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Artist News
Diplo criticises MIA over her political raps
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 16 May 2011
Producer Diplo has criticised his former collaborator and one time girlfriend MIA for “glamorising terrorism”, and says her last album failed to match the success of its predecessor partly because of its political content, and the subsequent spat with New York Times writer Lynn Hirschberg who claimed a number of the musician’s politically motivated statements were contradictory.
I’m not sure how Diplo got onto the topic of his ex, but he told WWD: “She got famous after ‘Paper Planes’ [which Diplo produced]. She had already thrown in the towel when that record came out. Before that she was like: ‘I’m retiring. I’m going to marry this guy, fuck it’. Then Paper Planes blew up and she was like: ‘Oh shit, I gotta take advantage of this. I’m actually an artist now'”.
On the lyrical content of the next album, he continued: “Maya left herself open for attacks. She’s not an easy artist to criticise because she’s very left-leaning, she’s progressive, she’s a woman. But when it comes to die-hard, facts-on-the-ground politics, she’s at zero. She’s nothing. I told her at the beginning of the third record, do not bring politics into this … You just can’t glamorise terrorism, it’s not cool … you can’t hide behind that shit. But she totally did … And Lynn Hirschberg just ate it up. If she didn’t, the critics would have ate her up anyway because the record wasn’t good”.
