The Pool Memo

I wrote this in 2007 for the wonderfully edited, but now defunct music site Paper Thin Walls. But lately this song, albeit in a pre-remix, bowdlerized form, has rocketed into public consciousness, thanks largely to Pineapple Express. I figured I’d repost it here.

M.I.A. ft. Bun B and Rich Boy: “Paper Planes (Street Mix)”

Maya Arulpragasam is a kind of counter-Angelina: a colorful foil, at least, if not the walking renunciation of the charity-fetish culture that Tinseltown nobility stands for. A recent brush with Fortress America threw the differences between the global women into sharp relief. Let us assume, first of all, that the Sri Lankan artist poses no greater threat to the republic than Jon Voight’s occasionally clothed daughter. They do both have addresses in New York, after all. Yet over a year ago, as no bureaucrat wanted to be scapegoated for letting in shoe bomber two, the Department Of Homeland Security withheld M.I.A.’s visa.

It’s no great leap then to credit our president’s vigilance for one of 2007’s greatest pop statements, “Paper Planes.” The opening lines―“If you catch me at the border/I got visas in my name”―come clean about their inspiration. About everything else, the song is less straightforward. Like everything she touches, this song, the third single from second album Kala, makes the personal political―only without resorting to the usual slogans. Half exasperation, half bravado, the hazy lyrics relay an outsider’s surreal encounter with American irrationality and paranoia. Images of the street corner and the high seas smear together as ghostly suggestions of lawlessness. Here, in this post-9/11 twilight zone, verse-chorus-verse would simply be too logical: so stanzas repeat, back to back, in the dream rhythms of a nursery rhyme or a Caribbean chant, simultaneously the sound of youth and the sound of otherness. In other words, the sound of the margins, America’s victims-to-be. You might call “Paper Planes” a song of experience disguised as a song of innocence.

The remix is more up front about its radicalism: the wolf sheds the sheep’s clothing. Only it’s the guest stars, drafted by Diplo, who bare their fangs: UGK’s Bun B and Alabama upstart Rich Boy. The latter rapper gives a class on personification 101, that vaults from cruise to bruise thanks to the quirks of his southern-fried flow, the singsong snarl and the sheer eccentricity of the concept. What was merely implied in the hook, the American appetite for destruction over creation, becomes ferociously literal here. Erotics of death, pornography of blood, you name it: that’s entertainment and foreign policy. Cymbals rustle nervously at the end. “You the police and we is the robbers, you need more than them helicopters to stop us.” Then before the clock runs out, he realizes he’s been impolite. “Excuse me, let me introduce my lady: Her name is Beretta and she motherfuckin’ crazy!”

Diplo knows to leave his perfect beat intact. Detecting promise in the ethereal prologue to the Clash’s “Straight To Hell” (from 1982’s Combat Rock), Diplo looped the notes into a full-blown arrangement. Breaking from M.I.A.’s weakness for raggedly electric Brazilian and Baltimore beats, this one has the foggy somnolence of some exotic coastline of the imagination, the howl of a village hanging over the sea’s white noise. It has a bittersweet sway. And it’s one of the track’s two guiding allusions, so cosmically apt that it demands a look at the source material. Joe Strummer wrote “Straight To Hell” out of anger at not only our government’s callousness toward the youth in Indochina but also at Manhattan’s venom toward Puerto Rican immigrants. Strummer’s chorus witnesses a G.I.’s icy indifference to his half-Vietnamese son pleading to go back with him only to be told to go, well, you can guess where. Locked out, sunk in the “Amerasian blues,” it is easy to imagine this boy identifying with M.I.A.―and vice versa. Twenty-five years later, the nation ponders an $8 billion border fence while one in four children wastes away in poverty.

The second allusion survives, as a poetically scarred husk, on the eerie hook. A flock of Brixton kids croon a weaponized version of Wreckx-N-Effect’s “Rump Shaker,” shuffling the focus from pleasure principle to death-instinct. The kids don’t want to zoom-a-zoom-zoom and a-boom-boom; they want to make Swiss cheese of your chest before they rob you. Diplo etches the message in code-of-the-streets musique concrète, where larcenous sound effects take the place of Teddy Riley’s lascivious verbs. We’re no longer idling at the beach. We’re placed at the scene of a stickup, bystanders to that evil that border-fence kooks believe (and want American to believe to believe) is coiled, like original sin, in every immigrant’s DNA. It’s a glimpse of the world through Lou Dobbs’s wacky They Live sunglasses. Diplo’s sleight-of-hand works just as well as a riff on America’s upside-down “family values”: a macho thirst for on-screen blood plus a Puritan fear of wardrobe malfunction.

We can believe M.I.A.’s reassurances that “Paper Planes,” deep down, is a toothless song, a kind of joke rising from a flicker of annoyance or a frolic with Blaqstarr. Plainly, the remix is all teeth. And it derives that true grit and seditious growl from Houston’s paterfamilias Bun B, whose sleek call to arms outshines the other two’s stylized street lullabies. He spends the first half of his verse sketching a brutal tableau of ghetto life, the other half on a blueprint for revolt. “Being poor is a disease, gotta hustle up a cure/Start with your head, homie, then use your hands/If you try it in reverse, you don’t even have a chance.” A true Texan, he preaches revolution from below: “Get your Robin Hood on: Put some pressure on the Man!” So Bun B, not M.I.A., becomes the Bono understudy, the freedom fighter, dashing into his Port Arthur, Texas, past to tap a reservoir of unrest, to remind us that decades of disaster capitalism have installed the Third World, and all its trappings of decrepitude, right under the nose of the First. During Bun’s fever-pitch raps, the “Paper Planes” remix delivers on the promise made by the brilliant original. We’re left with an activist anthem, punk by association, tossing flash grenades into America’s dark corners: the long plunge from melting-pot “city upon a hill” to Minutemen in lawn chairs, the confusions of love and death, a social contract in shreds, and child after child left behind to raise themselves. It’s the sound of 2007.

Producer Diplo on “Paper Planes (Street Mix)”

So how’d those kids get onto the chorus?
It was Maya singing on the hook first. Her boy Simonez was in there and he was just feelin’ the track really hard, so I guess it was enough for me to try and make it proper. Then we were fightin’ all the time and I think I made an excuse for XL to pay for my flight to London to visit her to try and make up. In fact, instead I got into a big fight. Dizzee Rascal and everyone in London hated me by the time I left. But round the studio, these kids were just some little runt kids in Brixton that were runnin’ around and we just asked them to come in and do the spoken-word parts. For them to do the hook kinda made sense. A choir of kids. I mean, the bottom line is: What’s the message in music these days? When Bun B says “put some pressure on the man” then it works in Maya’s context as a freedom fight or whatever. It’s like these kids we found in Brixton are giving a call to arms―a little Children Of The Corn fantasy about robbin’ and stealin’ everything. The rest of the hooks on her record are like “na nan an ana and bana nanan un ununu” and shit so it kinda sticks out.

Maya said the sample was your idea. What attracted you to it?
The Clash: That’s as close to Maya’s peers as far as style and content go, and they’re one of my favorite groups. That original song carries a lot of weight these days. But regardless, I’m samplin’. It’s hip-hop. But sampling can have double meanings and things like that. I hope that kids go check “Straight To Hell.” Anyway, Maya can’t sing, man, and I can’t use Auto-Tune―well, now I can―but for some reason she jumped on it and killed it. In a half sing, half kid way that is really perfect for the track.

The sample sounds a little dreamier and thicker―not as clean as the original.
I replayed it ’cause we thought it would save me money but I don’t think it did. And then we can bring out the parts like the high strings more, so it ended up sounding like Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps.” That’s actually one of Maya’s favorite songs. Someone said that “Paper Planes” sounds as close as me and Maya can get to a love song, and I think that’s pretty much hittin’ it right.

Did you have anyone else in mind for the remix?
Hell no. I only saw Bun B on this track. Ever since he played our party―Hollertronix in Philly back in ’04―I wanted to bring it full circle. For me, I thought the track was bigger than [something] just buried under the Timbaland joint on her record. I thought it had a bigger message with the sound and the hook. I really thought it made a statement about hip-hop in general and it was pretty clever for Maya to do it that way―instead of such literal references on her record―PLO, etc.―this one is a little deeper. But then to actually have some street rappers back her up. That’s a real fuckin’ statement.