M.I.A at the 9:30 Club
I’ve been looking forward to seeing M.I.A. live for ages now, having missed her previous show in DC with self-conscious indie unfortunates LCD Soundsystem. Not only do I have an enormous crush on her, but the combination of a leaked copy of Arular and her mixtape collaboration with Diplo Piracy Funds Terrorism soundtracked several straight months of my life.
The 9:30 Club is no longer my favorite venue in the area. As “alternative” and “independent” have become the mainstream, what was once a great space for a semi-known act to play is now too big and crowded a space for bands I’d rather see in a more intimate venue, like the Ottobar or Black Cat. Hip-hop is particularly awkward at the 9:30; the venue just has a white rawker kid vibe it can’t shake, Chuck Brown birthday bashes or no. Color me surprised, then, that M.I.A. sold the place out the day before tonight’s show.
As the club filled up I saw exactly the audience I figured M.I.A. would draw: exceedingly multiracial and international, just fashionable enough, and easily 60% female if not more. For a genre- and culture-spanning iconoclast, M.I.A. is hitting her target demographic dead on.
Openers Spank Rock were reputed to deliver a filthy Baltimore Club sound, but instead spun a tame mix of oldies and rare groove remixes until they were joined by an MC, a hand-drummer, and a 3-girl dance squad shakin’ what their respective mothers gave them. They did several respectable, head-knodding props-rhyme and party tracks, presumably from an upcoming LP, and left the crowd well warmed-up.
The stage was set for M.I.A. with colorful props of tigers, palm trees, and helicopters against a graffiti tapestry. Her DJ, accompanied by visuals on two flatpanel TVs, opened with a Negativland-style cutup of Bush and Blair exclaiming: “the only thing I’m interested in is… M.I.A.!” You and me both, buddy.
When she hopped on stage, backed up by a hype girl of sorts, I was instantly somewhat disappointed. Sure, she’s attractive and commanding, but you could instantly tell that she was going through the motions. Her MC banter between songs was flat, and her encouragements to “do something, change something” were about as genuine and inspiring as a self-help video.
Though topical, her Diplo-standin DJ’s samples of Kayne West declaring post-Katrina that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” typified the pop politicization of the M.I.A. platform: we’re not really sure how this revolution thing is supposed to work, but these beats sure are hott! (The beats, by the by, were largely from Piracy Funds Terrorism, and not much of interest was done by way of live remixing, save a brief swap-in of a David Banner track).
In a particularly offputting moment between songs she bemoaned that “my press is all about how much press I get,” a sentiment delivered with a bit too much celebrity for me to stomach. Would she prefer that her press covers how stellar she is, or perhaps the causes she believes in? What’s a media darling to expect if not an oroborus of analysis?
After a half hour a most she left the stage for the first time, creating artificial demand for what should’ve been less an encore than the continuation of a brief and hardly demanding set. She came back and, towards the end of the second song, pulled an almost peculiarly un-DC selection of people up on stage. These people were so well ethnically mixed, so perfectly dressed and instantly ready to dance on stage in front of several hundred people, that the paranoid in me briefly entertained the suspicion that they were plants. I was largely dissuaded from this hunch when one of the kids planted an apparently unexpected kiss on M.I.A. before diving back into the crowd, hugely pleased with himself.
Diplo was apparently lurking stage right, and hopped up for the encores, although not assuming the decks from M.I.A.‘s alternate DJ. Her last number was “Hombre,” and the night was over just after 11PM. The audience, and indeed the friend who joined me, seemed pleased, but it wasn’t the show I was hoping for.
It’s got be hard for M.I.A., having positioned herself as a rebel and so quickly been adopted as a leftist, globalist, neo-neo-feminist poster child. But my expectation wasn’t to leave the club having been conveyed a meaningful social platform so much as to have my party thoroughly rocked. Maybe an earlier tour date would have shown a more enthusiastic side of M.I.A., but tonight’s performance just wasn’t revolutionary.