Joshua Clover has put up his year-end best album essay, which is dedicated to Maya Arulpragasam's a.k.a. M.I.A.'s sophomore album, Kala. M.I.A. is the kind of artist that well-heeled liberal bohos love to get behind: a Westernized Other, directly connected to genuine third world tumult while fully embracing the best that Our Culture has to offer, bearing in mind that Our Culture really means African-American culture which has become Our Culture through processes still hotly debated.
M.I.A.'s debut record, Arular, was freighted with way too much revolutionary chic political content to be truly pleasurable as pop: call it form equaling function as M.I.A. tried to free your ass and mind simultaneously. It populated the upper precincts of many a year-end list that year, but you would be hard pressed to find many people who have given it more than a cursory spin since. Kala, a record that functions far better as such than as a badge of taste or solidarity or what-have-you, dialed back the sloganeering and showed where Arular told; songs like "World Town", "20 Dollar", and "Paper Planes" are political art but with equal emphasis on the art.
One of the more fascinating aspects of M.I.A.'s success is that, musically, she is an accomplished cultural tourist, an activity that elicits much opprobrium from more discerning quarters when the perpetrator is, well, white. Arular, abetted by then-boyfriend Diplo (who has taken not a little shit for his Southern hip-hop repping Hollertronix parties, coincidentally), raided Brazilian favelas for the prized baile funk beat that underlies the entire album. Kala is more widescreen in its UN ambitions, leaning heavily on Bollywood, but making stops in Africa and the Australian Outback for musical inspiration. (Hell, there's even a little bona fide indie rock in there, with direct quotes from The Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" and the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?"; somebody resuscitate Sasha Frere-Jones.)
So what makes M.I.A. different from, say, Damon Albarn or Paul Simon? Well, aside from the obvious, which we will of course come to, there's what Clover calls her "syncretism"; that is that rather than lifting one particular style wholesale, Ms. Arulpragasam has proven adept at fusing disparate "world" sounds together to form a novel whole. Whereas Graceland, an admittedly terrific album, is Paul Simon Sings Soweto, tracks like "Bird Flu" and "Boyz" demand unraveling, a process of discovery to pinpoint their musical roots; they sound like something, but more to the point, nothing sounds quite like them. M.I.A.'s music is, though familiar, profoundly original in its own right, and not theft unless you are one of those who think Elvis stole rock and roll, in which case, good luck to you.
(Of course, M.I.A. is hardly the only act to practice this form of synthesis; the most prominent example I can think of would be Brian Eno-era Talking Heads, who incorporated distinctly African polyrhythms into their songs beginning with 1979's Fear of Music. Furthermore, Eno and David Byrne branched out to Bedouins for 1981's more controversial My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. While they didn't get quite the free pass that M.I.A. gets, I think it goes to show that if people like what you're doing with the material, you could probably rip it straight off of some blind beggars dying of leprosy and people would be at least inclined to look the other way. Not that I'm accusing Talking Heads of this.)
The most important distinction between M.I.A. and other musicians is, of course, her ethnic background. Though reared mostly in the U.K., Maya is originally from Sri Lanka; famously, her father did/does have some ties to the Tamil Tigers terrorist organization. Her music and politics are informed in large part by this dislocation, and it constitutes 100% of her public persona, which she may not necessarily embrace, but does little to distance herself from. For all intents and purposes, to the limited audience that is familiar with her music (she has failed to penetrate the broader American marketplace despite Interscope's backing), M.I.A. is the Third World, or at least our most credible, and palatable, pop culture connection to it.
I certainly don't write any of this to discredit M.I.A. or her music; quite the opposite in fact. But I do think it bears mentioning that Arulpragasam isn't some Benetton construct romantically sprung from a muddled international ghetto. She's a human being with a fascinating but definite back story; she comes from somewhere, and that somewhere isn't the slums of Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai or the Bronx. It would be a mistake to accede her the same kind of credibility to speak "for" the world's oppressed masses the way we have allowed self-aggrandizing blowhards like Al Sharpton to speak "for" African-Americans. Right now she's speaking for herself, and given her tremendous talent and unlimited potential, that should suffice for the moment.
