M.I.A. seems like the kind of girl you don’t want to get in a fight with. So when writer Lynn Hirschberg wrote a less-than-flattering cover story on her in the New York Times Magazine, disaster was bound to occur.
Hirschberg’s article, published online yesterday and arriving by mail this weekend, includes phrases like, “Unity holds no allure for Maya–she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. ‘I kind of want to be an outsider,’ she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. ‘I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.’”
Despite her love of conflict and contradiction, M.I.A. was not so pleased about this portrayal. So she took to Twitter, releasing Lynn Hirschberg’s phone number to her over 100,000 followers.
Hirschberg, obviously, will not be pleased. Especially since her piece on M.I.A. is one of her last for the Times. (She recently resigned, with rumors swirling that she will soon follow Stefano Tonchi to W as Entertainment Editor). At least she’s going out with a bang.
Tags: Lynn Hirschberg, M.I.A., New York Times
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How tasteless and crass – of MIA, that is. And to think that she dared say that Lady Gaga jacked her style….bitch, please. If she did swagger jack you, she's doing a hell of a lot better job with your own stilo than you are.
MIA dreams of being a star of Gaga's stature.
Don't her actions kind of confirm Hirschberg’s assessment of her?
Good work proving her point.
MIA will be posting her thoughts and the “real” interview on her website neetrecordings.com this weekend.
I just read the article, and it seems pretty fair to me. The most incriminating things seem to come from the spokesman from the Sri Lanka Democracy forum, and he is right. She does seem pretty oblivious to the effects her words have, and she seems to be blindly calling the attention of a bunch of young American kids to a situation they know nothing about, without providing any actual information. I think it's great that she wants to use her position to effect political change, but it's a really big responsibility to take on, and I think she needs to move away from sensationalism and empty gestures if she wants to be effective in that respect.
You write better than most of the girls on here.
I didn't want to hear she behaved this way because this song is still sick…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1mcPrrYNAo
I haven't had any respect for Lynn Hirschberg since she wrote an article naming some members of her high school circle and saying they hadn't amounted to anything.
She can be quite petty and mean.
If MIA is thrives on controversy then Hieschberg profits from controversial views of others. Do you want MIA to turn away by saying nothing happened when Sri Lankan government killed helpless 20,000 + Tamils in the pretext of fighting terrorism. The unknown spokesperson for Tamil Democratic Form is biased in his opinion. MIA is regarded a hero of the greater 60 million Tamils of this world.
Grace Jones has made similar comments about Lady Gaga's style being highly derivative, so it's nothing new — and in fact Jones' and MIA's criticisms, while frank, are fair.
Lynne Hirschberg points out the truth in the creation of celebrity in modern culture. I thought her profile was beautiful and true. M.I.A. is sad, attention-seeking fraud. Tigers? Please. Go back to Colombo, my dear, and leave your home in Brentwood and your 'protection' by the Bronfman's. And, then let's see what revolutionary zeal you exhibit.
M.I.A. who? Totally forgotten about her ever since the world went Gaga.
The spokesperson is not unknown, his name is clearly stated as Ahilan Kadirgamar in the article, and no one is suggesting that she “turn away by saying nothing happened”, they are suggesting that she conduct her self a little more responsibly in regards to a very delicate and complicated situation.
“whole terrorism gimmick”
I guess the most damaging statement about her (MIA) agenda is the quote from her friend!
extract from the article:
” Diplo, whom she had not yet met, was hosting and working as a D.J. at parties in Philadelphia. He was given “Galang” by an editor from i-D magazine in London. He began playing the song and talking up Maya. “I was D.J.ing at a club called Fabric,” he told me, “and when she walked in, I was playing ‘Galang.’ This was before she had a major record deal. She met me, and we started a relationship. Maya was into the whole terrorism gimmick at the time. It was all underground back then. In the beginning, she was trying to be different. She understood that no one was doing what she was doing.”
I guess the words “whole terrorism gimmick” says it all! One cannot make up stuff like this! Perfect and insightful dagger to the heart of the story.
Its not under the pretext of fighting terrorism. By DEFINITION they were fighting terrorists, and when they were killed, the war ended…(btw i'm calling the LTTE terrorists because the world did, they were clearly freedom fighters, who used terroristic tactics – as did the govt). MIA is a huge tool who oversimplifies things.
Hirschberg banged on about “truffle french fries” in her Megan Fox article too…
More provocative than the Tamil Tigers: an underlying truffle french fry conspiracy.
MIA won in the end fair and square..
Times did an edit correction on a mis-quote.. turns out Lynn was the good one we all thought, eh?
ahhhhhhhhh appearances appearances….
guess Lynn thought it would be easy to diss a rapper…but got dissed instead.
An objective, factual and informative article on the NYT apology – puts NYT standards of journalism to shame. http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid…
During the interview MIA said, (she posted this on her website, and NYT admitted this as the original) “It wasn’t just about me, and me getting to the Oscars or me going to the Grammys – that doesn’t mean anything. The whole point of that journey was so you can go ‘hey – 50 000 people are going to die next month, here’s your opportunity to help,’ and no one did, and they still died. It wasn’t about accolades or fame,” referring to the Mullaiththeevu slaughter of Tamil civilians by the Government of Sri Lanka……..Media outlets speculated that the NYT's correction may not be adequate to placate the singer.
NYT admitted that the journalist omitted sections, and re-ordered the quotations to change the meaning.
http://www.spinnermusic.co.uk/2010/06/03/new-yo…
“You don’t have to read much between the lines to see that Hirschberg went into the project with the intention of writing a character assassination, and that her likely motivation is political, and in the worst way possible,” a Toronto-based daily said describing the initial NYT piece that irked the Singer.
http://www.nowtoronto.com/daily/story.cfm?conte…
Doesn't change the fact that MIA Is still a bit of a simpleton when it comes to SL politics, and I love how she decries Bono all the while matching his egomania (if not his good works, yet).
I presume you are a member of the majority Singhalese community. Who outside Sri Lanka gives a crap about Sri Lanka? It is a corrupt, totalitarian, banana republic, with longstanding and serious human rights, war crimes, lack of democratic institutions, and ethnic self determination issues. It is basically the Yugoslavia of the East. There are many such banana republics on par with Sri Lanka out there – Sudan, and Zimbabwe come to mind immediately. We can't really do much about them unfortunately, but what worries me is the slump in journalistic standards in the West, for which I blame commercial and political control or influence on the press.
You have foreign governments (like the Chinese and Sri Lankan government) which control what we see or read in the mainstream media by a combination of control of information release, paying commissions to journalists to publish articles written with a certain agenda in mind (It is quite likely that this is what happened in the case of Lynn Hirschberg), and applying advertising pressure or intimidation in the form of threats of legal action etc. China for example uses commercial interests such as broadcasting rights and publication bans in China to pressure Western publishers and broadcasters not to print news damaging to China in the West. The amalgamation of news reporting into large global organisations like CNN and Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire with publishing and broadcasting interests in the countries concerned, makes us in the West vulnerable to news manipulation. Sri Lanka is very skilful in using the same news manipulation techniques.
My concern is for democracy and accountability in the West. The independent reporting of news is vital to democracy, and the news we read now in the West is very much flavoured by the influence of foreign governments and worryingly, this is an increasing trend.
It is also worrying that some Middle Eastern news outlets like Aljezeera http://english.aljazeera.net/ arguably follow higher journalistic standards than the likes of NYT, the BBC and CNN in most cases. Also look for yourself at the tamilnet site http://www.tamilnet.com/ which is widely called a “terrorist site” by the Sri Lankan government and its supporters, and contrast that with the NYT article by Lynn Hirschberg. It follows high standards of journalism: facts are clearly separated from opinion and verifiable sources of information are cited. The articles focus on fact rather than opinion, and where opinions are expressed they are clearly cited as opinion. This is important. The difference between “The President was not involved in the Watergate bugging” and “The Whitehouse spokesman said that the President was not involved in the Watergate bugging”, is in the citation. The NYT could learn a lot from Tamilnet about journalistic standards.
Another thing that worries me is that we are moving into an era where people and organisations branded as 'terrorists' are expected to comply with much higher human rights and criminal justice standards than governments, and in the majority of cases they do act with much higher standards than governments. Governments like Sri Lanka on the other hand can do the same or much worse acts with total impunity (it is simply not called terrorism or treated as such if it has the official sanction of a government). The problem of terrorism has always been state terrorism or state sponsored terrorism, not movements for self determination. We are no nearer to dealing with the terrorist problem now because no action is taken against state sponsored terrorism or repression, which is what initiates armed struggles in the first place. One should not forget that the Taliban government which sponsored the 9/11 attacks was a government, and not a terrorist organisation. Unless and until universal standards are imposed on governments, the problem of terrorism cannot be dealt with effectively other than by invading those countries and maintaining a their permanent occupation.
Firstly, I'm Tamil. I visited Sri Lanka recently as a medical doctor, I was in the North, and yes there is suffering there, however the majority of the people I spoke to were glad that the war was “over.” Of course, we will have to wait for years to come to see what SL does for the Tamil people to say whether the conclusion to the war was a good thing or not.
I was certainly against the bombing, but to make it into this weird intentional genocide, rather than an accidental one, is folly indeed. Did Rajapakse care about Tamils? No, but I can guarantee you he would have done the same if it was Sinhalese people, and in fact there are reports that the Army took no special precautions to avoid killing Sinhalese people.
Neither the SL govt nor the LTTE (nor other splinter Tamil groups) are terrorists by any definition, as they don't wish to create terror, but simply gain rights for themselves and land (in the LTTE's case), and in the SL govt's case, to demolish the LTTE, a worthy cause in my opinion, if one badly planned out that lead to the deaths of thousands.
Your assumptions of me and subsequent response was astonishing considering I wrote a mere 3 lines, not supporting the govt or attacking the LTTE necessarily, but simply impugning Maya's uneducated simplistic Sarah Palin-like mind.
Anyway, I think we can agree that our hopes and prayers are with the Tamil and Sinhalese people who have lost loved ones in this conflict, and lets hope for a lasting and happy peace. :)