ABSTRACT
A down-tempo hip-hop song sung with a world-weary wink about the travails of immigrant visas—both fake and real—MIA’s “Paper Planes” distills a dizzying array of sensibilities and worldviews into three minutes and 24 seconds of chart-hopping (if not chart-topping) pop. “All I wanna do,” she demands, “is to take your money,” a sentiment that, combined with staccato gunshots in the chorus, told us that capital and coercion were part and parcel of the same package in the chaotic post-9/11 order. What makes “Paper Planes” remarkable in the recent history of pop is that it stands at the confluence of three currents: this was one of the first songs to showcase a woman of color whose ethnic identity was rooted in the global postcolonial South—“The sounds of third-world slums hammer at the gates of first-world pop,” as a Spin writer noted; it advanced, however obliquely, a kind of post-9/11 critique of the inextricable links between the neoliberal state and the war on terror; and it represented the obverse of the kind of sampling that had gotten many Euro-American artists in trouble over the unlicensed lifting of “global” sounds for Western pop music—practices often associated with a form of cultural appropriation. This essay explores these strands as well as the gendered and racist accusations of “authenticity” aimed at MIA to argue that, despite its many ambivalent positions, “Paper Planes,” especially in its use of a crucial sample from the Clash, was a manner of writing and rewriting history for those for whom history has always been written by others.
