Kala by M.I.A.

When I’m driving around in my car and I’m listening to Kala two things about it strike me. The first is that its gangsta. I’m not talking about chinchilla coat wearing, drinking Courvoisier out of a pimp cup gangsta. Or driving around shooting each other in the balls gangsta. I’m talking about the type of gangsta where you turn that shit up and all of a sudden you’re throwing gang signs and yelling things like “Killer Bees” at random pedestrians. M.I.A. is gangsta at a time when self-proclaimed Tony Montanas are opening jewelry boxes and rapping over the green sleeves shit that comes out. Their video clips still look like Goodfellas, but musically, what did they sample: No Surprises? (Though, admittedly, No Surprises is pretty gangsta). The other thing you need to know about Kala is that it’s heavy, in a time when what passes for heavy is a sorry state of affairs. You know those bands, where it looks like Queer Eye paid a visit to Middle Earth and they sing about some dead chick named Lacretia and play solos that make you wanna stick your hand in the air and shout “By the power of Greyskull!” M.I.A.’s idea of heavy is taking a really heavy thing and hitting it against another really heavy thing. Or taking a hundred really heavy things and hitting them against a hundred other really heavy things. Boyz sounds like a million children flooding the streets of every city in the world and being cleansed with the rain like some William Blake shit. And Bird Flu is the heaviest song since B-tuned guitars and Brazillian percussion made sweet sweet love in Roots Bloody Roots. M.IA.’s idea of heavy isn’t sitting in the corner of a shopping centre and brooding on the unfulfilled promise of armpit hair. It’s the heaviness we hear when every foot on a busy street falls into lockstep; when the leviathans that bleed through our countries start to roar; when the war machines roll on and leave nothing behind them but the finest black sand. Are people really serious when they complain that she’s glorifying violence? Ooh, there are terrorist imperatives that underscore her lyrics and they’re a threat to Western values. What, drawn and talk of peace? And then there’s people criticising her uninflected tone, accusing her of lazy rapping. What, do you think she’s gone all around the world, cooked up these smoking beats, and then thought: I can’t be assed with vocals? I’ll just knock out any old rubbish then I can kick back with a spliff? Listen to her. This is what it sounds like. We walk the streets. We perceive the cracks on the pavement, the garbled static on the radio, and perhaps, if we’re lucky, the sun in the sky. And we move inside this kaleidoscope of swirling noise and junk with an endless and serene ambivalence. Her cut up lyrics are like the thoughts that besiege us every moment of every day. Collages made from pieces of everything, nothing, anything. All connected by the rules of anaphora. This is modern life. Props to M.I.A. for showing it in all its chaotic splendour.

W.B.