When Your Idols Start Sounding Like Politicians
First MGMT disappeared into a fog of their own irrelevance. Then Uffie put me to sleep with a whole album of nothing. And now M.I.A.—whose first two records I’d followed with something close to devotion—has started telling anyone who’ll listen that video games are turning children violent. She has joined, in other words, the long and distinguished tradition of people who have no idea what they’re talking about but feel strongly about it.
In a recent interview, the thirty-four-year-old laid out her position: I don’t know which is worse. The fact that I saw it in my life has maybe given me lots of issues, but there’s a whole generation of American kids seeing violence on their computer screens and then getting shipped off to Afghanistan. They feel like they know the violence when they don’t. Not having a proper understanding of violence, especially what it’s like on the receiving end of it, just makes you interpret it wrong and makes inflicting violence easier.
The argument isn’t new. It’s been made by politicians, psychologists, concerned parents, and people who discovered video games exist roughly three weeks before they needed a quote for a newspaper. School shooting? Games. Gang violence? Games. Any act of human cruelty? There’s a console in that kid’s bedroom somewhere. The evidence for this chain of causation has remained stubbornly absent for decades, which has not discouraged anyone.
What M.I.A. skips over—as everyone who makes this argument skips over—is the part where the most violent places on earth have no particular relationship to gaming culture. The young men committing atrocities across conflict zones in the Middle East and Central Asia weren’t raised on Call of Duty. Violence predates the PlayStation by some margin. The causes are complex, structural, political, personal—everything that makes for a harder conversation than pointing at a screen.
I don’t want to be entirely hard on her. She grew up in a war zone; her understanding of violence is more personal and more visceral than almost anyone making music in her orbit. There’s something real in what she’s reaching for—desensitization, distance, the gap between the clean violence of a game and the wet, irreversible kind. It’s just that she’s grabbed the wrong explanation. The easy one, the one that sounds coherent until you push on it, the one your least thoughtful relative has been making since 1993. I expected more from the woman who made Arular.