Sure, globalization has its
drawbacks: McDonald’s in the ruins, Wal-Marts in the
rainforest, Guatemalan peasants quoting Dr. Phil. Sometimes,
though, it’s pretty great, and Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri
Lanka–raised, London-based MC who goes by the tag M.I.A., is
all the proof you need that a shrunken, mongrelized, borderless
world doesn’t necessarily mean oppression and colonialism and
bland, soul-killing homogeneity. Sometimes it can mean liberation.
Arulpragasam is an unlikely rapper with an
unlikely backstory. She was born in London to Sri Lankan parents,
who took her back to their homeland when she was 6 months old. Her
father (nicknamed Arular, or “ruler,” by his guerilla
followers) was a founding member of a militant Tamil group and was
forced to go underground as the civil war intensified;
Arulpragasam, her mother, and her siblings moved to India and then
back to Sri Lanka before finally fleeing the country for good,
earning refugee status in England. At age 11, Arulpragasam moved
with her family to a crime-ridden housing project in Mitcham,
Surrey, where she began to learn English and listen to American
hip-hop. Although she was drawn to the fierce, politically charged
rhymes of Public Enemy and N.W.A., she considered herself a fan,
not an aspiring performer. Instead, she studied visual art,
graduating from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design with
a film degree.
After her first exhibition of paintings was
nominated for the Alternative Turner prize, Arulpragasam seemed to
be headed for a successful art career, but fate intervened. In
2001, Justine Frischmann, of Elastica, hired her to film a
documentary of the band’s tour. Peaches, Elastica’s
opening act, introduced her to the Roland MC-505 Groovebox, a
primitive keyboard with a built-in drum machine. Within a few
months, she’d mastered the machine and was making songs in
her bedroom, odd little gimcrack raps that reflected her love of
Jamaican dancehall, American rap, and U.K. garage with a few flourishes
of ragga, bhangra, and punk thrown in for good measure. One of these songs,
“Galang,” became an instant club smash after she enlisted
the help of producer Steve Mackey, of the Britpop outfit Pulp.
Mackey, Ross Orton, Anthony Whiting, Richard
X, and Switch all had a hand in producing Arular, Arulpragasam’s
full-length début, augmenting her rudimentary arrangements
with nifty analog touches and glitchy textures. Fortunately, their
contributions don’t overwhelm her raw, minimalist punch, and
the 13 songs sound brutal, catchy, and idiosyncratic. Unlike the
vast majority of hip-hop releases, Arular is refreshingly lean, clocking in at just
under 40 minutes; it’s completely free of the painfully
unfunny filler that mars so many contemporary rap albums, and it
leaves you wanting more when it’s over.
Although it’s hard to believe that
anything could match the exhilarating force of
“Galang,” several tracks do just that. “Pull Up
the People,” a populist call to arms, mixes clattery beats
with squelchy blurts and video-game sound effects while
Arulpragasam brags, “I got the bombs to make you blow, I got
the beats to make you bang!” “Bucky Done Gun”
combines a sampled horn fanfare with rolling drums and lyrics that
sound simultaneously sexy and militant. “Fire Fire” is
Timbaland-spooky, a disorienting synthetic whine colluding with
fidgety drums, and “Amazon,” the album’s most
densely produced track, uses unidentifiable insectoid chirps to
evoke the jungle where the narrator is being held hostage.
“10 $” tackles Third World child prostitution without
coming off as preachy, and “Hombre” intersperses a
simple but absolutely killer vocal hook with such lines as
“Gonna make the homeboy want me, gonna make the homeboy take
me.” It’s early in the year to be making grand claims,
but I’ll go out on a limb: This is the best rap CD of 2005.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2005.
