[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

I had this entry going where I was trying to contextualize M.I.A. and talk about influences and stuff, but screw it, truth is I don't know about about the British music scene to do that. So here's a 17 meg QuickTime video. Square-wave synth beats -- very video-game -- with a melodic poppy rap going on over them, and a tribal chorus that takes over the song by the end. The imagery is pop violence; her father is (to some unspecified degree) connected with the Tamil Tigers. Careless appropriation of terrorism chic? Conscious rebranding? Damned if I know.

I sort of think conscious, though. The music's too pop culture literate for this to be accidental. She name checks Jimi Hendrix and the Clash, and the whole thing is primitive sophisticate: raw talent filtered through limited resources. One Roland synth is all she needed, plus tri-continental influences and bam, there it is. There's an interview somewhere, I can't find it again, where she's talking about her clothing and how in Sri Lanka people just make what they need. That seems to be to be both very true and a very conscious statement about her music slash image.

Insert obligatory Gibson reference here. Seriously, though, this is what he was talking about.

She has a Web site which is huge Flash that takes over your screen. But there's more music there if you don't feel like downloading 17 megs. Now, if only the big MP3 archive of her mixtape would come back...

Addendum: there's a nifty Bollywood/Galang mashup here.

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

The United Iraqi Alliance/Kurd talks are not going well. I'm saddened, if not surprised. While it's certainly not unprecedented to have no clear winner a month after polls close, there's no sign of the deadlock lifting. I suppose we'll see what happens in three days.

For all the talk about how the Iraqi election was the first domino, and about how recent events in Syria and Egypt are more dominos falling, I can't help but wonder if the dominos represent democracy. Populism? Almost definitely. The ability of the people to force regime change? Sure. Newly found bravado for Shiites throughout the Middle East? Hm.

There are pro-democracy protests in Lebanon, but right now, the Shiite protests are larger. It's good that the Saudi government is loosening up, but it would be foolish to ignore the fact that protests in Saudi Arabia are likewise Shiite-driven.

We'll find out, one way or another.

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

Christopher Hitchens, of all people, has a good roundup of the Ohio voting machine irregularities. He's such a contrarian.

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

Remember the kid in Kentucky who got in trouble for writing a story about zombies taking over his high school? It's more complicated than he claimed. According to local police, there weren't any zombies in the stories, and there's more to the case against him than just some fiction.

I did a little poking around to see if I could find anything out about this "No Limited Soldiers" gang. The only sign of it on Google is, um, a Command and Conquer clan. Their page seems to be down. I found their home page on archive.org, and whois data shows that the domain is registered to someone in the Netherlands, so probably no connection there.

In defense of something or other, the kid's teachers still look like they're overly nervous. They're on record saying that "they had not assigned such a story or talked to him about it -- and had they seen it, they would have been obligated to report him to authorities." Zombies are scary. Overreaction to zombies makes me wonder if the police didn't overreact to something else.

Or, hey, the kid could be a junior whacko who was thinking seriously about armed revolt. Hard to tell at this point.