MIA = Missing In Action, in the Jungles of Hip.

 A few months ago I shot a quick dart of snark at Sri Lankan-born rapper MIA over her intentionally-infamous "Born Free" video. I did so without a whole lot of knowledge of anything about her other than her popularity amongst the hipsters, and Andrew Earles' tart dismissal of her:

It’s amazing the lengths to which music consumers, makers and critics will go to avoid appearing—gasp—racist. If the Sri Lankan-born M.I.A. had instead hailed from Tulsa, Okla., with the exact same music in tow, well, she would still be there right now. I call it TV On The Radio Syndrome: If they were white, one-eighth of the press and attention would’ve come their way. Music critics are terrified of facing this fact. M.I.A. provides lazy listeners with an easy multicultural accessory, the equivalent of traveling through India by way of seeing The Darjeeling Limited.

And so I would have let the matter rest, had not Ace of Spades linked the NY Times' skewering of her radical pretensions. Which he goes on to lambaste:

Basically, M.I.A.'s rule seems to be that if you're talking about her being a terrorist as if it's a chic, fashionable, daring, awesome thing -- i.e., as a good thing -- then she is a terrorist, precisely as she herself often claims.
But if you're saying it's a bad thing to be a wannabe terrorist jocksniffer, then she's not, and you are just being an unfashionable dolt who doesn't understand her sly humor.

After which, he links to the following (Content Warning: Real corpses and violence):

The Hip constantly insinuate to squaredom that images and words and meanings can be freely used: as Chuck D once put it: when someone says "nigga buggin," he's saying a lot more besides "nigga buggin." When I read that, in John Leland's Hip: The History, I found myself wondering "like what?" but that's not the point. The point is that artists like MIA have been engaging in acts of creative deception since P.T. Barnum, they're known as Tricksters:

Tricksters advance hip by crossing and recrossing the lines that hem it in. Their tools are not ideals like justice or valor but humor, wit, wile and self-interest. Nontrickster heroes help societies distinguish betweeen right and wrong; tricksters violate the boundary between the two. In a nation artificially divided into black and white, inside and outside, tricksters open channels of exchange.

MIA implicitly draws on this principle to justify her use of Tamil Tiger imagery. At one and the same time, she draws attention to an almost forgotten conflict (now over three decades old), and casting herself in the role of music-industry rebel. To ask whether she really is in favor of what the Tamil Tigers do is, unfortunately, to miss the point.

So is it fair for DeLon to call her out on them?

I say, yes, for two reasons:

1. Rebellion = Profit! What exactly is MIA bringing to the scene that we haven't seen before? The entertainment industry is filled with scrappy outsiders hustling their way to the top. It's the central narrative of virtually all popular music for the last century and more. Other than her unique ethnic stamp as an entertainer (which in a decade or two won't be unique at all. In terms of immigrant groups, Indians are the new Germans), she's not saying anything that every other rapper from here to Hong Kong hasn't said. We've seen this movie.
2. When you put on the Swastika, the Swastika also puts on you. Back in the 70's, first-generation punk rock played a lot with Nazi imagery; you see it from the Ramones "Today Your Love, Tommorow the World" to the Sex Pistols "Destroy" T-Shirt. This was all officially done with the best of Trickster intentions, but as Lester Bangs pointed out in his famous article "The White Noise Supremacists" (.pdf at link), there was an ugly undercurrent to the gleeful Situationism as well:

We believed nothing could be worse, more pretentious and hypocritical, than the hippies and the liberal masochism in whose sidecare they toked along, so we embraced an indiscriminate, half-joking and half-hostile mindlessness which seemed to represent, as Mark Jacobson pointed out his Voice piece on Legs McNeil, a new kind of cool. "I don't discriminate," I used to laugh, "I'm prejudiced against everybody!" . . . But when I got to New York in 1976 I discovered that some kind of bridge had been crossed by a lot of the people I thought were my peers in this emergent Cretin's Lib Generation.

 This was stuff even I had to recognize as uttelry repellent. I first noticed it the first time I threw a party. The staff of Punk magazine came, as well as members of several of the hottest CBGB's bands, and when I did what we always used to do at parties in Detroit -- put on soul records so everybody could dance -- I began to hear this: "What're you playing all that nigger disco shit for, Lester?" 

If you start saying something, it's not difficult to start meaning all the things that something represents. In that respect, it's perfectly legitimate for DeLon to ask MIA what exactly she means by "Some I murder, some I let go." After all, the first-generation punks weren't Germans or, strictly speaking, even Nazis; MIA is a Tamil, albeit one of British citizenship raised in London.

A strict intentionalist reading of MIA's Tiger imagery would disallow all of this: she intends by the Tiger not propaganda, but something else. I happen to be perfectly sympathetic to intentionalism: to read a text without paying any attention to authorial intent is not to "read" at all. But that "something else" is the problem. Tricksters move in the cracks between language; their statements sucker-punch. That's the whole point. So an intentionalist reading needs to take into account her true intent, which is not to make a statement but to hide one. She hasn't misspoke; she's lying to tell the truth.

Hence, for DeLon to call out that lie is but to tell another truth.