M.I.A. Video for "Paper Planes": Uncut, With Gunshots and Beastie Boys Cameo Intact

M.I.A. is sick of anonymous editors taking the ammo out of the chorus for her single "Paper Planes." The rapper writes in her MySpace blog about haters cutting the gunshot noises out of her track when she performed on the The Late Show with David Letterman earlier this year (watch here). "I felt soooooo bad for what they did to my sound .... on the actual taping my sound was sooo different from what I'd agreed." And now MTV is messing with the video for "Planes": "The video was sabotaged" she writes, and she's posted the original version of the video, which was shot in Brooklyn and features a cameo from the Beastie Boys, on her site; check it out above.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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