Way Cooler Than You Sucka

Bayside High Class of '92

So, yesterday, I am at the [NAME REDACTED] record store in Fords (hollah!) perusing the used racks, when I come upon that holiest of grails, the promo copy of a yet-to-be-released album. Sure enough some sucka M.C. sold back his free copy of the new M.I.A. album, Kala, slated for release this upcoming Tuesday, August 21st, but in my hot little hands for the princely sum of $5.99 today.

"So what do I thi...er...what do you think?" you ask? Well, first the bad news:

1. Contrary to the hopes of Interscope Records and the internet, this album will not "break" M.I.A. in America, nor does it constitute any sort of "pop move," at least not anymore so than Arular was a "pop move."
   
2. The singles - well, the advance leak from way back ("Bird Flu"), the official first single ("Boyz") and what I assume is targeted for a single as it is highlighted on the sticker that was slapped on my copy of the album ("Bamboo Banga") - are all pretty much duds, sounding less like pop songs and more like fragments, all thudding monotonous beats with dissonant "world" (read: jungle) sounds going on in the background.
3. Kids rapping = still not good ("Mango Pickle Down River" featuring what is referred to as The Wilcanna Mob - you'll like this if you thought Debbie Harry's rap on "Rapture" was wicked dope).
4. Timbaland's verse on album closer "Come Around" is pretty much one of the worst guest raps ever, rehashing basically all of the verses he contributed to Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake's records last year and turning the wattage down by half. Take his contribution to JT's "Chop Me Up", replace "Let's take it back to my hive" with "You and me need to go to your teepee" and voila.

Of course, here's where I pick it up, flip it over, and reverse it. I do think that as a whole, Kala is a stronger album than Arular, which could be extremely repetitive at times (a sin reprised on Kala's first three tracks). But where tracks like "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun" wore thin upon repeated listenings, Kala deep cuts "20 Dollar" and "Paper Planes" are seemingly bottomless, demonstrating a widescreen vision previously hinted at by M.I.A.'s stabs at hip hop along a South Asian/African/Anglo-American (South American? Caribbean? Is baile funk still in? Reggaeton?) multicultural axis. "Paper Planes,"* an early candidate for Track of the Year and easily the best thing M.I.A.'s ever done, is an especially infectious refraction of Kanye West's "We Don't Care" ethos by way of Dirty Pretty Things:

I fly like paper get high like planes
If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name
If you come around, hey! I make 'em all day!
I'll get one down in a second if you wait

Sometimes I think sittin' on trains
Every stop I get I'm clockin' out game
Everyone's a winner, we're makin' our fame
Bona fide hustler makin' my name

Followed by a sunny chorus of:

All I wanna do is
[4 gun shots]
And a [sound of slide on a gun being pulled back, cash register opening]
And take ya money

Never having been a huge M.I.A. booster, it's tough for me to say how Kala is going to fare with the blogniks that seem to constitute her core audience, at least in the U.S. It's a tougher listen than Arular, transcending a lot of the initial "novelty" that stemmed from M.I.A.'s bio and her affiliation with the then-white hot DJ Diplo. It's also inconsistent, as I guess would be the case for almost any album recorded over almost a year on three or four different continents and with any number of collaborators. Yet when it works, it really works, and on tracks like the aforementioned "Paper Planes and "20 Dollar" plus "Jimmy", "Hussle", and "World Town" you can hear what the Fork that Dare Not Speak Its Name meant when it said that M.I.A. "recasts the tag 'world music' as the ultimate in communicative pop rather than a symbol of condescending piety."

*Idiot that I am, I completely missed the fact that "Paper Planes" samples The Clash's "Straight to Hell" fairly heavily - something I realized playing Combat Rock in bed Saturday morning. Updated on 8/20/07.