Readers who know me probably know that I’m indifferent to the Guns n’ Rose album Chinese Democracy, but native reviewer Chuck Klosterman makes an interesting assertion in his review of the record.

Chinese Democracy is pretty much the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context—it’s the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file. This is the end of that.

Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy at The A.V. Club

At first blush, I’m inclined to agree, but if Klosterman were giving a job talk, I would have a barrage of questions. I presume that he’s limiting this assertion to mainstream, major-label records, so the artisanal indie-rock artists that come to mind probably don’t count. I’m sure “rock artisans” will continue to make albums or digital song cycles for generations to come. However, I do think there are still musicians that are touchstones for the Baby Boomers or Generation X that still have the cultural and market power to put out an event album. If Bob Dylan releases another album, I suspect it will be greeted with substantial media fanfare and physical CD copies will fly off the shelves. I’m at a bit of a loss to think of figures for my generation: Kurt Cobain is dead and Trent Reznor has wholeheartedly embraced digital distribution and unbundling. Two album-oriented bands come to mind, The Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, but I’m not sure how to gauge how mainstream these bands are. What I do suspect is that rock is only a niche audience for generations younger than mine, and Klosterman is right – pop music going forward will largely be a matter of discrete hip-hop or electronic tracks bought over the cloud.

About a month ago, I was driving to my favorite hiking trail, and I heard the first few bars of “Straight to Hell” by The Clash come on the radio. I was happy to hear a familiar song, instead of the mopey emo and rap-rock this station often plays. Until I heard a finger-snapping figure that isn’t in the original recording, after I heard M.I.A.’s distinctive sing-song flow, I thought, “That’s cute. She’s sampled The Clash.”

Apparently I didn’t learn my lesson because “Paper Planes” has fooled me a few times since. Being teased by M.I.A. and the program director had colored my attitude toward the song. I’m not crazy about artists who use really obvious samples like this one – I mean, the sample is almost the whole song – but great songs – like A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick it?” – have come out of obvious samples. I’ve since come around, if only because the finger-snapping figure makes it that darn catchy, and it is nice to hear something familar, non-white, and non-rock on a mainstream rock station.

The use of the Clash sample leads me to return to a few thoughts I had about M.I.A. since I first heard her work a few years ago. I wonder what relationship she has to Sri Lankan pop music made for a domestic audience. OK, it’s pretty clear that her music is more for audiences in London and Berlin than Colombo, but is there really anything Sri Lankan in her records? Would audiences there recognize it as something from their nation? It’s interesting that the video for “Paper Planes” is set in Brooklyn, considering INS refused her entry to the US for her 2005 SXSW appearance; her father is a leader of the Tamil Tigers resistance movement, which Homeland Security apparently considers a terrorist organization. Although her biography as a political refugee is a big part of her artistic persona and her lyrics make passing references to global political figures and cultural diaspora, I also wonder how genuinely political her work really is. Is it a call to consciousness or an instance of boutique multiculturalism, cloaking consumption in the guise of the other?