M.I.A. - 'Popular'
M.I.A’s new release “Popular” boasts galvanizing, rhythmic drums, fuzzy-noise led production and a sarky take on influencer culture. She just keeps churning out bop after bop, and who’s to tell her to stop? (Not me!)
British-Tamil rapper, singer and, according to this song’s accompanying music video, part-time influencer-bot-trainer, M.I.A whose real name is Mathangi Arulpragasam, released “Popular” as her second single from upcoming studio album number six, MATA. I don’t know if it was on purpose but this really seems like a playful parody of social-media conglomerate META, which really nicely fits the theme. M.I.A embodies the algorithmic takeover of social media with M.A.I, an influencer-bot-in-training who is eerily similar to M.I.A, dressed in the same clothes and sporting the same haircut, but is visibly not the same. M.A.I rakes in those likes and follows by twerking, throwing up peace signs, learning TikTok dances (you know the ones…) and sassily posing in all those familiar Instagram-model poses influencers seem to churn out. She complements this with lyrics that list out boring clichés that seem to follow around Instagram influencers like a self-loving demon that’s attached itself to their souls. ‘Yeah, love me like I love me, love me/Suddenly it's about me, 'bout me/Now you wanna be around me, 'round me/'Cause I love myself, I'm livin' my best life’; there’s your next Instagram caption right there! It’s already a hundred times less nap inducing than whatever Kylie Jenner just wrote on her Insta – and I am actually a fan of Kylie Jenner.
Rapping into the next verse M.I.A kicks the door of the ‘Bad B Club’ down and enters the room declaring, ‘Pictures of my body cause a stampede, ayy/If you cut me, success I bleed/If you don't know, I'm a queen (Queen)/Lovin' myself like a dream (Dream)’, and all that’s really missing is a ‘yaaaassss’ in the distance and honestly that’s basically the entirety of Instagram right there. During the training course of M.A.I she shows her A.I. counterpart how to roller-skate, something that got very trendy on TikTok during the covid pandemic and it seems to be the preferred transport in L.A. as far as I can tell from the internet. And the social commentary doesn’t stop there. Our robot vision of “popularity” ingests videos, pictures, articles, media, dances, poses, captions, hashtags, headlines, tattoos, and selfies, whatever gets likes and followers, which results in ass-shaking and trying to make out with M.I.A (to be fair, she is ‘popular, [and] hot, like really, really hot’ as she raps over this part of the music video). At the end of the video, doing what we all should, M.I.A takes a water gun which rather hilariously looks exactly like the emoji they replaced the regular gun emoji with back in 2018, and shoots water all over the influencer-bot as if to imply how much she’s had enough of all this nonsense online culture. I think that’s fair – most of us would do the same.
Proving once again that M.I.A can create a socially fluent bop, and comment on the destructive online culture particularly to women and girls, ‘Popular’ intertwines punky, classic M.I.A style with a music video likely very ahead of its time, and succeeds in making people really think about the world according to algorithms, whether you’re a fan of influencer culture or not.
Words by Mary Cooke
