On M.I.A.

M.I.A., "Bird Flu"


M.I.A., "Boyz"

I heard second second track yesterday on KCRW ... a preview of M.I.A.'s sophomore album, due out later on. As usual, the UK/Sri Lankan rapper (um, chanter?) is up to her in-your-face, low-resolution tricks. But musically I find it a lot more interesting than a lot of the stultifyingly repetitive dancehall-beat stuff I've heard (largely reggaetón but not exclusively) over the past few years. Beyond that, there's the M.I.A. aura, aggressively transcultural, sort of an anti-Peter-Gabriel. And the lyrics are, for a get-on-the-floor dance song, a tremendous celebration-cum-feminist-critique of rowdy masculinity and its geopolitical consequences.

One thing that comes up for me, perhaps irrelevantly, is the sticky authenticity question. On the one hand, as Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker review of her debut album put it, she's giving voice to the third-world street (and its first-world urban echoes), delivering music "from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot". (it's a great line by Frere-Jones, but I don't know how much M.I.A. herself talks about trying to be or not to be anybody's version of an authentic voice).

But M.I.A.'s whole approach, from music to videos to her artwork and anti-fashion attire (like a can't-stop-looking-at-it 1980s nightmare, with giant Reebok logos spraypainted on in a sort of piracy of piracy itself), is extremely canny, intellectual, and in ways more first-worldly than third-. Which is what lifts it over the bar and onto KCRW or into the New Yorker, where someone like me hears it and likes it—or at least can't stop listening—and feels a bit more authentic, hip in the way that certain NGOs are hip, for doing so ("pull up tha PEE-ple, pull up the Poor").