If I tell you I've listened to M.I.A.'s Arular at least 50 times since last week and that I can't help but dance every time "Bingo" impales my ears, will you believe me? Will you believe me if I say it's spastic and innovative and confusing and challenging and intelligent and just the remedy pop music so direly needs? Will you believe me if I baptize it the best album of the year?
Screw it, I don't care if it's only April.
M.I.A.'s been hyped like Star Wars, at least in the Web sites, magazines and social spheres I frequent, but I'm honestly not sure how many of y'all have heard of her, because it's not like I'm a US Weekly subscriber. So, back story: M.I.A. is Maya Arulpragasam, a London-based, Sri Lankan chick who can best be described as, hmm, dancehall techno rap? But that doesn't even come close to what M.I.A. is.
She's club, crunk, bhangra, reggae, calypso, hip-pop rap with lyrics that are absurd as they are direct, as sexually kittenish as they are fiercely antagonistic, and as happy-go-lucky as they are defiantly subversive. She trills and snarls in Spanglish, South London-spiked English and some other languages my non-linguistically trained ears can't classify -- all this to the mercurial pulse of handclaps, synth bleeps, bongos, steel drums and fuzzed out, grimy electro samples.
"I got the bombs to make you blow, I got the beats to make you bang," M.I.A. slams on the album's first full track, "Pull Up The People." And no one's going to mess with that because, heck yeah, she's got the beats, and that bomb reference isn't just there 'cause it sounds swell. It's there because Arular is an album of revolution.
The widely circulated, oft-told tale goes that M.I.A. grew up in Sri Lanka, then she and her mom fled to the U.K. because of her pop's role in a militant ethnic group. But war is never that simple and neither is resistance -- in fact, her father's group is famed for its suicide bombing methodology, which remains a touchy topic today.
So when M.I.A. swathes herself in a terrorist-chic persona by calling herself a freedom fighter, using her father's codename as her album title, giving a shout out to the PLO on "Sunshowers," and shimmying joyously in front of a screen of animated hot-pink bombs in the video for the relentlessly addictive "Galang," what are we to think? What's M.I.A. really saying? What's boiling and splattering behind her playful, deceptively accessible pop tunes?
Such hybrid identity, self-commodification and conscious exploitation of Otherness is really too complicated to expound in a mere album review. But it's exactly this hazy thematic cacophony that makes Arular so seductive.
M.I.A. isn't making any excuses for who she is or where she comes from. But she's not dwelling on it either.
She's embracing and challenging it, and blinging it out in infectious rhythms and rhymes that I double-dare ya to sit still to.
Believe me, it's really that good.
