As Lynn Hirschberg and M.I.A. exchange bitch slaps over the H-bomb’s portrayal of the, uh, songstress in a recent New York Times magazine piece (as well as M.I.A’s new response track), it seems the real issue is being totally ignored.
I mean, hello: Who cares if M.I.A. was portrayed as a mildly talented, wildly inelegant chick who lacks subtlety, street smarts and authenticity? The real controversy is crouched in a mild-mannered deep-fried starch package. That’s right, folks–M.I.A. ate truffle-flavored fries during their tete a tete and Hirschberg failed to truly highlight this jarring nugget of revelatory info.
As anyone worth their truffle salt knows, consuming truffle “flavoring” is analogous to wearing a knockoff Louis Vuitton handbag from Canal Street. Put simply, it’s aesthetically and morally offensive to self-respecting dandies.
Robert Sietsema summarizes the heinosity nicely in the Village Voice: “No one who has the slightest amount of taste would ever eat anything called a truffle-flavored French fry. They’re uniformly awful. Truffle-flavored fries are nearly always made with truffle oil, which is a synthetic compound, a chemical, not a natural substance.
And as Hirschberg points out in her poison-laced meme, authenticity is, ironically, the ephemeral item M.I.A. is most worried about losing in the hurricane of her celebrity: “What Maya wants is nearly impossible to achieve: she wants to balance outrageous political statements with a luxe lifestyle; to be super successful yet remain controversial; for style to merge with substance.”
The first step on that road to outrageous, controversial, luxe, authentic indulgence would be sitting down with a knife and fork with kilo or so of actual truffles. She can afford them at $1,500 a pop, right?
Next step: Find a new publicist.
TOPICS: Eat to the Beat, Kathleen Willcox