book. I have heard of Mary Ellen Pleasant before reading this novel but I did not know her exact roles and contributions with the abolishment of slavery. Michelle Cliff displays Mary Ellen as a strong woman fighting for the slaves to become free and to be treated humanely. As I was reading I focused my attention to the character Regina, who later abandons that name for the name of Annie Christmas which Mary Ellen gave her. Annie Christmas was supposed to be a fierce woman. She would get dressed up and go into fights , when she died her and her twelve sons floated on a barge down the river into Caribbean (pg 26-27). She lived with the lepers and shared her story with them and they shared theirs with her. In a way I believe Annie Christmas followed the footsteps of Mary Ellen. She was an abolitionist and was capture while she was in disguise and was chained with a bunch of men, until they realized she was a woman. From there she was chained separately from the neck and was passed around. Clover Adams was a photographer who did take the picture of Mary Ellen Pleasant. While I was reading I found that Clover was a pure innocent soul searching for answers. She unfortunately did not find those answers and committed suicide by drinking chemicals which caused her heart to paralyze. Mary Ellen Pleasant’s presence in this novel was not as much as I would assume it to be. For the novel to based upon her I would wish there was more information about her and her accomplishments throughout the stories. I personally would have thought the book was about Annie Christmas if it wasn’t for the subtitle.But to understand her you have to understand the time period with the background that is involved.

Harper's Ferry


Mary Ellen Pleasant


Clover Adams


John Brown

The Body Beautiful

After watching this film, I began to think about how incredibly obsessed our society is with beauty and the idea of the perfect female body. We obsess over fitness magazines and dieting, we idolize the celebrities who starve themselves to achieve the "ideal" body, and we over-analyze our bodies, picking apart our "flaws." This has somehow become the price we must pay for beauty.  In many cases, these women whom we have put on such a high pedestal are so thin that they are unhealthy and malnourished. But this is beautiful. This is what we have been taught to be perfection. Somehow the body of the average woman is not even considered to be worthy of beauty anymore and therefore the deformed body takes on an even lower status than ever before. 

Our generation has been brought up in a overly-competative social environment where perfection is always the number one goal. To many, deformation seems like the absolute end of the world. Plastic surgeons make millions of dollars a year "fixing" peoples bodies. From liposuction, to nose jobs, to botox, to breast enhancements, all people seem to want is to stay young and "perfect" forever or to achieve that much-desired level of "perfection" that they have not been given by nature. "Flaws" are not tolerated or accepted in our society and therefore must be eliminated. Hundreds of thousands of dollars go into the beauty industry a year to create new products to prevent and diminish wrinkles and regain the appearance of "youth" and "beauty," which always go hand in hand. It also seems like almost every week there is some new extreme, super-restrictive diet developed to help us attain the perfect body. Subsequently, more and more people are being diagnosed with eating disorders or suffering from malnutrition. 

The fact of the matter is, that instead of embracing our bodies, embracing our age and our differences and our "flaws," we strive for this uniform look. We live under the belief that beauty and perfection and youthful are interchangeable terms and that they have very strict guidelines. To stray from these guidelines even in the slightest way, puts you at a sub-level of beauty, making you unable to be a part of the "elite bread of women" as we hear about in the film. 

Sadly, deformation makes many people very uncomfortable. Its hard to see, its hard to understand and so we make our own assumptions to make ourselves more comfortable. Just as the women in the sauna do in the film, we turn away and we avoid it. Most people are so quick to judge others, to see only the outside without even bothering to look in. The director herself, when speaking about her mother, even admits that, "The truth was...that if i hadn't come from inside that body that everyone wanted hidden away, then I would have turned away too."

In our society's beauty standards, Madge Onwurah and her daughter are at opposite ends of the spectrum. In our world, women who do not fit into what is "normal" are forced to see themselves as inferior to others, as Madge explains by saying that the "sliding scale of beauty...stops at women like me." This is how she has come to understand the world, a world that has made her feel sub-human and undesirable. Madge is made to believe that cancer has not only taken away her left breast, but that it has also stripped her of her beauty and sexuality as well. 

It is in her fantasy about the man at the bar we see her wishes to regain "the right to be desired for my body and not in spite of it" and says how "one caress from him would smooth out the scars." We realize here just how much she wants to be normal again, to feel beautiful, to feel like a woman. She is a woman who has been made to feel ashamed of her "sexless" body, and to believe that she is unworthy of sexual attention, and unworthy of love. 

I thought it was particularly beautiful how we are able understand just how unbreakable the bond is between Madge and her daughter at the end of the film. We come to realize that these two women, although opposites in appearance, share one spirit. Madge's beauty is reflected in the image of the daughter, through the beauty which she has been able to create. In her daughter's own words, "She lives inside of me and cannot be separated....I may not be reflected in her image, but my mother is mirrored in my soul." 

Submitted By: Tara Scalesi