Real talk. I went to the MIA + Cool Kids show last Thursday. If you can’t afford the ~$30 tickets, don’t worry, I can help you recreate the experience. First, sit real close to the monitor, turn off the lights, and watch this video:

Okay, now imagine that a few hundred people are cheering and waving their hands at various climactic points in this video. That was literally the first three minutes of the MIA set: three massive monitors playing a youtube clip and people screaming and laughing in disbelief at what they were seeing.

As a side note, I should mention that KUCR doesn’t necessarily support the views stated in the above video. I, however, completely cosign on the dude – but that is probably due to my level of political savvy being somewhere between that of Atari Teenage Riot and kids that buy Che Guevara shirts from Abercrombie and Fitch.

As for the rest of the concert – well, MIA had something shiny on and ran around and yelled. A couple other people had on funky colors, and they ran around and yelled too, so that was pretty awesome. I mean, do you like any of the following?

1. Lasers
2. Random Nintendo backgrounds
3. Gunshots
4. Shouting
5. Gunshots
6. Lasers
7. Gunshots

If you answered “Yes” to any of the above, particularly #s 3, 5, or 7, then you would have loved this show. Seriously, at two or three points in the concert the DJ would mash the gunshot button so much you couldn’t hear the music, and MIA look into the crowd intently, and say, softly: “Yes, gunshots! More gunshots from the people! We need your support!”. And then people would throw their fingers into the air as though making a gun shape with your hand would somehow “support” “the movement”.

I’m not saying that I didn’t make the gun-hands, too, though. Gun-hands are pretty cool.

The low point of the concert was probably when she invited like everybody from the VIP section up on stage. Seriously, like 70 people were on stage, dancing (or trying to). I say low point because this seems like a really great idea, but then this white girl came up behind MIA, grabbed her by the waist, and started pelvic-thrusting MIA so hard that she couldn’t stand up straight. That part made me cringe, which upset me because nobody comes to an MIA concert to cringe. They come to the MIA concert to make the gun-hands.

Everything else, though, was awesome. Below I leave you with a similarly awesome remix of MIA’s Paper Planes with Bun B and Rich Boy.

Bun really kills this one. I love how this song is so cute and catchy but is actually probably the most violent hook that’s come out in recent months. All I wanna do is *blam blam blam* and *click-clak* *ka-ching* and take your money? No wonder they took away her visa.