FEATURE:
Groovelines
M.I.A. – Paper Planes
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JUST over…
PHOTO CREDIT: Jim Dyson/Getty Images
fourteen years ago, the fantastic M.I.A. released a track that ranks alongside her very best. The final single from her second studio album, Kala, Paper Planes is a magnificent song. In fact, Kala turned fifteen earlier this month. It is an album that I would urge everyone to hear. Paper Planes was produced and co-written by M.I.A. and Diplo. Among the notable layers of the song is the interpolation of The Clash's 1982 song, Straight to Hell. The music video for Paper Planes depicts M.I.A. as an undercover dealer and features images of paper planes flying overhead. Paper Planes was M.I.A.'s biggest commercial success to that point, entering the top twenty on the U.K. and four on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. It is a magnificent song from an artist who is releasing her sixth studio album, MATA, later this year. She has released the new single, Popular. It proves that she has lost none of her brilliance and consistency! There are a couple of articles about Paper Planes that I want to introduce. I was interested discovering more about the origins and success of Paper Planes. ODD MAG looked into the meaning of the song last year:
“That’s amazing,” said recording artist M.I.A. in 2018 when she heard that her hit song Paper Planes earned her the Number 1 spot on NPR Music’s The 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women. “I’ve never come first at anything. Like definitely a massive historical moment in my journey, to be recognized as someone who’s made this song. It’s nice because to me it’s so layered. And it did represent a time where we had the financial crisis and also the immigrant stuff, also it’s about sort of mixing genres. To me, it has a lot of memories and meaning. Yeah, people still like the song, which is kind of amazing.”
Determined to record her second album and in a move that prioritized the Global South against American imperial hegemony, M.I.A. decided to record on the road, sampling local music on the album in countries like India, Trinidad and Tobago, Liberia, Jamaica, and Japan. The result was explosive and M.I.A. further cemented her sound of multicultural mashups, described as “a pastiche of hip-hop, electro, Jamaican dancehall, reggaeton, garage rock, Brazilian baile funk, grime, Bollywood bhangra and video game soundtracks”. Responding to accusations and describing her music in her own words, M.I.A. said, “I don’t support terrorism and never have. As a Sri Lankan that fled the war and bombings, my music is the voice of the civilian refugee.”
This voice was particularly loud on Paper Planes, a song which catapulted M.I.A. into stardom. With its catchy melody and banging baseline, the song was featured in an exhilarating montage sequence of children hustling to make money in the film Slumdog Millionaire and is perfectly matched to the raw scenes depicting courage, brotherhood and extreme poverty.
With Paper Planes, M.I.A. established herself as that rare pop artist who addresses politics and brings issues into the mainstream. Positioning herself in this way rendered her the target of a censorship campaign and being constantly badgered about her music and it’s messages. Providing further clarification about her hit song, M.I.A. said, “[it’s] about people driving cabs all day and living in a shitty apartment and appearing really threatening to society. But not being so. Because, by the time you’ve finished working a 20-hour shift, you’re so tired you just want to get home to the family. I don’t think immigrants are that threatening to society at all. They’re just happy they’ve survived some war somewhere”.
In another article, the Financial Times delved deep into one of the greatest songs of the first decade of this century. I hear Paper Planes played a lot today, and it still holds that power to really affect you. A track that helped define the Noughties, it is a shame that Paper Planes was met with some controversy upon its release (M.I.A.’s music was not being played on Sri Lankan radio or television due to government pressure as the Sinhalese–Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka dragged on). It is unquestionable now that Paper Planes is a modern classic:
“Paper Planes” is not a paean to gangster life, but a mocking, coruscating attack on the pernicious, superficial assumptions people make about that which is unfamiliar, those who are “other”. Fuelled by the British-Sri Lankan rapper’s own experiences as a refugee and her personal indignation at being refused a working visa in the US due to her alleged — and denied — links to Tamil militia groups, M.I.A. (real name Mathangi Arulpragasam) set about skewering the febrile post-9/11 climate of xenophobic paranoia in which ethnic diversity became more or less synonymous with danger. As she put it in an interview at the time: “[they thought] that I might fly a plane into the Trade Center.”
And while the song’s title refers to counterfeit visa documents, it cannot help but also evoke the Maoist phrase “paper tiger” — broadly meaning something or someone whose perceived threat is entirely illusory. The wickedly sardonic implication here is that immigrants, feared to be terrorists, are in fact a threat to no one, or just “paper planes”.
The track’s musical reference points are similarly wide-ranging. Despite being labelled as a hip-hop record, the song is freighted with a pugnacious, punkish attitude that is driven by the extended sampling of the hook from a single by The Clash (who are credited as co-writers): 1982’s “Straight to Hell” — a track that likewise attacks nativism. The chorus of “All I wanna do”, meanwhile, appears to stem from new jack swing ensemble Wreckx-N-Effect’s concupiscent 1992 hit “Rump Shaker”. The line here is used as a winking response to M.I.A’s purported criminal intentions and is later followed by the equally arch “Some I murder/some I some I let go”.
Despite boasting such a light, acerbic touch and an irrepressibly catchy melody, it wasn’t until it was featured in the trailer for the stoner comedy Pineapple Express — and, perhaps more appositely, in an exhilarating montage sequence of Indian children grifting in the Oscars-sweeping Slumdog Millionaire — that the song exploded into the mainstream, going multi-platinum in the US and reaching the top 10 in charts across the globe.
Soon enough, all the biggest names in hip-hop were queuing up to pay homage to “Paper Planes”. 50 Cent remixed it, Rihanna and Dizzee Rascal covered it at their live shows, and a rap supergroup of Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne and T.I. built an entire song around the sample of the line “No one on the corner had swagger like us”. A heavily pregnant M.I.A. joined the rappers in a rendition of “Swagga Like Us/Paper Planes” at the 2009 Grammys — a performance so electrifying that it was named as one of the 50 key events in the history of world and folk music by The Guardian”.
I was eager to spend some time with M.I.A.’s Paper Planes. As she is preparing a new album, it is worth looking back at one of her biggest songs. If you have not heard the track – or not listened to it for a while -, then go and play the incredible Paper Planes. The 2008 track is…
AN extraordinary thing.