I gave a presentation about M.I.A.'s song "Paper Planes" today for Mina Yang's "Theorizing Popular Music" class. Students are giving presentations over the next few weeks where they need to use their new tools of analysis to pick apart a pop song. As the T.A., I volunteered to give an example presentation to help them out. I think it turned out really well, so I thought I'd post it here. Enjoy!
M.I.A. ends her hit “Paper Planes” with two brief but significant statements: “M.I.A. Third World democracy. I got more records than the KGB. So no funny business!” and “Some some some I murder, Some some I let go.” Catchy, right? Let’s see: “Third World democracy.” In the hook we get gunshots and cash registers. In the third verse, “Skulls and bones/Sticks and stones and weed and bongs.” We get images of an underground meritocracy driven by violence, drugs, and money. In the first verse, the narrator sells counterfeit Visas:
I’ll fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border I got Visas in my name
If you come around here I’ll make ‘em all day
I’ll get one done in a second if you wait
In the second verse, “every step [she] gets to [she’s] clocking that game”; a “bonafide hustler making [her] name.”
From the lyrics, “Paper Planes” could either be sad and grim realism or a hard glorification of the street, either of which would be familiar. Except we also get the novelty sound effects of gun shots and cash registers, set up by a quote from Wrecks-n-Effects’ “Rump Shaker,” which goes “All I wanna do is room a zoom a zoom zoom and a boom boom/Just shake your rump,” or, for M.I.A., “take your money.” Does she mean to tell us that stealing money at gunpoint is some kind of party? Later she says “we pack and deliver like UPS trucks.” So is it okay to be clever when boasting about shipping stolen goods and/or drugs? Is it really boasting? If this is grim realism, why is the song so much fun? Does that sense of fun add meaning to the grim realism, or confuse that meaning? Why is it charming and funny rather than chilling when she says “no funny business”? Especially preceding the chant “Some I murder, some I let go.” What codes and meanings are taking place here?
These are not easy questions to answer. I’ll begin with some context. Like the children in Slumdog Millionaire, which featured this song after it was a hit in the summer of 2008, M.I.A. grew up in a violent country. She is a refugee of Sri Lanka, which is governed by the majority Sinhalese Buddhists, though her family is of the oppressed minority Tamil Hindus. The civil war in Sri Lanka began in 1983, when the Tamil Tigers began a series of terrorists’ acts against the Sinhalese, including early examples of terrorist suicide bombings. In fact, these Tamil Tigers invented the “jacket” worn by suicide bombers, which we may be more familiar with from conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians. M.I.A.’s father is a Tamil Tiger, though she does not communicate with him and does not condone terrorist actions. Her mother left Sri Lanka with M.I.A. and her sister when M.I.A. was ten, and M.I.A. was raised and educated in London, England, with her mother and away from her father. Much of her music takes place in Third World communities like the one she grew up in where violence and terrorism are a continuous threat to everyday life.
Now, listen to “Paper Planes” with this in mind. Also listen to the beautiful sample that opens the piece, and the novelty sound effects in the chorus or hook. Then we’ll talk.
The music underneath most of “Paper Planes” comes from a passage in “Straight to Hell” by the Clash, a song from their 1982 album Combat Rock.
I believe the Clash’s song is about Third World people whose economies and cultures are displaced by war and imperialism, but it’s hard to say. I do know that Americans and Brits are the ones telling the victims that they are going Straight to Hell, like salt in an already painful wound. And it’s precisely this mentality that I believe our criminals in M.I.A.’s song are reacting against.
I believe this is the concept behind one of two major components to this song: both M.I.A.’s lyrics and the meaning attached to the Clash sample tell us that M.I.A.’s song is about the underprivileged getting there’s in a world that does not want them. Or, as critic Robert Christgau puts it, “Paper Planes” “imagine[s] and recreate[s] an unbowed international underclass that proves how smart it is just by stating its business, which includes taking your money.” All of which is interesting and meaningful, but may not actually capture what is truly magical and transcendent about “Paper Planes,” or M.I.A. as an artist. Our responses to beautiful art are rarely that rational.
Consider the gunshot and cash register sound effects in the refrain of this song. They do share a meaning with the lyrics, but they also share coding with the sound effects used in novelty songs. I’m thinking of “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las, with the motorcycle sounds that punctuate the hook “that when I fell for/the Leader of the Pack.” Or the seagulls in the refrain of their “Remember (Walking in the Sand).”
However, these sound effects are more dramatic than musical. Consider instead something like Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang,” where the sounds of the hammers and grunts of a prison work crew contribute to the texture and rhythm of an otherwise conventional R&B song.
Though this is topical, more contemporary examples are less so. Missy Elliott inspired M.I.A. to rap, and she originally wanted to write her second album, Kala, which features “Paper Planes,” with Elliott’s former songwriting partner, Timbaland. (Unfortunately, M.I.A. was not allowed to stay in America at the time due to her father’s activities with the Tamil Tigers.) In Elliott’s “Work It,” sound effects stand in for words, though the content is more sexual than political. And other sound effects, like her backwards rhyming, are meaningful as music more than as text.
I believe “Paper Planes” also signifies with this kind of musical coding, so that, even though the lyrics depict a rather grim social crisis, the music contradicts that crisis with novelty sound effects, so that the greater meaning presented by the music and the lyrics together is more complex. Though the Clash lyric is similar to M.I.A’s lyric, I’m not sure we are expected to know the Clash sample independent of “Paper Planes.” And yet, if the music contradicts the lyrics, why do they seem to go together so well? Why is “more records than the KGB” funny rather than terrifying?
This is going way out of the parameters of this class, but I can’t help myself. I believe this is an example of Theodor Adorno’s theory of Negative Dialectics. In his writing concerning Negative Dialectics, Adorno was trying to make sense of why very dissonant, ugly music was so meaningful, and why consonant, beautiful music seemed to ring so false. He postulated that, after the tragedies of WWI and WWII, “beauty” could no longer be trusted; that beauty was easily corruptible, and could be used to manipulate people by provoking them to react with canned emotions. However, dissonant music, especially atonal music, did not produce canned emotions or reactions, and was therefore less corruptible, and more truthful.
Taken a step further, I believe that meaning in music in the late twentieth century is only possible when something expressive is cut with something inexpressive, or dissonant, or contradictory. So that something like “Paper Planes” would be less meaningful if it only expressed a grim reality—if it didn’t include novelty sounds and humor. Think about it: M.I.A.’s street hustlers aren’t selling counterfeit Visas, then crying about their lost childhoods. They’re boasting about their swagger. And this is truthful, too. It’s easy to set tales of whoa to sad music, and then to wallow in pity. But it’s not always entirely truthful. I’m glad M.I.A. writes about street life in “Third World democracies,” which in itself is funny and contradictory because these democracies are not about every citizen having a vote so much as every citizen fighting to get what’s there’s. I’m glad that reality has a voice. But I’m also glad M.I.A. is a musician as well as a storyteller, so that the messy, complex, contradictory, irrational, disturbing, and exhilarating reality of life can be expressed in all of its beauty. The world may be sad, but it’s also happy, often in the same instant. It’s something to think about. And in art, it’s something to treasure.
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