She's M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam), 27, a Sri Lankan Tamil Tigress, mostly raised in England. And she's the most exciting thing to come along since the Beatles showed up on the Ed Sullivan show 40 years ago.
The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones calls M.I.A.'s music "an example of authentic, on the ground, world culture: synthetic, cheap, colorful, staticky, with power." I call it "The Macarena" with an extreme attitude.
"The beat is shuffling and abrasive," says Frere-Jones of the song, "made from what sounds like the by-products of some other, more polite song...Alongside the beat runs a distressed motif that may have been a melody before it was Xeroxed fifteen times...It's a voice from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands..."(*)
I'm old enough to remember when Elvis Presley demolished, then reconfigured American and, eventually, European culture with "Hound Dog" and "Blue Suede Shoes" in 1955. The Beatles had a similar effect nine years later. It's past time for someone to appear who will have that kind of impact on a truly global scale.
M.I.A. speaks not just for her race, or her gender, or her generation, but for an entire world festering under the tyranny of global capital and the military empire-cum-death machine it has spawned. Her music is, as the reviewer quoted above has noted, simultaneously personal and political. Reactionaries will find her frightening and repulsive. I'm sure she'll consider the source.
Do yourself a favor and visit this remarkable woman's website at www.miauk.com, and get acquainted with her sounds, her graphics, her looks, and her ambience. She's awesome.
*All quotes from Sasha Frere-Jones in "Bingo in Swansea," in The New Yorker, Nov. 22, 2004, pps. 90-92.
Photograph by Craig McDean, Ibid., p. 91.
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