During the conclusion of last week’s episode of Entourage, movie star Vincent Chase goes skydiving in a desperate search for the rush he’s long since lost as a major celebrity. As the character plummets towards the ground, the weightless voice of M.I.A. sings out “Gravity is my enemy” and the final track of her latest album, MAYA, folds into the closing credits. It’s the best context yet for the album and artist that has struggled to resonate with the a global audience in 2010. First there was the politically unsophisticated if visually shocking video for the song “Born Free” which was banned from Youtube for it’s graphic depiction of redheaded youths being blown up. The clip garnered heavy-buzz, but little conversation about the dissonant song it accompanied. That was followed in quick succession by a scathing cover story in New York Times Magazine, a willfully eligible album title (officially it’s /\/\ /\ Y /\), a scathing review of the CD on the ultra-influential website Pitchfork.com and most recently, the cancellation of the 25,000 person HARD LA festival—which banked on M.I.A. to both headline and curate the line-up—due to poor ticket sales.  

That’s a difficult album roll-out by any standard, much less for an unlikely pop star who rode to fame on the back of her song “Paper Planes” appearing in a film trailer, got pregnant by a liquor heir and major label music business scion, and then strutted her very big belly into our homes via a Grammy performance with megastars Jay-Z, Lil Wayne and Kanye West. It was a victory for the little brown girl who grew up poor in London as a refugee from her Sri Lankin home. But that tale has been told. And now, much like Entourage, which we continue to watch despite it’s ever more insipid story lines, M.I.A. seems to be coming down to earth, and fast.

Take it a step further, and it’s not difficult to see the current trials of M.I.A. as a referendum on the generation of blog-buzz heavy music she represents. It’s been half a decade since she first came to the attention of underground music fans in 2005, quickly garnering critical praise, internet clicks and magazine covers. Newly dominant tastemaker blogs like Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan and the aforementioned Pitchfork led the way by laying out a fast-evolving musical agenda that championed rock music that was stripped-down (The Strokes), angular (Bloc Party) or baroque (Arcade Fire). At the same time, dance music was showing signs of life via ragged disco-punk of LCD Soundsystem, Philly-based digital “club music” perpetrated by frequent M.I.A. collaborator Diplo and big top electro from Daft Punk and a new generation of DJs and producers such as LA’s Steve Aoki and France’s Ed Banger record label. Amidst all this, M.I.A. captured the imagination with her heavy stomping world-flavored beats and trans-global fashion statements. It was a hyper-colour future to be had by anyone with a fast Internet connection. It didn’t matter if most of the acts sounded different. The MP3 became the message.

Given the new media melee that has always surrounded M.I.A. and the blog music scene she represents, it’s ironic that one of the most damaging punches in her current takedown came from an old media tradition, the hatched job. Written by celebrity profiler Lynn Hirshberg, whose previous claim to fame was a 1994 article that accused Courtney Love of using heroin while pregnant with her child with Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, the NYT Mag article wasn’t a knockout blow, but it’s insinuations of a privileged lifestyle in Los Angeles painted the artsy and rebellious image of M.I.A. as fraudulent. In a pop universe where multi-platinum stars like Lil Wanye do real jail time, these charges against her credibility were severely damaging. M.I.A. tried to defend herself by first making public Hirshberg’s personal phone number on her Twitter account, then by posting audio recordings meant to discredit the author’s claims of what became known a truffle-gate (“Unity holds no allure for Maya,” read the article. “She thrives on conflict, real or imagined. ‘I kind of want to be an outsider,’ she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.”) But one cannot control the echo machine that is the Web, and it became clear that the conflict itself, and not the facts in question, was what people wanted to talk about.

Musicians have battled this double-edge sword for a decade now. New acts are capable of building their own fan base via the Web, and some reap the benefits of deafening praise from within the blogosphere long before they have built up a substantial artistic cannon. Elvis may have experienced overnight success, but today’s musicians can record an album without leaving their bedroom, and be booked to play major gigs before setting foot on a nightclub stage. M.I.A. played one such difficult show at LA’s Knitting Factory in Hollywood in the spring of 2005 that in the eyes of many tastemaker attendees could have ended her career there.

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Many of M.I.A.’s musical peers have also suffered at the hands of the web when it comes to actual record sales. The entire music industry has felt the downturn as MP3 piracy became the norm over the last decade, but the indie scene(to use the broadest of terms) from which M.I.A. arose has been particularly rife with acts that under-perform in sales while over-performing in buzz. And once that buzz turns nasty, like a poor reviews perpetuated across a number of influential websites, that damage to an artist’s reputation can be ghastly.

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