MIA and Dylan

The mini-controversy over the Honda ad featuring MIA's "Galang" is a a great example of what I called a "trivial" issue in my last post. The two sides of the argument are as follows:

Side A. MIA has sold out to a big corporation. She makes anti-capitalism/anti-imperialism overtures in her interviews and therefore she is a hypocrite for allowing her song to be used in this commercial.

Side B. A girl's gotta pay the rent.

Preamble A. People still care about "authenticity"? Is it 1977? Liscensing songs for use in ads -- is this uncommon?

Preamble B. MIA is already a total hypocrite in regard to her so-called "values", because in interviews she talks about being anti-war and how violence solves nothing, but her album cover is adorned with pictures of bombs, machine guns, and tanks -- imagery which effortlessly slots in next to her fascination/hero-worship toward her PLO-trained father.

Now then, she let Honda use her song, a move which appears to be in conflict with her personal politics/values. And you know what -- it is! However, she can carry on pushing the same issues she's always pushed and I don't have the slightest problem with it. Similarly, I have absolutely no problem reconciling my feelings about unionism with my habit of shopping at Wal-Mart. There's a Wal-Mart three minutes from my house, they sell things I want and need, it's fucking cheap, and I'm not exactly rich. I sleep just fine at night after shopping there, knowing that I'm going to work at my unionized teaching job the very next day.

I'd much rather talk about "No Direction Home", the strongly-hyped four-hour Bob Dylan documentary that aired this past week. The attitudes I just discussed were also raised in this excellent doc, which needless to say, is required viewing for even casual Dylan fans. A couple of quick thoughts:

-- Joan Baez does a great Bob Dylan impression
-- Dylan was remarkably lucid (for Dylan), although he did seem noncommittal at times in that he dodged potentially revealing questions ("my songs weren't about anything", "I was always an outsider" = "I will only comment on the things I personally did and can't (or won't) provide my present-day perspectives on the folk/political scene as a whole")
-- Part I is a remarkably detailed historical document (old pictures, recordings). Part II's power is slightly curtailed if you've already heard the 1966 concerts and seen "Don't Look Back".

Dylan famously (supposedly) sold out by going electric, but even before that, some people within the folk scene weren't happy that he signed to Columbia and started cutting records, leading to (naturally) a spike in his public profile. Ires were raised because his behaviour ran contrary to the intimacy/politics/monetary goals of the NYC folk scene. On the other hand, it was noted in the doc that some of this animosity was because Dylan's success forced some folkies to look in the mirror and notice that they were hungrier than they cared to admit. They needn't have bothered tearing themselves apart over this -- you can sell a few records and not worry about how you're going to eat without feeling that you've betrayed your personal politics. In the mid-60's, maybe this presented more of a dilemna ... Joan Baez talked about how everything was so polarized -- you were either for or against the war in Vietnam, for or against segregation, etc. -- to the extent that you had to decidedly pick sides, leaving no room for any "shades of grey" fence-straddling attitudes. But in 2005, mobilizing around the big issues is more of a slog, and such polarizing rhetoric is more easily marginalized. In 2005, you can have your cake (speak your mind) and eat it too (sell your song to a car advert).