Sticks and Stones and Weed and Bones

Published April 1, 2008

By Alex Pinto

Hearing the opening Clash sample in M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” most hip college kids know what’s up. The first lyric of that song, “I fly like paper/ Get high like planes” has been plastered on away messages and status updates with increasing frequency for months. The niqueness of the song ropes in many upon first listening, myself included, and it’s exactly that mystique that has driven fans to her. Butjust a light knowledge of her tunes does not do the music justice.

Since 2005, Maya Arulpragasam has rocked her growing milieu of fans with two albums and a mixtape with Diplo, all front to back dance workouts with interesting genre-mashing beats. However, despite the booty shaking, the music is not entirely accessible. There’s no safety line to a genre to which expectations can be matched — there’s hip-hop, there’s electronica, there’s grime, but not quite anything like M.I.A.’s. Perhaps even more importantly it is certainly not smoothed out for mass listening. That isn’t to say the albums aren’t polished-the production is top notch-but the structures of the songs and melodic choices are more exotic than would be found on top 40 radio.

Many critics laud her use of a dizzying array of influences. A Londoner by birth, Sri Lankan by blood and childhood, and Londoner again in her later adolescent years, M.I.A. understandably did not grow up with a narrowly Western music base. She started listening to hip-hop as a teenager but never attached fully to any genre; her ecumenical worldview couldn’t be satisfied by just one thing or another. In “Bucky Done Gun” from her 2005 debut Arular, there are dancehall air raid-style horns, classical Indian tabla samples, and one big fat hip-hop kick. And that’s about average.

One can easily listen to an M.I.A. album right through just for the aesthetic pleasure of the beats, and that seems to be a mistake many make. Indeed, it takes more effort to understand M.I.A. lyrics than those of most artists — it typically involves internet research — but the little work that can be put in pays dividends.

More often than not M.I.A. will throw some fairly esoteric London slang (Bucky Done Gun is not just random syllables) into a song, and without a translation of sorts the meaning is lost on American ears. Similarly, her imagery can be misleading on the surface. Sometimes sexual, sometimes violent, sometimes party-related, M.I.A.’s words typically go with the partying tone of the music. These,while occasionally just fun, are almost always politically or socially motivated. She reps the streets in a fashion simi- lar to the average American
gangster rapper, but instead of portraying New York she illuminates life in Africa, Sri Lanka, and keeps a third world motif much of the time. One might have to read the lyrics and look up some terms, but once the work is done the lucid storytelling and vivid imagery pops out of the music and adds a dimension as important as the music itself.

M.I.A.’s father was an active leader in the Tamil Tigers, a revolutionary group fighting for independence of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Though she no longer has contact with him, that connection let her peer inside a revolution and helped shape her overall message. M.I.A. encourages everyone to look into the mind of terrorists and revolutionaries around the world-people who she says the Western media describes as a faceless, outright evil-and at least understand what it is they are fighting for, even if diplomatic peace is out of the question. She fights for oppressed people the world over with a dreamy, Utopian motivation, but covers that core in reality with accounts of real life struggle and violence so dramatic they seem to be firsthand.

M.I.A. has said that she has always admired Public Enemy’s combination of important message and great music. Already, with two studio albums under her belt, it would not be a stretch to say she is in the process of achieving something as great-and in time possibly greater.

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