MIA “Arular” XL/Beggars US
Pop music hasn’t seen an artist quite like MIA before.
Part of it is the storybook child-of-globalization biography that
has publicists everywhere drooling: Maya Arulpragasam, born to
members of the Sri Lankan rebel group Tamil Tigers, forced to flee
to London as a refugee, an art school graduate with a professed
love for everything from her local grime scene and New York hip-hop
to Brazilian baile funk and Puerto Rican Reggaeton. Though
she’s hardly the first artist to build up buzz via a mixed
tape and a killer single, Arulpragasam is the first to do it on the
Interet with any real success, tapping into the newly rising
phenomenon of the Internet pop star. More importantly, MIA simply
sounds unlike anything else, forging her debut “Arular”
with the dance-pop equivalent of a pidgin language, as well as
incorporating all of the above influences and more with frenetic
abandon on an old-school Roland MC-505 sequencer. Discontent with
merely sliding from style to style, she borrows from everything at
the same time and comes up with a sonic vocabulary uniquely her
own, strung together on each song by a series of annoyingly catchy
hooks. The PR cloud hovering over “Arular,” however,
has resulted in perhaps the most divisive record so far this year
among popular music junkies ““ and for all the wrong reasons.
MIA’s connection with the Tamil Tigers has resulted in
supporters misguidedly loading her music with political
significance, while detractors howl that the empress has no lyrics.
Much of the debate has centered on why this record does or
doesn’t matter. But “Arular” works, and not
because of any underlying revolutionary political agenda, or
because it’s everything good about world dance music in under
40 minutes, or because the Internet says so. It works instead
because of inventive and nearly unclassifiable production, beats
that hit hard, and a virtuoso home stretch (from
“Amazon” to the sledgehammer finale
“Galang”) that throws in steel drums, near-tribal
chants and disco samples that may be as perfect as pop music
““ or whatever this is ““ will get all year. ““
Alfred Lee