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#feel so alone in the way that theres no one with any power whose willing to help
lycantherous · 2 years
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I had contacted the board of parole before my brother was released with no response, been calling also no response. Now that he has moved back in I'm scared I might get kicked out when/if hes issued a no contact order
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winx au: what causes each character to gain charmix/enchantix/gloomix/disenchantix? does Stella get her two at the same time or only progress in one? is her witch form always the basic one? does she ever ise it? do the witches and fairies gain the power ups the same way? does riven ever get one? T (sry bout all the questions)
Okay! So!
Yes the powerups are earned the same way for Faeries and Witches. They are parallels of one another.
Stella does use her Witch Form a few times in the first few seasons. In Season 1, it's mostly a "this form is stronger at Night" deal, but she stays in Faerie most often. She uses it a little in Season 2 because her Faerie Magic doesn't do well underground, being literally Light Based. Her Witch Form isn't the best option, but doesn't drain as fast in darkness. By Season 3, her Witch Form is at an actual disadvantage compared to her Faerie Form so she only really uses it once to make a point. She will have to earn each form seperately when she trains her Witch powers.
Riven wasn't intending to get more Forms, but kinda... Gets them accidentally? Like. In the next chapter of that fic, he's starting on actually working at being able to use his Magic. He'll be caught off guard by Charmix in Season 3. And because Enchantix is earned by confronting some personal stuff, as soon as he does some major character momet he gets that. By Season 5 when everyone else is getting Harmonix/Discordix, him and the rest of the guys are helping them with getting all that so he's just like "well since I'm in on this anyway...".
Charmix/Gloomix is earned mostly by making major progress in actually training your Magic. One could use their Base Forms many times, but actually training and honing their skills would lead to earning Charmix/Gloomix. It's not exactly an entirely new form, just a sign that they're ready to earn Enchantix/Disenchantix.
So the "confronting something personal" plot is moved to Enchantix/Disenchantix instead. Because that makes more sense than "sacrifice your life to save someone from your homeworld" for many, many reasons!
As for how everyone gets their forms!
As said, Charmix/Gloomix happens on it's own and is earned by training your Magic. While Echantix/Disenchantix is "character developmemt". The Winx all get theirs in Season 3, and others get them at various times. I'll start with the Winx though!
Bloom:
Bloom's had a hell of a time finding where exactly she belongs. On Earth, she always subconciously knew she didn't "belong" there. Then she learns about a whole ass world of Magic she does belong to. Only to find that her birth family and homeworld were destroyed. So she feels this disconnect.
She tries to connect to the handful of survivors from Domino. But that makes her feel even more like an outsider because theres a whole planet/culture she doesn't remember. And it doesn't help that Valtor is specifically using this feeling to manipulate her.
Eventually, she comes to realize that she doesn't have to "belong" to some place because she already belongs with her friends and family.
Stella:
Stella has a lot of pressure on herself and tends to ignore her problems by pretending she's not bothered because she should be able to handle all this!
She eventually opens up about all that. Just. Admitting that she is stressed and being reminded that she can rely on the people who care about her.
Musa:
So. I bumped up Musa's mother's death to just before she left for Alfea in Season 1.
Musa has been pretty much running away from facing that for the past two years. Not even going home during breaks from school because it hurts too much to be in her home without her mom.
In Season 3 she gets to meet Galatea and the two just talk about their homeworld. Musa misses it. A lot. But going home means facing all that.
Eventually she does. Having a bit of a breakdown but properly processing the grief.
Tecna:
One of Tecna's issues is that she's... Not good at communicating or interpretating emotions. It's partly on her and partly just that Zenith culture is very blunt with emotions. So she won't understand what someone is feeling unless they say it point blank, but also won't always show what she's feeling outside of saying it out loud(which... Doesn't register to others)
She never realized how much of an issue it is until her and Timmy have tension because of it. Nothing bad! Just that their love languages are very different and both begin to feel unappreciated because of the lack of communication on the emotional front.
It's the decision to actually begin learning that has her earning her Enchantix.
Aisha:
Due to her very isolated childhood, Aisha is still new to having such a large friend group. But she quickly fits in with them. However. Right when she got the group, they seem to e drifting apart.
Not in a bad way, of course! But everyone has their own adventures and subplots this season, which leads to the whole group not always being together. And as they plan for the future and what may come, it's likely that they'll have to go their seperate ways.
Aisha is scared that she'll be alone again. And It's only after voicing these fears and being reassured that even if their lives have them seperate, they'll always be ready to come back together and be friends. They're not going away forever.
Flora:
Flora's insecurity comes from feeling like the weakest of the Winx.
She's not, of course! But... Bloom and Aisha are their main powerhouses. Stella is also quite powerful, and uses both Faerie and Witch Forms. Tecna and Musa have much flashier powers. And Flora is over here with her plants.
Plus. One of their main opponents is Icy. Whose powers are naturally very effective against Flora's abilities.
She begins to feel very useless. Like she shouldn't even bother fighting because what difference would it make?
Eventually, she does kind of snap. And realize 1.) She's not weak and 2.) Even if she was, it doesn't mean she shouldn't do what she can to help.
Darcy:
She actually gets her Disenchantix at the end of Season 1(all the Trix start Season 1 on Gloomix because they're in their third year at Cloud Tower).
It's solidifying that she won't break her morals to obtain her goals, even to the point of fighting against people she loves and fixing her mistakes.
Stormy:
Hers happens off screen because she disappears in Season 2 and shows up again in Season 3. But sometime during this she realizes that her current methods of trying to get anything she wants isn't... Really working. She manages to sort that out but I'm still thinking about all that.
Icy:
Oh boy. My girl has a lot of issues. Especially relating to her mom.
99% of people she meets that know who her mom is either judge her, or want her to pick up where her mom failed. And Icy has internalized a lot of that shit. About having to complete her mom's goals because what else is there for her? If she does, she'll have the wonderful life she was promised way back then. She'll be... Worth something.
Sometime in Season 3 she meets some characters who, despite who her mother was and what Icy has done since then, are willing to care about her. And She's also reminded that Darcy and Stormy did care about her, but she pushed them away for her own goals. And that even the Winx gang are willing to help her get away from... All that.
It's a lot of progress and she probably won't really get Disenchantix until Season 4 when she actually feels genuinely loved for who she is and despite everything.
Riven:
Oh boy.
So. I.... I will go into this more after I post the next chapter of that thing. However!
I will say that his Enchantix is either late Season 3 or sometime in Season 4. And It's a very cathartic, facing childhood truama, "god do you have any idea how much that fucked me up?!" Moment.
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shellofaretard · 5 years
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Incel Manifesto
I am the BIG INCEL. The perennial incel. I was a virgin before you were born. I was a virgin when the universe was formed. When i close my eyes the world dies with me its hymen still intact. 
Incel has always been the default of western civilization. We are the inheritors of this w/o any disparity to what came before. Metaphor about ancient statues and their lil shrimp dicks.
Sir Isaac Newton was an incel. Nikola Tesla was an incel. Jesus Christ was an incel. Has anyone who’s NOT an incel ever created anything worthwhile??
soul
Ripped apart by natural selections icy north winds. Tossed around by autism chromosome waves. Mogged by 4/10 clouds. Masticated by roastie whirlpool.
The Incel project is an indictment of Creation that is, at the same time, rooted in an observant piousness towards its laws and the impossibility of moving outside its boundaries. The duty of Man to accept and affirm the inherent cruelty of the cosmos, and ponder his destiny within it.
For the <0.5/10 genetic sewage, to expose oneself to the flesh-burning mog radiations of the outside world is comparable to Julius Evola walking around the city during bombing raids.
body
Really hope incels start walking the walk and actually go ahead with those elaborate plastic surgery plans they love to talk about soon.  In post-modern body modification culture, surgically administered transformations are seen as an ascent towards the narcissistic illusion of a more “authentic” self. We have understood that the vanilla modernist paradigm in which Man is assigned one body, whose form, “health” and integrity it is his duty to preserve unto death, was never going to work.
Until very recently, it was normal for bodies to undergo unwanted dis- and transfigurations due to war and disease, their personal notions of bodily integrity routinely subdued to the amoral whims of the medieval War God. It is this view of the world that the incels, these ferocious dreamers of Galilean proportions, these weavers of cruel, delectable phantasms after my own heart, are returning to, finding themselves thrust into a hostile universe whose rigid biological laws are stacked against them with no humanist justification of “fairness”.
Incel chin osteotomy is then a religious act completely removed from narcissism. It is done out of reverence for a cosmic order radically irrespective of the incel’s interests and feelings. The ontological conduit between God and man takes the form of a leash, one by which Man is dragged to the plastic surgery clinic precisely in order to serve God better. I would like to argue that Incel is the most legitimately religious (anti-humanist) movement of our time in that it is based on an acceptance of human insignificance in the face of the cosmic order.
will
Much has been said about the supposed ‘entitlement’ of incels, but this can easily be reframed in a different context. Incel is, at its heart, a radical human agency denialist movement, seeking to redefine the role of Man in the universe by finding spirituality and reverence in the acceptance of total biological determinism, and beauty in the order of chin curvatures, neural pathways and DNA spirals of differing quality. The total absence of free will means everyone is always already entitled to exactly what they get. Genuine incel is less about demanding more than what is deserved than a retreat into a meditative position, neutral like nature itself.
If you’re willing to sell your purity for some used up 3.5/10 roastbeef: fuck off. This is supposed to be a modern monastic movement, where disciples eventually achieve true serenity and a connection with supernatural powers (wizard) in studying the patterns of the cosmos, of God’s plan; taking in the thorny architectures of inherent hierarchy without ego. It is about seeing the face of God in the cute waterpolo boy who nearly bullied you to suicide in 4th grade.
If you believe such a thing as ‘volcel’ exists in this world utterly bereft of all and any free will, you have reasoning skills akin to a donkey, I’m afraid.
time
Incels see time as a byproduct of the sad compulsion of humanist perception to form linear narratives of ‘progress’ and change. Such narratives are to be deemed illusory and rejected to the best of our abilities. In the Incel conception of time, everything is always already happening at the exact same time, meticulously arranged into a rigid, immutable hierarchy by the will of God himself alone.
This also means that it is pedantic and somewhat shallow to necessarily equate Incel with total sexlessness. Since no narratives ‘connecting’ one moment with the next are real, technically, every man not currently experiencing (undergoing?) direct roastie friction in this very moment is an incel, with whatever horrible baggage that entails.
virginity
I’m a virgin myself but my impression is that sex probably isn’t as big a deal as elliot rodger thought it would be. I look at sex havers and don’t think they are truly happier than i am (I’m a pretty happy retard). They were just born with higher quality DNA but i’m not sure if that is correlated with happiness whatsoever. I hate and envy them because I must but there is no objective ‘truth’ behind my ostensible assumption of their having it better.
All partaking in an act does is destroy the soul and dream of that thing. Only virgins understand the metaphysics of sex, only incels are capable of having a soul. This is why elliot rodger was so dangerous to the system. He had dreams that were unquantifiable and untransferrable, and the system thrives solely on the quantifiable and transferrable. I know y’all want to fuck Elliot now but thats like wishing jesus had the chance to get into nintendo wii instead.
If elliot rodger’s ideas of what sex (and ‘love’) would have been like could somehow be quantified, externalized and turned into a reality for all to simultaneously experience, the entire world would collapse, submerged in the brutal, monolithic singularity of joy.
religion
There is a reason religious, celestial imagination is all over incel culture. Think of st. blackops2cel and compare it to the brash, earthy vulgarity of YASSSS KWEEN or something. It is st. blackops2cel whose hand i am taking. It is through him that i discover weightlessness and liberation from the ballasts of the body. It is with him that i dash through the firmament and enter the pearly gates. Perhaps in the near future, the only two ways to die will be euthanized by the state following a lengthy bureaucratic procedure (hell) or shot by a cute incel at school (heaven).
-------
Now awaiting my gentle ascent into wizardry. Male pattern balding. Hormonal makeup changing. Still worship sathanas and aktion t4 and cut myself under the full moon. Still loathe god for giving me the tard genes and curse the faggot christ for normalizing the enabling of retards. But also know this is definitely all there is for me to which there is a certain closure. Know this basement is, at the end of the day, safe. Know theres not that much left at least.
How does the eventual ascension into the more serene state of wizardry feel for you. My angry incels. My romantic incels. My aching incels. My defeated incels. My broken incels. My incels who just want to see the world burn.
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trendingnewsb · 7 years
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MIA: This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me
Maya Arulpragasam is bringing dancehall, hip-hop and grime to this years Meltdown. Is the outspoken British Sri Lankan the best argument for positive cultural appropriation?
The Guardian said that you couldnt shag to my record. As conversational openers go, MIAs beats the banal niceties of, say, Hello, how are you doing?. Its no surprise that she charges straight into a chat about why her last album was considered too confrontational for the bedroom by this paper. Its an icebreaker moulded to MIAs very own design: abrasive, compelling, underpinned by sex. Yeah, she finally concedes with a grin when I suggest we move past it, you cant have it all, can you?
Its a theme she warms up to when we talk about her edition of Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, which were ostensibly here to discuss. Usually, I wouldnt do something like this, she says, slouched under an oversized khaki coat dress. [But the organisers] were like: Hey, you can do whatever you want. Still, putting on the South Banks annual festival, curated in previous years by the likes of David Bowie, David Byrne and Patti Smith, has turned out to be a fairly arduous affair for MIA who says she doesnt do computers at the moment.
They didnt tell me it was nine days long. I thought it was a weekend. And then all my lists were, like, Well, this person wont be in London and that person is doing Glastonbury. Organising festivals is actually really complicated, she stresses. It wasnt just about dreaming something and then it appeared. Programming literally means, like, programming.
For all that Maya Arulpragasam didnt quite know what she was letting herself in for, one suspects the Southbank Centre didnt either; logistics aside, the mornings photoshoot has already been met with some flapping from the press officer made nervous by MIA climbing on the roof without safety clearance. Still, her lineup dancehall, Brooklyn hip-hop, depressive Swedish rap and Nigerian grime is perhaps the most underground the festival has seen in its 24 years. How much is she expecting to shake up its comfortable concert halls, cafe bars and conference-room spaces?
youtube
Click here to watch the video for last years Go Off.
When I was a teenager in London, I would just get a Travelcard and go somewhere, explore the city and go to weird places, she says. I would never judge the place, like, This is middle class and white. This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me, but there wasnt ever a limit on where I could go or what I could do.
A long, elliptical digression on London then and now follows, which takes in the optimistic multiculturalism of the 90s, Tamil house parties, empire and British identity. Its the bento box of an MIA interview: individually contained ideas that dont obviously bleed into one another and yet, overall, make a collective sense if youre prepared to go with it. Thats the key thing about MIA: you have to be willing to go with her to properly get her. Given that she still looks and sounds like a beautiful, bratty, art-school upstart and is prone to labyrinthine tangents, its easy to portray her as inarticulate or unhinged. But MIAs intelligence is instinctive rather than intellectual, and fuelled by the political.
The Mehrabian maxim that reckons that only 7% of communication is verbal is one that might best be proven by the transcript of a chat with MIA removed of all tone, attitude, context and body language. Take, for instance, her explanation of why only the future remains relevant:
As humans, we dont use our past and our history to work out the importance of what our role is in the present, she says. And if you cant use the past to define your present, then it should not be an element that holds back the future. Greece is a perfect example. More than Britain, they were brought to their knees, and not a single white country thought about saving them. And it was part of their heritage. Its where their mythology comes from or their concept of capitalism and democracy comes from. Nobody cared, everybody cared about the modern. Right?
Kim Kardashian is actually more powerful than Greece. She has more money than the whole of Greece, she continues. Therefore, thats where the power lies. If you then define it that way, then you kind of just have to live with that. And maybe whats happening in modern society: that if youre going to judge it by that, then other countries are gonna come in and define the future.
In print, its a statement that seems lacking in logic and coherence. In the moment, Im fairly sure Im able to follow her and we go on to consider how and where this future is being defined (for the record: You cant ignore the fact that China is going to be doing their thing in the next 50 years) and how Arulpragasam believes the immigration issue has become a red herring covering up a truth that can explain the American and British swing to conservative populism.
With Brexit, the idea was to get away from Europe and reinvent our identity, she says. And really, that identity was going to be American, but then they gave us Trump! So, everyone now is like, Oh shit, what is Britain? Are we going to rewind back to the 1800s? We cant. Its too late for that. So, going forward, we need a charismatic leader who then va va vooms the British identity. And we dont have that either.
People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted … MIA. Photograph: Stephanie Sian Smith/The Guide
The prime minister has called a snap election on the day we meet. Does MIA have any faith in our political system? Or in the left?
Everyone keeps going, Corbyn cant do this, but its, like, well, who else is there? she says. If people just left him alone to actually do the job and actually gave him some support, maybe hed be different. Treating him with so much contempt fighting that takes all his energy. How the fuck do you expect him to do interesting things? In any case insists the estranged daughter of a Tamil revolutionary, politicians are people who couldnt get jobs somewhere else.
MIAs politics, unwieldy and unslick though they may be, have often made her an easy target for tedious sneering in the press; the most insistent narrative is that, like Banksy, shes big on arch, subversive statement but lacks substance. Or that she is a hypocrite for making herself the poster girl for the worlds most marginalised people. And yet, shes one of the best pop stars Britain has ever produced. For all the ear-clanging experimentation of her five albums, MIA has always kept a sleeve full of pop bangers Bucky Done Gun, Paper Planes, Bad Girls, Finally that have sounded like little that came before or since her. Even if she didnt have the tunes, here is an art-school refugee Sri Lankan single mother with a visual aesthetic co-opted by everyone from Vetements to Versace who was born into political rebellion and revels in controversy. Gleefully gauche and carefree, MIA is the best argument for when cultural appropriation works. Bland singer-songstress beloved of Radio 2 playlists she isnt. So how much has the criticism bothered her?
People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted because Im not, she ays. I just had to fight for shit, and I still do. I just dont care any more. I dont know. She stops and starts. What I deal with as an artist, the media, the public persona, its a walk in the fucking park, compared to how confusing the universe really fucking is. Theres so much beauty in it and theres so much mystery, theres so much confusing shit in it. That is way more interesting to think about than why, like, Patricia hates me. You know what I mean? I laugh. Its like, Who the fuck is Patricia? and How can Patricia say this shit about me?. It just does not matter to me at all.As it is, she says shes most preoccupied with how to be a functioning grown up, an adult and a mother to an eight-year-old son (whose father Benjamin Bronfman is son to the billionaire heir of the Seagram fortune) born into immense privilege.
When the war came to an end in Sri Lanka in 2009, it actually did affect me, she explains. Everyone was, like, What the fuck does she know? Shes, like, a pop star, but that was my life. It was 50% of who I was, it was my identity. I didnt know what to do with myself. So I had a kid. Its the year the cause died, but the year my personal cause my son was born. And then, OK, I have to figure out what to do in very small parameters: I have a son, how is he going to see his grandma, am I going to make it there on Saturday? Can I make sure that I dont mess up his head by being depressed about certain things?
She struggles to reconcile her upbringing poor and living in Sri Lanka for her childhood to poor and living on a council estate in Mitcham, south London, in her adolescence with her sons. Im not very straightforward as an immigrant. That whole My kids would never see the pain that I saw; Im not like that. Im totally up for reintroducing him to the pain. I dont have any qualms about that. Her problems havent changed, she says, because of money or better circumstances. Whether Im in a mansion or a council flat, I would feel the same anxiety waking up going: I need to write this thing in a scrapbook, wheres my notepad? I would still have all those problems. I might still overcook the fish fingers. Those things are not going to magically transform because your house has changed. At the beginning I thought that money couldve saved my family. Very quickly I realised that money is not the thing.
Her conflict in wanting to being huge and commercial versus credible and ahead of the curve has been a persistent tension threaded through MIAs career. When I got into the music game, it was never an option to shut up and make lots of money. she says. To be a huge pop star, I would have to be, like, Yes, I think bombing Afghanistan was a great idea, I love our democracy and what it has achieved. I love the American flag and Im going to make a jumpsuit out of it. I just think it was important to have all of those Arab Springs, and its great and lets drink Coca-Cola. I had to do that, and do it all in a thong. Could I have done that if it meant that my mum had the nicest house in Chiswick by the river?
youtube
Click here to se the video for MIAs Bad Girls.
Does she worry about money now? If youre preaching living within your means, you have to, to some extent. But I also know that if youre someone in society that speaks out about injustice or political issues, one of the things that happens is that you get economically punished, 100%. I take that hit all the time.
The most recent, obvious example was MIA being forced to quit her headline slot at Afropunk last year, following a contentious quote in which she asked in an interview why Beyonc and Kendrick Lamar might not discuss why Muslim lives matter or Syrian lives matter. I dont regret [raising the issue], she says, with triumphant chutzpah. You saw how bad it was. And the Muslim ban didnt happen just with Trump, it was already happening under Obama. But you couldnt say that about him, you couldnt say that he introduced the Muslim ban, or banned seven different countries, or was already monitoring people, or dropped more bombs than Trump has. In truth, Obamas administration did identify the seven countries on Trumps list for additional screening measures, but it didnt bar their nationals. Shes already skipped ahead. The quantity of damage cant be quantified right now, she insists. Well have to wait the four years. After eight years of Obama, we kind of knew [his failings], but we just werent allowed to say them because he was so great. He was better than any person in Hollywood that I wouldve watched. He was really likable and just had loads of swag. That doesnt mean that you have to deny the truth, though.
This (and much more) comes moments after she tells me she has no time for opinions these days. She claims she doesnt read the news any more and that her primary sources for information are customers at the local kebab shop, taxi drivers and then sort of figuring it out. What about the state of the world? MIAs moment as an agitprop pop activist has never seemed more potent. Politics? I have no time for these things because Im so stuck in the zone. Ive become a hermit. [Meltdown] is actually giving me the chance to actually go out and meet people again. Ive gone for weeks without talking to a person, I do that happily. I tell her I dont believe her, as I suspect it would be a recipe for her to go fully barmy.
Im actually quite an extreme person, so I dont see that as madness. I see that as, like, solitude, doing a phase of solitude is not that bad. After declaring her fifth album AIM to be her final one, shes also trying to find new ways to channel her creativity. Im trying to write a film. I havent stepped into it yet because I want it to be good. Once you hit the start button you cant really stop it. She has, she tells me, the added complication of ADD to contend with. When was that diagnosed? I just have it. Dont even need diagnosis, its a waste of time, its a waste of the NHS. In truly blithe MIA style, she adds: Its just when you have too many ideas and not enough ways to get them out.
MIAs Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre, SE1, 9-18 June
Read more: http://ift.tt/2rBtxTD
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trendingnewsb · 7 years
Text
MIA: This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me
Maya Arulpragasam is bringing dancehall, hip-hop and grime to this years Meltdown. Is the outspoken British Sri Lankan the best argument for positive cultural appropriation?
The Guardian said that you couldnt shag to my record. As conversational openers go, MIAs beats the banal niceties of, say, Hello, how are you doing?. Its no surprise that she charges straight into a chat about why her last album was considered too confrontational for the bedroom by this paper. Its an icebreaker moulded to MIAs very own design: abrasive, compelling, underpinned by sex. Yeah, she finally concedes with a grin when I suggest we move past it, you cant have it all, can you?
Its a theme she warms up to when we talk about her edition of Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, which were ostensibly here to discuss. Usually, I wouldnt do something like this, she says, slouched under an oversized khaki coat dress. [But the organisers] were like: Hey, you can do whatever you want. Still, putting on the South Banks annual festival, curated in previous years by the likes of David Bowie, David Byrne and Patti Smith, has turned out to be a fairly arduous affair for MIA who says she doesnt do computers at the moment.
They didnt tell me it was nine days long. I thought it was a weekend. And then all my lists were, like, Well, this person wont be in London and that person is doing Glastonbury. Organising festivals is actually really complicated, she stresses. It wasnt just about dreaming something and then it appeared. Programming literally means, like, programming.
For all that Maya Arulpragasam didnt quite know what she was letting herself in for, one suspects the Southbank Centre didnt either; logistics aside, the mornings photoshoot has already been met with some flapping from the press officer made nervous by MIA climbing on the roof without safety clearance. Still, her lineup dancehall, Brooklyn hip-hop, depressive Swedish rap and Nigerian grime is perhaps the most underground the festival has seen in its 24 years. How much is she expecting to shake up its comfortable concert halls, cafe bars and conference-room spaces?
youtube
Click here to watch the video for last years Go Off.
When I was a teenager in London, I would just get a Travelcard and go somewhere, explore the city and go to weird places, she says. I would never judge the place, like, This is middle class and white. This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me, but there wasnt ever a limit on where I could go or what I could do.
A long, elliptical digression on London then and now follows, which takes in the optimistic multiculturalism of the 90s, Tamil house parties, empire and British identity. Its the bento box of an MIA interview: individually contained ideas that dont obviously bleed into one another and yet, overall, make a collective sense if youre prepared to go with it. Thats the key thing about MIA: you have to be willing to go with her to properly get her. Given that she still looks and sounds like a beautiful, bratty, art-school upstart and is prone to labyrinthine tangents, its easy to portray her as inarticulate or unhinged. But MIAs intelligence is instinctive rather than intellectual, and fuelled by the political.
The Mehrabian maxim that reckons that only 7% of communication is verbal is one that might best be proven by the transcript of a chat with MIA removed of all tone, attitude, context and body language. Take, for instance, her explanation of why only the future remains relevant:
As humans, we dont use our past and our history to work out the importance of what our role is in the present, she says. And if you cant use the past to define your present, then it should not be an element that holds back the future. Greece is a perfect example. More than Britain, they were brought to their knees, and not a single white country thought about saving them. And it was part of their heritage. Its where their mythology comes from or their concept of capitalism and democracy comes from. Nobody cared, everybody cared about the modern. Right?
Kim Kardashian is actually more powerful than Greece. She has more money than the whole of Greece, she continues. Therefore, thats where the power lies. If you then define it that way, then you kind of just have to live with that. And maybe whats happening in modern society: that if youre going to judge it by that, then other countries are gonna come in and define the future.
In print, its a statement that seems lacking in logic and coherence. In the moment, Im fairly sure Im able to follow her and we go on to consider how and where this future is being defined (for the record: You cant ignore the fact that China is going to be doing their thing in the next 50 years) and how Arulpragasam believes the immigration issue has become a red herring covering up a truth that can explain the American and British swing to conservative populism.
With Brexit, the idea was to get away from Europe and reinvent our identity, she says. And really, that identity was going to be American, but then they gave us Trump! So, everyone now is like, Oh shit, what is Britain? Are we going to rewind back to the 1800s? We cant. Its too late for that. So, going forward, we need a charismatic leader who then va va vooms the British identity. And we dont have that either.
People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted … MIA. Photograph: Stephanie Sian Smith/The Guide
The prime minister has called a snap election on the day we meet. Does MIA have any faith in our political system? Or in the left?
Everyone keeps going, Corbyn cant do this, but its, like, well, who else is there? she says. If people just left him alone to actually do the job and actually gave him some support, maybe hed be different. Treating him with so much contempt fighting that takes all his energy. How the fuck do you expect him to do interesting things? In any case insists the estranged daughter of a Tamil revolutionary, politicians are people who couldnt get jobs somewhere else.
MIAs politics, unwieldy and unslick though they may be, have often made her an easy target for tedious sneering in the press; the most insistent narrative is that, like Banksy, shes big on arch, subversive statement but lacks substance. Or that she is a hypocrite for making herself the poster girl for the worlds most marginalised people. And yet, shes one of the best pop stars Britain has ever produced. For all the ear-clanging experimentation of her five albums, MIA has always kept a sleeve full of pop bangers Bucky Done Gun, Paper Planes, Bad Girls, Finally that have sounded like little that came before or since her. Even if she didnt have the tunes, here is an art-school refugee Sri Lankan single mother with a visual aesthetic co-opted by everyone from Vetements to Versace who was born into political rebellion and revels in controversy. Gleefully gauche and carefree, MIA is the best argument for when cultural appropriation works. Bland singer-songstress beloved of Radio 2 playlists she isnt. So how much has the criticism bothered her?
People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted because Im not, she ays. I just had to fight for shit, and I still do. I just dont care any more. I dont know. She stops and starts. What I deal with as an artist, the media, the public persona, its a walk in the fucking park, compared to how confusing the universe really fucking is. Theres so much beauty in it and theres so much mystery, theres so much confusing shit in it. That is way more interesting to think about than why, like, Patricia hates me. You know what I mean? I laugh. Its like, Who the fuck is Patricia? and How can Patricia say this shit about me?. It just does not matter to me at all.As it is, she says shes most preoccupied with how to be a functioning grown up, an adult and a mother to an eight-year-old son (whose father Benjamin Bronfman is son to the billionaire heir of the Seagram fortune) born into immense privilege.
When the war came to an end in Sri Lanka in 2009, it actually did affect me, she explains. Everyone was, like, What the fuck does she know? Shes, like, a pop star, but that was my life. It was 50% of who I was, it was my identity. I didnt know what to do with myself. So I had a kid. Its the year the cause died, but the year my personal cause my son was born. And then, OK, I have to figure out what to do in very small parameters: I have a son, how is he going to see his grandma, am I going to make it there on Saturday? Can I make sure that I dont mess up his head by being depressed about certain things?
She struggles to reconcile her upbringing poor and living in Sri Lanka for her childhood to poor and living on a council estate in Mitcham, south London, in her adolescence with her sons. Im not very straightforward as an immigrant. That whole My kids would never see the pain that I saw; Im not like that. Im totally up for reintroducing him to the pain. I dont have any qualms about that. Her problems havent changed, she says, because of money or better circumstances. Whether Im in a mansion or a council flat, I would feel the same anxiety waking up going: I need to write this thing in a scrapbook, wheres my notepad? I would still have all those problems. I might still overcook the fish fingers. Those things are not going to magically transform because your house has changed. At the beginning I thought that money couldve saved my family. Very quickly I realised that money is not the thing.
Her conflict in wanting to being huge and commercial versus credible and ahead of the curve has been a persistent tension threaded through MIAs career. When I got into the music game, it was never an option to shut up and make lots of money. she says. To be a huge pop star, I would have to be, like, Yes, I think bombing Afghanistan was a great idea, I love our democracy and what it has achieved. I love the American flag and Im going to make a jumpsuit out of it. I just think it was important to have all of those Arab Springs, and its great and lets drink Coca-Cola. I had to do that, and do it all in a thong. Could I have done that if it meant that my mum had the nicest house in Chiswick by the river?
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Click here to se the video for MIAs Bad Girls.
Does she worry about money now? If youre preaching living within your means, you have to, to some extent. But I also know that if youre someone in society that speaks out about injustice or political issues, one of the things that happens is that you get economically punished, 100%. I take that hit all the time.
The most recent, obvious example was MIA being forced to quit her headline slot at Afropunk last year, following a contentious quote in which she asked in an interview why Beyonc and Kendrick Lamar might not discuss why Muslim lives matter or Syrian lives matter. I dont regret [raising the issue], she says, with triumphant chutzpah. You saw how bad it was. And the Muslim ban didnt happen just with Trump, it was already happening under Obama. But you couldnt say that about him, you couldnt say that he introduced the Muslim ban, or banned seven different countries, or was already monitoring people, or dropped more bombs than Trump has. In truth, Obamas administration did identify the seven countries on Trumps list for additional screening measures, but it didnt bar their nationals. Shes already skipped ahead. The quantity of damage cant be quantified right now, she insists. Well have to wait the four years. After eight years of Obama, we kind of knew [his failings], but we just werent allowed to say them because he was so great. He was better than any person in Hollywood that I wouldve watched. He was really likable and just had loads of swag. That doesnt mean that you have to deny the truth, though.
This (and much more) comes moments after she tells me she has no time for opinions these days. She claims she doesnt read the news any more and that her primary sources for information are customers at the local kebab shop, taxi drivers and then sort of figuring it out. What about the state of the world? MIAs moment as an agitprop pop activist has never seemed more potent. Politics? I have no time for these things because Im so stuck in the zone. Ive become a hermit. [Meltdown] is actually giving me the chance to actually go out and meet people again. Ive gone for weeks without talking to a person, I do that happily. I tell her I dont believe her, as I suspect it would be a recipe for her to go fully barmy.
Im actually quite an extreme person, so I dont see that as madness. I see that as, like, solitude, doing a phase of solitude is not that bad. After declaring her fifth album AIM to be her final one, shes also trying to find new ways to channel her creativity. Im trying to write a film. I havent stepped into it yet because I want it to be good. Once you hit the start button you cant really stop it. She has, she tells me, the added complication of ADD to contend with. When was that diagnosed? I just have it. Dont even need diagnosis, its a waste of time, its a waste of the NHS. In truly blithe MIA style, she adds: Its just when you have too many ideas and not enough ways to get them out.
MIAs Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre, SE1, 9-18 June
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