Dub dot dash

'Are you lesbian?' 'No, I'm making music.'
From Aaron Wherry... "Here's a little tip for the kids. If you're going to be interviewing Miss M.I.A., be sure to tell your editor you're going to need at least a half dozen pages to squeeze in all the good stuff. If your editor finds this unreasonable, get a blog and just reprint everything there. That way, everybody wins.

So. Today we talked to the delightful Maya Arulpragasam. The 800 word version of our encounter appears in tomorrow's National Post. [Read it here] If you'd rather just read a couple thousand of her words without ours getting in the way, this post is for you. Laughs have been edited out. But they were frequent. And wonderful." Read it all here.

UPDATE XL Recordings (MIA's label) list her album as coming out April 4 in the UK, but will be out February 22 in USA/Canada. Check Amazon.com for audio previews, cover art etc.

And have a look at Whinin' Simon, examining the notion of Kiwi music failing to churn out any 'standards'.
"it occurred to me [while he was drinking Belgian beer and eating mussels, bless him] that New Zealand, as a songwriting nation, for all the classic performances (and there have been countless) hasn’t yet matured sufficiently to produce standards as Australia, for example has. Perhaps it’s the result of a largely moribund recording industry for many years and the lack of any airplay...." Go on Simon, drink yourself more bliss, forget about the old songs, sing yourself a new one...
what about that Michael Murphy tune? Hang on, some Yank wrote that... (Just kidding about the whining thing, okay Simon?)

ADDED Simon suggests that there are plenty of Kiwi classic songs, but how do you define classics as different from standards? The two seem so closely interlinked. The term 'classic' is one that is so overused on relation to Kiwi music - as Simon notes, "we might have a recording history going back fifty years but we’ve only really had a mature recording industry for a decade or so." thats' not nearly enough time to generate standards.
Even worse are the music reviewers who label a new release an 'instant classic' (and no, I have never done that). I guess you could argue that a standard is something deeply ingrained in the national psyche, a tune that everybody knows. The one tune Simon missed out in his list was the Ka Mate haka, as used by the All Blacks. I think you'd call that a standard, yeah?