M.I.A.

It's a sign of M.I.A.'s genius that her debut sounds like the prototype for Missy Elliott's Under Construction and Peaches -- at the same time. The beats are old-school simple, the rhymes are bastardized dancehall/London street slang, and the focus is global. "Amazon," "Sunshowers" and "Pull Up the People" are amazing, and you won't find "Do Ya" anywhere else.

You've never heard anything like M.I.A. -- the sound of jump-rope rhymes in a war zone.
She blew out of the London electro underground last year with her indie debut single,
"Galang." M.I.A. chants the hook "London calling/Speak the slang now" while she plays with
her cheapskate beatbox and amps up her minimal buzzes and bleeps into monstrously cool
explosions. It sounds like Bow Wow Wow shooting bottle rockets into a vintage... More >

The deepest cut on Arular is "Amazon," where M.I.A. the favela funk thief depicts herself as a cultivated Brit kidnapped by Brazilian criminals. She's missing from Acton, her London 'hood, but after she fell for that palm tree smell, "bodies started merging." The vertiginous excitement of pan-ethnic identity, so unlike the purity the Tamil Tigers kill for, imbues every pieced-together track, but only on "Hombre," a pidgin-Spanish proposition with a sitar intro, does it get quite so explicit. Violence is everywhere, dropped casually like a funk grenade or flaunted instructively as in the oft quoted "It's a bomb yo/So run yo/Put away your stupid gun yo." But not for a moment does the violence seem vindictive, sadistic, or pleasurable. It's a fact of life to be triumphed over, with beats and tunelets stolen or remembered or willed into existence. This is the territory I've always wished Missy Elliott would risk, and let's not be coy about how M.I.A. got there. "Banana Skit" starts the album with her only message: "Get yourself an education." (Grade - A)