Review of the Week: M.I.A.

The titanic waves of hype cresting over M.I.A.’s long-awaited debut album have created one of the finer ironies in recent memory: So much music-crit ink and bloggy bits have been lavished on Maya Arulpragasam—an artist who studiously, hyperactively, sublimely avoids cliché—that it’s nearly impossible to write about her without indulging in a few already-saids.

For those of you who haven’t been tuning in, the 27-year-old Arulpragasam comes with a bio that a press-release scribe would kill for. She fled her native Sri Lanka at 11, a refugee from that small island’s brutal civil war, which her estranged father helped wage as a leading militant.

Flash forward to 2003: M.I.A., now living in London, releases “Galang” as a single, kicking off a dizzying succession of critical plaudits. Her sound defied easy description from the start, echoing out like a siren’s song on that first single: often incomprehensible but always irresistible, all staticky bounce and half-nonsensical singalongs, with dial-tones spiraling downward over nimble bass stabs. And “Galang” sounds like almost nothing else on the final album.

M.I.A. can’t stand still. Her production twists and darts through countless iterations of the globe’s pop music, but no sound or style is held on to long enough to get boring, making for a remarkably self-disciplined sonic adventure. Her voice is chameleon-like, instantly insinuating itself into whatever unexpected direction the music finds.

Some might feel that lyrical depth would distract from music this meticulous; M.I.A. finds the best of both worlds, filling the album with equal shares of nursery-rhyme scat, foreign slang, and an aggressive social conscience to back up her rhetoric of revolution.

“Pull Up the People,” the album’s first proper track, makes mincemeat of Ali’s famed boxing boast, as butterfly-crushing bass hits gently buzz underneath the sugary stings of a thousand sonic bees. On “Bingo,” steel drums and swaying low end are joined during the chorus by gnashing, squelching keys that make you really want to “hit a six,” whatever that means.

In Arular’s sea of shouts and chants, “Sunshowers” alone magically manifests a falsetto hook smooth enough for a Ghostface single (the verse even has a 36 Chambers--style PLO shoutout!). On the moodily droning hidden track, “M.I.A.,” she mutters magnetically about Kate Moss and George Bush in the same breath. Each of Arular’s 13 tracks, really, is a standout—even the three skits—and its 40-minute run time is far too brief.

Of course, you can’t get as much hype as M.I.A. has received without facing a little backlash from the notoriously fickle world of music snobs. People bitch about M.I.A.’s authenticity (“She went to art school!”), political associations (“Her dad’s a terrorist!”), and fashion sense (“Who was the wardrobe designer for the ‘Galang’ video, Crockett or Tubbs?”). But very few can find a bottle of Haterade big enough to wash away their appreciation of the music.

There’s a reason for this: Arular is a truly great album, one that more than meets even the absurdly high expectations many have built up for it. It remains to be seen whether M.I.A.’s hipster-friendly formula will translate into the widespread success she deserves. Just to get the ball rolling, all readers should get their hands on a copy of this album by any means necessary, cruise through their hoods blasting it on the fattest Prius soundsystems they can find, and watch the rebel rhythms trample past the hype.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.