I really don’t know what to make of MIA (Maya Arulpragasam). There’s nobody else remotely like her.
She’s a one-woman band, trend, and revolution. Everything she produces -- the paintings, the music, the clothes, and the attitude -- is original and disturbing and mostly weirdly beautiful. Ultimately, the message trumps the aesthetic. It’s always political, and from the underdog’s point of view; that’s why sexual politics shares center stage with the politics of liberation, urban slum- southern hemisphere-style.
Her first full-length CD, Arular, has already rattled some cages and upset some delicate middle-class northern-hemisphere nervous systems. Like her earlier hit single, "Galang," the music is more manufactured than played, composed on a Roland MC505 Groovebox (widely used by d.j.’s to add effects to their playlists) and fortified with samples, especially electronic beeps, bleeps, and chirps. The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones describes it as "on-the-ground world culture: synthetic, cheap, colorful, staticky with power. The beat is shuffling and abrasive, made from what sounds like the by-products of some other, more polite (music)."
MIA’s stuff is always danceable, and has even been described as "dance hall," but it’s also a hell of a lot more than that. The song “10 $” tells the now-common story of the third-world girl looking for a ticket out of the shantytown:
Dial-a-bride from Sri Lanka/Found herself a Yorkshire banker
Need a Visa?/Got with a geezer
Paid him with her knees up/Year later, started to ease up
Got her own way/Shouted out "See ya!"
One-third of the world’s urban population now lives in slums and shantytowns, mostly in the third world, mostly south of the equator. They’re the fastest-growing global demographic, and we ignore them at our peril. Ignoring them is what we in the air-conditioned comfort of North America and Western Europe have been efficiently and determinedly doing, along with allowing our governments to enact "globalization" policies that exacerbate this intolerable state of gross inequality and exploitation. But now those mute billions have a representative and a voice in, of all places, the transAtlantic pop music scene.
You no like the people/they no like you
Then they go set it off /With a big boom
Every gun in a battle/Is a son and daughter too
Why you wanna talk about who done who?
What you wanna talk about?
--From "Pull Up the People," by MIA
See also http://www.geocities.com/slim_93304/M.html
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