Music Box | M.I.A.

Mike Newmark Columnist

M.I.A.
Kala
[Interscope Records]

To understand what makes Kala succeed so brilliantly is to realize why so many anti-war albums fail. Exhorting a message is easy. Getting people to sit up and pay attention is a much more formidable task, one that’s proven too tall an order for the likes of the Flaming Lips, Nine Inch Nails, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, From Monument to Masses, and dozens of others. Kala sets itself apart by pulling off the neat hat trick of sounding both urgent and joyous—something that the Sri Lankan M.I.A. (née Maya Arulpragasam) managed to do with 2005’s Arular, but which is presented here to an incredible new extent. Perhaps Arulpragasam became a musician to push a point, but Kala is better poised for a club than for brow-furrowing headphone listening or a street protest; it is music first, a message second.

Surely, Kala is some of the most exciting world-electronica fusion the United States has heard since, well, Arular. The production on “Bird Flu” is so chillingly perfect that you might forget that the song has no melody to speak of. Here and elsewhere, M.I.A. exploits the universal and pleasurable properties of percussion to draw us into Kala's world; unless you actually live there, your knowledge of Sri Lankan music is probably nil, and M.I.A. is the most accessible guide one could hope for. Tribal drumming and modern-day electro exist alongside each other as naturally as oil and vinegar, while M.I.A. plays to and uproots our expectations by taking world music clichés and turning them on their heads, whether it’s the hilarious pygmy-like shouts in the war-paint-covered “Bird Flu” or the ersatz strings in the 1982 Bollywood cover, “Jimmy”. If anything, Kala hammers home Sri Lanka’s status as a hotbed of multiculturalism. Its music is African, Indian, Middle Eastern, British and wryly American all at once, and I can imagine no better environment for an anti-war cry than one in which musical styles coexist this peacefully.

M.I.A.’s exhortation strategy is fresh, uncommon, and sledgehammer-blunt. “Fight on!”, the album cover shamelessly reads, and it’s clear that M.I.A. considers a move toward peace as literally that: a mobilization that requires as much force as soldiers are willing to devote to a war. Her fight-fire-with-fire approach results in music that’s more bracing and confrontational than Arular while still avoiding sounding militaristic, instead coming off like a cheerleading squad that means deathly serious business.

M.I.A.’s voice often feels like a drum, pounding away about the price of AK-47s in Africa, forgoing a fashion career for the sake of protest, being hassled about immigration papers and what it might be like to blow up the fighters in her dreams. She stands above the dreck as a paragon of self-confidence, while even allowing some humor to peek through on “Boyz”: “How many no money boyz are crazy, how many boyz are raw? / How many no money boyz are rowdy, how many start a war?” (The z’s aren’t there for nothing.) Of course, when Nigerian M.C. Afrikan Boy reproachfully spits, “You think it’s tough now? Come to Africa” on “Hussel,” we don’t dare laugh.

Perhaps most phenomenal is how M.I.A. made a better album than Arular by grabbing the reins herself. For Kala, she aligned herself with U. K. house producer Switch, whose relatively hands-off approach allowed M.I.A. to have a greater say in the production and arrangements than she had on Arular (heretofore considered DJ Diplo’s album above all). It shows; Kala sounds like the album M.I.A. wanted to make, all the way down to the slinky swamp song “The Turn.” In fact, “Come Around” is the only track I can think of in which Timbaland’s foray behind the boards actually makes the song less interesting than what surrounds it. If M.I.A. wasn’t an international superstar before Kala’s release, she likely will be, and certainly deserves to be. This is her album, reflective of her vital personality and compelling statement of purpose at every single turn. In an era riddled with ghostwriting, lip-synching, showboating, and O-Town, few recording artists alive are less deserving of M.I.A.’s own namesake than M.I.A.