September 10, 2007 @ 5:24 pm

M.I.A.: 3RD (world) BASS

by: Julianne Shepherd

Three years ago, M.I.A. rallied rebel dancefloors. Now the British MC has a new mission - to unite the street sounds of the new global town.

Three years ago, M.I.A. rallied rebel dancefloors. Now the British MC has a new mission - to unite the street sounds of the new global town.

They wanna check my papers
see what I carry around
Credentials are boring
I burnt them at the burial ground
Don't order me about
I'm an outlaw from the badland
-M.I.A., "Bird Flu" (2007)

May 2006. MC/producer/artist M.I.A. signs a deal with Interscope Records. It's for her second album, the follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2004 debut Arular (XL). Scheduled to travel from London to Virginia to begin recording her second album with Timbaland, she applies for a visa to come to the US, a country she's been to plenty of times, toured through - and even found love in.

The Department of Immigration and Citizenship rejects her.

Based on what, she can only speculate. Her polysyllabic Sri Lankan name - Maya Arulpragasam - perhaps? Her former status as a third-world immigrant living in a Western nation? Or the fact that her father has fought with the Tamil Tigers, a Sri Lankan rebel group classified as a terrorist organization by the US? Maybe it's because on her last album, she took President Bush's name in vain. ("President Bush doing takeover," she needled on "M.I.A.")

"I'm not out there shooting people, or whatever, you know?" says Arulpragasam, phoning in from London in early May. "Yet I'm having to go through the same sorts of prejudices. It took me years to get to this point, and in the same breath of being given that ticket to become whatever I want - as if in a dream - it was taken away from me."

Credentials are boring, though, so she did what any self-respecting citizen of the world would do. She boarded a plane to Liberia. "I said, okay, I'll go to Africa, then Trinidad and Jamaica and India. I'm not afraid of these countries or the cultures or the sounds or the customs there. I'm five foot five and totally on my own. I didn't have a team. I didn't have my management or backup traveling with me. None of these places are as scary as we make out. If I lived it to prove that point, then I have. If I made a record that sounds different from what is coming out in America this year, then that's cool, too. "

Historically, Arulpragasm has been considered a "global artist" by default of her background: London art school Central St. Martins via a Sri Lankan refugee camp. On her first record, she and her then-boyfriend, producer Wes  "Diplo" Pentz, pasted together her vocals - a modern interpretation of Jamaican toasting  - with Miami low-end, Brazilian baile funk and a shake of Salt 'N' Pepa. By style and by mixtape - the popular, Diplo-helmed Piracy Funds Terrorism - Arulpragasm seemed determined to become the living embodiment of a worldwide mash-up. And at the crux of her music is the complicated world: mortars and mangos, political protests and booty calls.

Her new Kala (Interscope) - named for her mother  - began with the idea of making a record about the mechanics of motherhood: "I started out thinking, I'm gonna make this album more about women and not talk about politics. My mom represented a typical woman who had typical woman problems and I really wanted to handle that. But as soon as I started writing, I felt like I couldn't really represent it, because I didn't have kids."

But Arulpragasm may have created an album about women and children without trying. The hallowed voices of kids worldwide echo through Kala, whether the Indian children chanting  the chorus of roiling, drum-roll-driven, jungle-double-dutch of "Bird Flu," or with Wilcannia Mob, the Aboriginal child-rappers on didgeridoo'd fishing tale "Down River." While she was in Liberia, she worked with an organization to help rehabilitate former child soldiers, and from the experience wrote "20 Dollar," a hulking club track with an eerie sample of the Pixies' 1988 classic "Where is My Mind" (4AD), which to her, explores the base economics of the international weapons trade. "One of the things that bugged me, is that an AK-47 in Africa costs less than a mobile phone," says Arulpragasam - a slight exaggeration, perhaps, but a valid concern. "I knew that I was gonna have problems with people telling me to shut up. But I felt like it was a simple equation: 'A gun costs $20 in Africa.' Somebody's making them and somebody's selling them. And that's us. It's the West."

Arulpragasam has tackled politics before - Arular was rife with refugee-status references and rebel verbiage - and she has been both lauded and criticized for her perceived melding of hipster-design aesthetic with real-life revolutionary causes. But Arulpragasam has made a recording career out of the personal-as-political, relying on her complicated personal history as both text and backstory in her cut-and-paste, global bass music. With Kala, Arulpragasm wanted to give the third world visibility in the West as a place of joy, via music, drum-sounds, lyrics and videos.

Thus Kala is fleshier, more human than her first - it is born of real-world experiences and feels generous, blending Arulpragasm's own production - heavy drum samples and field recordings - with the mélange of throwback booty- and club-beats from Timbaland and his protege Danja, Diplo, Baltimore producer Blaqstarr and her longtime collaborator/engineer Dave Switch. It is a thumping cacophony of club-influenced rhythm patterns, spontaneous claps, Casio and snaps, bubbling-over horn sections, beatboxing and didgeridoo. Kala is a soundtrack to a global club: "Hands up/ Guns out/ Represent the world town," she sings on "World Town."

"I felt like I had some sort of duty to relay some information [that] not all of it is hunger and famine and terror and horror. We're just as fly. And we listen to T.I., but we live in a shantytown, that's all. The third world isn't a victim."

Article tags: Arular, Diplo, Kala, M.I.A., Mia 

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