M.I.A. Profile

To back up my previous assertion that men's magazines are superior to women's magazines I will urge you to read GQ's She Might Get Loud: M.I.A. by Gary Shteyngart.  Gary (like we're old friends.  I've never heard of him) may not be a great writer, but they don't have writers even an eighth as funny writing for Elle, Glamour, or Cosmo.  And as far as M.I.A. profiles go, it's not bad.  At least he didn't quote her talking about being an outsider while munching on truffle flavored french fries the author herself had ordered.

"I stopped seriously listening to music when Ice Cube began appearing in the Friday movies. When I was a kid at Oberlin ­College, somewhere in Ohio, one of the whitest and crunchiest institutions in America, our obsessions focused on Ice Cube and Kurt Cobain, who managed to die my junior year abroad as I was flying Olympic Airways from Athens to Zurich. The pilots found out midflight, and the young stewardesses began to cry in unison as they tried to pour us our glasses of cloudy retsina. Back then, you see, musicians were still gods who walked among us. But it was the beefy gentleman emerging straight outta Compton, a self-described crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube, who provided our daily soundtrack as we jacked up my roomie's Saab and aimed it at Oberlin's sole ­McDonald's, located in the most ­"urban" part of this sad village of 8,000 crushed souls. Ice Cube's music—racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic (full disclosure: my roommate Mike "the Zap" Zapler and I were both nominally Hebrews)—rocked our little black Swedish convertible all the way down College Street as we dreamed of a Big Mac as hot and rancid as Cube's funky lyrics. The Zap and I were both political-science majors with a lot to lose, but Ice Cube seemed like he came from a world where the apocalypse had already wiped clean any vestige of hope—an exciting, existentialist posture for a 20-year-old cracker still unsure of how to play the opposite sex. Since its East Coast inception and up to its recent blinged-out downfall, hip-hop has always been an exhilarating form of tourism for privileged young Americans, a journey into that shit-stained part of the country that always seems so near and yet so far. Bitch, you shoulda put a sock on the pickle, Ice Cube rapped firmly as he educated two guys in a Saab about the correct uses of birth control in a tone no Oberlin woman would ever tolerate. And your pussy wouldn't be blowing smoke signals. Uh, yes, I'll take that with fries."