The full explanation of what’s going on with this is available here, but the short version is that over this month we’re doing a little essay-ish series connected to eleven songs I associate with August. They’re organized like an album, in the order listed below. Some of the writings are more focused on the songs than others. Today, we’re onto Tracks 8 and 9.
Side A
1. “August and Everything After” – Counting Crows
2. “Untitled (Love Song)” – Counting Crows
3. “Goodnight L.A.” – Counting Crows
4. “Wildest Dreams” – Taylor Swift
5. “Coming Home” – Diddy – Dirty Money, Skylar Grey
Side B
6. “Rockin’ the Suburbs” – Ben Folds
7. “Meet Virginia” – Train
8. “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon
9. “Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
10. “Satellite Call” – Sara Bareilles
11. “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” – Noah and the Whale
If you use Apple Music, a good friend and reader has put together a playlist of Tracks 2 through 11 here.
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There’s a line of thinking regarding media—media broadly, inclusive of art—that says it’s reflective of culture as a whole, or reflective of what culture as a whole wants to see. I’d subscribe to that, but I’d want a caveat added saying that “culture” in the statement is weighted in proportion to those who hold power—financial power, power of influence, power of numbers (specifically numbers of those who may yield large fruit in sales and votes).
I ran through campus Monday night. It’s a little less than a mile from our apartment. There were all sorts of beginning-of-the-year affairs happening, mainly of the sanctioned variety—clubs offering frozen lemonade in exchange for email addresses, a mingling session set up for students new to the in-person experience of the university, a young woman sitting alone beneath a tent reading aloud in a yell as the sign in front of her advertised free bibles. Others were of the quintessential sort—scrambling games of Spikeball® on the turf field by the creek. As the week shades towards weekend, other sorts of beginning-of-the-year affairs will happen, many of the illegal sort. Kids will drink beers. Kids will do drugs. West Campus will turn revelous.
In a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone, Paul Simon told Jon Landau that he had “no idea” what the crime was in Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard. He speculated that it might be “something sexual,” but made clear that it was not one specific crime. It’s a carefree song, a silly song, not to be taken too seriously. There is whistling. Some of the percussion comes from the noises of the samba.
Paper Planes is heavier. Maya Arulpragasam, known better by her stage name, M.I.A., sings and raps about forging passports, trafficking drugs, and—most famously—armed robbery. It’s carefree in its own way, but more harshly so than anything coming out of the Paul Simon apparatus. It taunts the comfortable and afraid. Some of the percussion comes from the noises of firearms.
This is more serious stuff than beers, and more serious stuff than much of the other illicit undergrad weekend programming. The song samples The Clash’s 1982 Straight to Hell, a song largely critiquing racist views of immigrants, and it’s satire, as Arulpragasam has made clear in interviews. It’s not about Arulpragasam forging passports, trafficking drugs, or blasting people’s brains out with firearms. It’s about people, like the critiqued characters in Straight to Hell—the comfortable and afraid—viewing immigrants this way. Defaulting to this perception of the folks a few neighborhoods over. Arulpragasam takes on a persona that they, not she, construct: “All I want to do is—*five gunshots*—and take your money.”
Arulpragasam is a Sri Lankan refugee. Her family fled to London midway through her childhood, in 1986. She’s told stories of a primary school experience marked by visits from soldiers who would shoot at the school. Her father played a role in the creation of EROS, a revolutionary group involved in the Sri Lankan civil war, and went on to serve as a mediator in the conflict (Arulpragasam had little relationship with him). She’s worked in film and visual art in addition to music. She’s a graduate of a college within the University of the Arts London. She has not, to my knowledge, made a living through drug trafficking, passport forgery, or armed robbery.
There’s plenty to examine regarding Arulpragasam’s political views and statements, and I don’t want to imply any blanket endorsement of all of her thinking here. With regard to Paper Planes, though…she’s got it right, right? Those views are common. Those views are, often, instinctive. “All I want to do is—*five gunshots*—and take your money.” Isn’t that how non-white Americans are often viewed by their white compatriots? Isn’t that how non-white Americans are often presented in a vast swath of news media? Isn’t the trope that immigrants are here to “take your money” one of the more potent political forces of our time, and of much of history?
In Austin, this weekend, there’s a vastly higher probability that a person selected randomly in West Campus will be in the act of committing crimes, many on the consumer side of the drug trafficking industry (recreational cannabis is still illegal in Texas), than there is that a person selected randomly in one of Austin’s black or brown communities will be in the act of committing crimes. Suspicion, though, does not follow this statistical bent. Yes, some would argue that there’s a homogeneity to the West Campus crime, with a lower peak of severity than in the less opulent areas of the city. But is there? Is the West Campus crime not inclusive of, say, sexual violence? In 2017, UT-Austin released a report lowlighted by the revelation that fifteen percent of female students surveyed reported having experienced rape, “either through force, threat of force, incapacitation or other forms of coercion such as lies and verbal pressure.” And is Austin really plagued by threats like, to use M.I.A.’s percussion as an example, armed robbery? In 2019, the FBI reported that Austin was safer from violent crime, on a per capita basis, than any of the other thirty largest American cities save El Paso and San Diego. The violent crime rate may be rising, yes, and that’s a deathly serious problem. But that’s not something specific to Austin. It’s rising around the country. And again, some of that violent crime? It’s coming from West Campus, and it’s coming in an abhorrent manner that’s far too commonly accepted as “normal college stuff” even in the wake of recent decades’ major strides in ceasing to accept it. Cue Paul Simon whistling.
This isn’t to criticize Paul Simon, or to criticize the song. I love this song, and he wasn’t trying to make any statements about crime in it. He was telling a story, and it happened to have to do with crime, and I’m using it here to try to make a point. Likewise, I do think there’s something to be said for doing a few benign crimes in one’s adolescence (drinking laws in the United States and their selective enforcement are nonsensical; sometimes a good TP-ing is warranted in middle or high school). But there’s a distinction between benign and malevolent, and there are assumptions made about people and their relationships to either side of that distinction based on things like the clothes they wear and the neighborhood they’re in and how freshly-painted their house is—and, of course, the color of their skin. Listening to these songs next to one another as reflections of those different perceptions—Paul Simon singing about people like him getting into trouble, M.I.A. singing about people like her getting into trouble—feels like an illustration of those perceptions. Media reflects culture, right?
