| M.I.A. tune no longer missing, back in action
This week the M.I.A. song “Paper Planes,” jumped to No. 1 on iTunes electronic song chart. While a sudden jump on the charts isn’t newsworty in itself, the song was released almost a full year ago. “Planes” owes its sudden altitude to prominent placement in trailers and ads for “Pineapple Express,” the new Seth Rogen joint (like how Spike Lee and Michael Scott call their movies “joints,” but if you’ve seen the promos, you know it’s more literal here.). It also doesn’t hurt that Rihanna has been covering “Planes” on Kanye West’s tour. This creeping movement towards acceptance mirrors my own experience with the song. At first I thought it blasphemous that M.I.A. and producer/co-writer Diplo used one of the most badass songs ever written — “Straight to Hell” by The Clash— as the song’s foundation. Not that I don’t like sampling, but they didn’t even sample it as much as just use the music. Who are the musicians that recorded that backing version? As you’ll hear if you click play on the mix below, it ain’t The Clash version. M.I.A.’s rhymes are cool, but all she does is repeat them over and over in the verse. And if you listen to the tune closely on headphones, you can hear that she tries to repeat them even more, before the “All I wanna do” chorus kicks in. But I immediately recognized the way she substitutes gunfire and cash register Ka-chings! for words as pure brilliance. And her sing-song “some of them I murder, some of them I let go” chant at the end might be even more badass than telling somebody to go straight to hell and actually meaning it, as Joe Strummer did in The Clash tune. This appreciation led to me to forgive the other faults I had mentioned earlier. And then I woke up one morning and suddenly the things that initially bothered me were endearing. I became so obsessed with the song that I cut the original Clash song together with the new one, to try to seamlessly segue them. Did it work? Kinda. You be the judge when you listen to the mix.
The rest of this mix is a little scatter-brained, by the way, as this was the first Fuzz mix I ever made. I tried to seamlessly segue Rod Stewart with The Smiths later on in the mix because the symphonic lines in both songs always reminded me of one another. I doubt this pair will ever wind up in a Seth Rogen joint and reach the top of the charts. Back |