Released
exactly ten years and seven days ago was M.I.A.’s sophomore album
Kala.
Her first album, Arular
(named
after her father), was a spare, beat-heavy mixture of rap, electronic
music, international sounds, rock attitude, punk-ish abrasiveness and
politics, and more. Kala
(named
after her mother), expands in every direction, fleshing out
everything implicated on the first album and trading in Arular’s
spareness for a densely layered sound that still has me discovering
sounds and words in the mix after a decade of regular listening.
Maybe you’ve never heard this one, or maybe you have and set it by
the wayside, in which case it’s a good time to pay the album
another visit. Or maybe it only fleetingly entered your consciousness
when the single “Paper Planes” (which was included on the
soundtrack to Slumdog
Millionaire)
worked its way up the Billboard charts to #4 over a year after the
album was released.
“Paper
Planes,” built on a Clash sample, only scratches the surface of the
record, though its stories of hustlers, drug dealers, and forgers cut
right to the heart of the world M.I.A. is telling us about throughout
most of the record. But “Paper Planes” turns up at track 11; we
go through a lot of worlds before arriving there. The record kicks
off with “Bamboo Banga” which takes off from Jonathan Richman’s
“Road Runner,” lays a Bollywood sample over it, and declares her
“a world runner,” which she’ll spend the rest of the record
proving, starting immediately with the percussive firestorm of the
next two tracks. “Bird Flu” and “Boyz” both pile on layers
and layers of sounds - percussion, electronic beats, snatches of
keyboard melodies, quick samples from Bollywood and elsewhere, deep
bass depth charges - and up on top M.I.A. herself, putting a unique
spin on the “coming up from the underground” stories of so much
hip-hop and taking the same boyz who’d spin such tales to task in
the next song with lines like “How many no money boys are rowdy?
How many start a war?” Even the next song, “Jimmy” a Bollywood
cover from a 1982 film called Disco
Dancer
is
a seemingly a flippant disco tune, but M.I.A. and producer/co-writer
Switch have rewritten a longing love song so it kicks off with the
unsettling lines “When you go Rwanda, Congo / Take me on your
genocide tour” leading the listener to think that perhaps the
song’s protagonist is in love with a terrorist, or mercenary for
hire. It’d certainly fit with the snapshots of “Third World”
poverty and violence that M.I.A. provides in her lyrics throughout
both of her first albums.
And
so it goes throughout the rest of the album - in the spectacular
“Hussel” over a great rhythm and buzzy keybs M.I.A. asks why so
many people are addicted to the hustle of trying to scrounge money,
though noting that it's often to send money home to support their
families (with intimations that it many come from illicit ventures).
She then gives 18-year old rapper Afrikan Boy space to recount his
“hussel” selling merch on the side of the road and avoiding
police to not get deported; “Mango Pickle Down River” remixes a
community youth project of indigenous Australian youth; “20 Dollar”
interpolates the Pixies into a tune that explores how war impacts on
the civilian populace; and before long, we’re back at “Paper
Planes,” bringing her tales of international strife and strength
full circle before closing out with a Timbaland-produced tune that
sounds like the most mainstream thing on the record until you zero in
on lines like “Gold and diamond, gems and jade/Ride up on our tanks
– invade!/Blow up things to save our name.”
Three
years after its release, the album crept up to a gold sales award,
but each subsequent album was met with indifference by fans (though
I’ve liked every one of them). And maybe that’s because Kala
remains
her high-water mark, the peak she’ll continue working to meet.
- Patrick Brown
No comments:
Post a Comment