I'd been vaguely aware of M.I.A. for a while, but hadn't really been paying attention and had formed the vague impression that I probably wouldn't like her music all that much. The other night, though (between "Pictures of the Floating World" with Myles and Wonderful Days with David), I was browsing in Polyester Records when I realised that the music blaring through the in-store system was really good - one beats-and-vox-driven call to arms after another, each different from the others and collectively pretty different from anything I'd heard before...the end of this story is, of course, that the record being played was Arular, and I was sold.
I didn't buy it straight away, wanting to give myself a chance to: (a) get it cheaper at jb hi-fi; and (b) (and more germanely) see reason and realise that I didn't really need to own the record. Come Monday, though, the music was still in my head, and so I went out and got it (in the process hearing a glowing endorsement of the album by the store attendant who served me) - and, for the time being at least, it's replaced Kathleen Edwards as my repeat-play soundtrack of the moment (I spent all of yesterday (Tuesday) having to ask people to repeat themselves, having - I think - temporarily damaged my hearing in that cause). Put simply, it's fantastic, but it's hard to explain it much beyond that - Arular is an album that really needs to be listened to.
A large part of the appeal is the gleeful way in which so many disparate musical strands are pulled together - or at least touched upon - across the course of the album. The music is basically rooted in hip-hop, and it's pushed forward by some pretty hard beats as much as by M.I.A.'s charismatic vocals, which are usually in a style closer to a sort of scat-rap than actual singing, but there's a lot more than just hip-hop feeding into the mix and the result is an almost 'world-beat'-type record which covers a great deal of ground across its 40-odd minutes. My favourites at the moment are the urgent up-and-down shuffle of "Bingo" and the sleaze and shimmy of "Hombre" (that latter being the one which first caught my ear in Polyester), but each song has its own distinct personality and I expect that I'll go through phases of particularly liking almost all of them in the next few days and further into the future.
Much has been made of the political aspects of M.I.A.'s music, particularly to do with the background of Arulpragasam (London-born child of Sri-Lankan parents with strong links to 'infamous' Tamil Tigers, etc), but while there's attitude to burn, of both the inconsequential ("And could it be that me and he are tighter than R Kelly in his teens?"...unless there's some kind of commentary on the machine which produces pop music as/and commodities in there), and the social/political ("I'm hot now you'll see/I'll fight you just to get peace") varieties, and while the songs still sound thoroughly righteous, and have retained that air of being calls to arms in the transition to repeat bedroom and discman listening, what Arular above all else is, is fun. It's a melting-pot, and it's catchy, and it's brilliant.
