History

Well, the inevitable happened: I started my boring new job and neglected my blog. Sorry about that. Having a proper daily routine has been quite a shock to the system. And at the weekend I completed a ludicrous 'drink your age in pints challenge', which knocked out both Saturday and Sunday. I feel lucky to be alive, but never mind about that.

Tomorrow's an exciting prospect, isn't it? I really hope Obama manages it. Sarah Palin worries me in a big way. Seriously. Most would-be beauty queens are bullshitting when they threaten to bring about world peace, but this woman is like all four horsemen rolled into one. In any case, I'm sure most of us will be glad to see the back of Bush. Then again, he did give us a few laughs along the way. (Small consolation for ruining large parts of the world, sure.) He also inspired some edgy, brave, heart-pounding music - music that will soon be consigned to history, just like the warmongering chimp himself:

Radiohead - The Gloaming (DJ Shadow Remix) (mp3)
Immortal Technique - Bin Laden (mp3)
Bloc Party - Helicopter (mp3)
M.I.A. - M.I.A. (Arular Bonus Track) (mp3)

Censorship is for c*nts

Apart from listening to her music, I hadn't been paying a great deal of attention to M.I.A. After all that talk of retirement, why would I have? Then Paper Planes ended up on the soundtrack to some film called Pineapple Express. So far the single has flown (see what I did there?) as high as #4 in the US Billboard charts. All of a sudden it looks like M.I.A. has a big opportunity to reach a much wider audience. Personally I'd really like to hear another album from her. Her messages are great. The beats are fun without compromising on richness, and vice-versa.

But here's the problem: MTV absolutely butchered Paper Planes. This is old news, to be honest, but I'm ranting about it because the censored video has only recently been getting UK airplay. M.I.A. was understandably livid when the edit first dropped, saying 'I WILL NEVER CENSOR THIS SONG' on her YouTube channel last December. But someone else did, and now it's stuck. There's still a lot of infectious elements in the song - from the sample of The Clash's Straight To Hell to the 'swagger like us' lyric that almost every US rapper has been sampling over the summer. But they got rid of all the gunshots! Apparently we the public are far too stupid to understand the sound effects as anything other than a glorification of gun crime.

The massive, massive irony is that this kind of paranoia is exactly what the song tries to highlight. I pity the suit-wearing pillock who put two and two together and came up with 'OH DEAR GOD, IT'S AN IMMIGRANT WITH GUNS!'

I was thinking of posting the butchered version as a point of comparison, but here's some unadulterated stuff instead:

M.I.A. - Bird Flu (mp3)
M.I.A./Diplo - Pop (mp3)