Browsing by Author "Lönnblad, Irene"

Popular music often reflects the politics, ideas and turmoil of its time. This thesis concentrates on the music of the Sri Lankan Tamil origin artist M.I.A. who has, during the last decade, established her status as a politically active and influential artist. The main focus of this study is on the different elements that make her music political while challenging the existing power hierarchies in popular music. This study focuses on the interaction of technology, culture, and gender in M.I.A. s music. These elements overlap and together build and support her political image and role. The technological approach examines how M.I.A. uses new social media, Internet and music making software to better her audiences. Here the ideas of Timothy D. Taylor (1997, 2001) and Sanna Rojola (2007) are combined to examine M.I.A.'s relationship to technology and how it has provided her the possibility to express and create her own kind of music. From a cultural point of view, M.I.A. s refugee background and her otherness to western culture are viewed through the global/local dichotomy, through style and ethnicity, and through cultural resistance. Each of these chapters deconstructs M.I.A. s musical layers and attempt to provide a blueprint to her music and how she creates it. Theories of race and hip hop are informed by the writings of Marcyliena Morgan (2009) and Halifu Osumare (2007), while her take on cultural resistance is informed by the ideas of Stephen Duncombe (2002). M.I.A. s role as a woman in the music industry and the political nature of her material has a significant impact on how the music industry treats and represents her. The writings of Tricia Rose (1994, 2008), Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (1989), Patricia Hill Collins (2000), Norma Coates (1997), Teresa de Lauretis (1987), Chris Weedon (1999) and bell hooks (1986 [1981], 1998) provide a bases on which to reflect M.I.A. s sexual representations and feminist approaches. The thesis concludes with analyses of seven M.I.A. songs, all of which combine issues brought up in the previous chapters. M.I.A. s manner of representing herself as the other as well as her political awareness are examined through her songs and music videos.