The M.I.A. fan base held its collective breath when word got out that the London via Sri Lanka dance-rap sensation would be getting help from Timbaland on her new album. Would M.I.A. emerge from the collaboration dumbed down to Nelly Furtado levels? It seems that Fate can be counted among the many who enjoyed her seamless blend of punchy beats and political substance on her 2005 tour-de-force debut “Arular,” because she decided to stop the potentially doomed meeting in its tracks.
While en route to see the Hit Man himself -the producer that launched a thousand ringtones – U.S. immigration officials denied M.I.A. (real name Maya Arulpragasam) a visa, barring her entrance to the country. It’s likely that the lyrics of “Arular,” rife with mention of terror groups and Third World violence, was what kept her behind the border. If a full-size bottle of lotion can keep a person from getting on a plane, it’s expected that mentioning the Palestinian Liberation Organization in a song (“Sunshowers”) might render the same treatment.
But when life hands M.I.A. lemons, she makes the best album of the summer.
“Kala” is pop-perfect from start to finish, mostly because the majority of it wasn’t made on this side of the world. Uncle Sam’s cold shoulder sent her globe-trotting to India, Trinidad, Africa and Jamaica, collecting beats on her stops like they were souvenirs. She borrows from splashy Bollywood flicks (“Jimmy”), features Nigerian rapper Afrikan Boy (“Hussel”) and remixes a song by Aborigine schoolboys Wilcannia Mob (“Mango Pickle Down River”).
Timbaland can’t touch that.
The sounds run the gamut in worldly origins, but they all speak to the common experience of the Third World. This adds a dimension to M.I.A.’s sound and also to her personal narrative as a product of a childhood inundated with violence (her father was a Tamil militant in Sri Lanka) of which “Arular” only scratched the surface. The songs evoke the good – her verses on “Mango Pickle” talk about climbing trees and seeing boys fight over the town’s one BMX bike – but mostly the bad -in mentioning that an AK-47 costs $20 in Africa in “20 Dollar,” and in the gunshot-punctuated chorus of “Paper Planes.” As Afrikan Boy sums it up quite succinctly in “Hussel:” “If you think it’s tough / Come to Africa.”
Timbaland does pop up at the end on “Come Around” (presumably US immigration decided to do the same) with, as expected, lots of “baby girl”s in his verse propositioning M.I.A. for a one-night stand – confirming that the unexpected direction of “Kala” was indeed the right one. Let’s just hope that the feds won’t give her any trouble come October, when she is slated to perform at The Voodoo Music Fest.
Lauren Laborde can be reached at [email protected].
