Review: M.I.A. – MAYA

August 3rd, 2010 by Jeremiah / Comment on this post

MAYA, the politically provocative hip-hop/dance artist M.I.A.’s greatly anticipated third album, begins with the sound of fingers typing. An industrial approximation of a tribal beat kicks in and a male voice drones, “Headbone connected to the headphones / Headphones connected to the iPhone / iPhone connected to the internet /Connected to the Google / Connected to the government.” These words are reiterated by M.I.A.’s voice under heavy distortion. An alarm blares out that somehow recalls neither J Dilla nor Bomb Squad. Then the track ends. It’s called “The Message,” and it’s clear that M.I.A. takes it deadly seriously. But why? Aside from a telling detente with the Chinese government, Google has never been particularly guilty of political collusion. It’s the stuff of conspiracy theory, and logically shoddy – Google makes an OS that directly competes with Apple’s. It’s also indicative of the level of thought that went into the composition of most of the rest of the album. “The Message”‘s message aside, you can’t dance to it, unlike all of M.I.A.’s previous politically incendiary tracks. There’s not much point in even trying to. It’s neither a pleasure to listen to nor to think about.

The same is true of more than half of MAYA. The beat to “Steppin’ Up,” produced by Rusko and Switch, is overwhelmed by the sounds of industrial equipment. You could conceivably dance to it if the rhythm wasn’t constantly interrupted by electric drills and jackhammers. This could be an interesting artistic statement, but the lyrics prove otherwise: “You know who I am / I run this fuckin’ club / Club-a-dub-a-dub-dub / Club-a-dub-a-lub-a-lub.” M.I.A. asserts her status as queen of contemporary hip-hop just as she forfeits the title. “Teqkillya,” produced by Rusko, Switch, and John Hill, is similarly ruined by unpleasant and totally pointless noise. The track has the makings of an incredible beat, but screeching electronic tones that sound like the frozen MIDI noise made by a broken Nintendo cartridge are too annoying to withstand, as are the lyrics, which describe through a series of labored puns on the names of liquors how M.I.A. met her fiance. The chorus, “I got sticky-icky-icky-icky weeeeeeed / Like a shot of tequila, in me,” seems totally disconnected from the rest of the song.

“Lovalot” begins as follows: “They told me this was a free country / Now it feels like a chicken factory / I feel cooped up; I wanna burst free.” A chicken factory? Because she feels “cooped up”? By what fluke of reason did that sound like a coherent metaphor when she said it? The low-end beat, produced by Rusko and Switch, is one of the album’s strongest, but M.I.A. can’t not ruin the opportunity it presents by saying the most inane things that she thinks of. In a grotesque Southeastern Asian accent, she rhymes “Who’s in town?” with “Hu Jintao” for no reason whatsoever. There are lines on the track that recall her brilliant earlier work – “Like a Taliban trucker eatin’ boiled up yucca / I keep my eyes down like I’m in a black burka” – but these only serve to remind the listener of what it’s not, which is good music. It’s allegedly about a young female suicide bomber, but that story is not told in the lyrics. “It Takes a Muscle” is a misguided cover of a New Wave/reggae song by the group Spectral Display. The original track has a poignant beauty that’s utterly missing from this version, which sounds like Red Red Wine-esque light reggae. For some reason, the chorus is squealed in the Autotune equivalent of chipmunk voice.

The penultimate track, “Tell Me Why,” is Autotuned into the abyss, but is also undone by another set of idiotic lyrics. M.I.A. demands, “Tell me why/ Things change but it feels the same / If life is such a game / How come people all act the same?” Games demand that players behave within the confines of sets of rigidly defined rules in order to win; M.I.A.’s question answers itself. It’s a pity that she doesn’t do anything with Diplo’s fantastic beat. “Space,” the closing track, produced by Rusko, is better than any of the tracks mentioned above, but its psychedelic pop melody doesn’t develop. One melodic couplet is repeated for nearly three minutes, and at no point are the lyrics terribly compelling. It makes for an unsatisfying end to a confusing listening experience.

But the experience is confusing because it isn’t all bad. In fact, MAYA contains several fantastic tracks. The Blaqstarr-produced “XXXO” sounds more like radio pop than anything else M.I.A. has done, and she seems to know it. If the lyrics aren’t self-referential, the oblivion she displays on the rest of the album must be boundless: under heavy Autotune she screams a chorus of “You want me be somebody who I’m really not!” The song ostensibly addresses an incompetent lover who demands that M.I.A. be more sexually conventional, but it sounds like a metaphor for her recent incursion into American chart success with the single “Paper Planes.” When she says, “We can find ways/ To expand what you know / I can be the actress / You be Tarantino,” is she suggesting that she change the expectations for and image of the mainstream popular musician? The sheer incongruity of the track with her previous work certainly suggests so, but the rest of the album is enough to give one pause. “It Iz What It Iz,” another Blaqstarr collaboration, succeeds for its incredible sonic beauty alone. It’s another pop track, and it directly addresses M.I.A.’s celebrity status, but the lyrics are much less striking than “XXXO”s. In one quatrain, she rhymes the word “more” with itself three times, and once more with “store.”

The beat to “Meds and Feds” is made of chopped up bits of the Sleigh Bells’ song “Treats,” and with that band’s maelstrom of abrasive guitar behind her, it really doesn’t matter what M.I.A. has to say. The track is exciting enough without her, but with her shouting “I just give a damn!” over it, it’s a near-classic. But the best song on MAYA is the Switch-produced, Suicide-sampling “Born Free.” On that track alone, M.I.A. puts her all into her lyrics and her performance, and the result is incredible. “Man-made power stood like a tower / Higher, higher hello / And the higher you go, you feel lower.” Here she’s finally back to playing the freedom fighter she so believably portrayed throughout Kala, and she’s angry. She menacingly purrs under heavy vocal distortion, “I throw this shit in your face when I see ya / ‘Cause I got something to say / I was born free!” It’s hard to believe that the confused pseudoprofundity of “Lovalot” and “Tell Me Why” could come from the same writer as “Born Free”‘s “I split a check like Slovakia.” The song is made to be the soundtrack to an anarchist revolution, and if there ever is one it might well be.

It’s clear that M.I.A. intended this album to be polarizing, split as it is between grating noise and cloying pop experiments. Unfortunately, the space between the stylistic poles it explores is reflected in the qualitative distance between “Born Free” and most of the rest of the album. Ideas are certainly there, and there is potential on nearly every track for the unambiguous excellence of Kala and Arular, but there is no organizing principle at work here, no voice of authority. Without one, the surplus of ideas works to the album’s detriment, as most of them seem to have been picked before they were fully developed and thrown haphazardly into the record. Brief glimpses of genius can’t redeem thirty minutes of slogging through the rot of underdeveloped ideas. But the very existence of those ideas is proof that M.I.A. remains an artist with great potential who may yet produce another work of sustained genius. She just needs to focus.

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About the Author

Jeremiah McNeil is a 27-year-old former cat wrangler for the Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circus, though they presently disavow any information relating to his time in their service. When he was 24, a lion tamer informed him that amid the gibberish he scrawled in his scat on bathroom stall walls were passages of recognizable English. Since then, Jeremiah has been driven by ambition and Adderall to be the best writer he can be. Please humor him. Follow Jeremiah on Twitter.

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