A God-awful Small Affair

M.I.A. - /\/\ /\ Y /\ With two previous albums that earned more critical attention than public, Maya Arulpragasam finds herself inbetween a rock and a hard place. There's going to be the inevitable expectations to continue making the artistic and pointful music she's earned such praise for (Arular and Kala both performed highly in end-of-the-decade critics' lists). But a surge in public attention due to the genius single "Paper Planes", showcased in more films and promotional pieces than you can shake a stick at, has made her music a whole lot more mainstream. Indeed, her media presence thus far this year has not been ignored. She's inescapable - one week she's ranting about the state of Lady GaGa, the next she's producing Christina Aguilera songs. The video for her single "Born Free" has drawn millions of complaints and controversy with its depiction of ginger-haired people enduring the same kind of genocide and army persecution that other r...

Yeah, lame title. Anyway - with a fresh new background (I fear that changing it will be a regular occurance) comes a new idea for a blog. So, the rainbow. It's a rare but pretty natural occurance. Every time I see one I'm firstly almost always in a vehicle - but ignoring that, I always crane my neck and make the effort just to see them more. Odd glimpse of good-naturedness aside. Everyone's familiar now with the connotations a rainbow (that is to say, the colours in a flag, or an emblem or logo) carries. There's a sense of unity in that the colours blend together and that's all very swish and dandy. So, in that sense it's understandable that the rainbow flag has been seized by the LGBT community. But is it really? Call it a shallow observation but surely the blending of colours into one attractive, multicoloured collective has more of a resonance with racial campaigners than the sexuality. Speaking of this, why is it only the LGBT community and not a collective ...

Well I did create this a few months ago with a view to making this a regular habit, and, as you may notice below, it didn't exactly take off. So, Shaun. You're going to have a self-evaluation. You haven't slept all night and are currently eating jam on toast for what is the first time in YEARS. You're listening to the radio on your TV, for fuck's sake. What's wrong with you, and why have these circumstances led to your blog-revival? Well. It was chance. I clicked someone else's blog and saw odd and angry musings and it irked me. So I decided to make more of my own, just to spread a little more rational and lovely and self-assured giddiness. But you can't just be wallowing in how amazing you are? Whilst it's something I do do often, not this time. In fact, I'm going to moan about the nature of blogging itself. Now, don't get me wrong - it has its uses and it's had its success stories. Diablo Cody's screenplay for her story was picked u...