M.I.A.

The U.S. denied M.I.A. a visa to work on Kala, but she showed us by making an album that's an exercise in audio globetrotting, almost as if she was taunting us with all the directions she could go in. Pit stops include Bollywood psychedelia, clucking, chutney-bhangra, vocals from a South Asian Donna Summer, Nigerian MC Afrikan Boy, a teenage Australian Aboriginal hip-hop crew, tribal vocoders, electro-reed mouth organs, an apocalyptic rave, a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song about counterfeiting passports and Timbaland. Feel confused, even assaulted, yet strangely enticed? Ah, then, she's done it again.

The debut Arular was about M.I.A.--her ambition, her education, her contradictions, her history of violence. Kala is about Euro-America's brown-skinned Other--described from the outside, although often in the first person, by a brown-skinned sympathizer who despite her star power is an insider only as long as her visa holds up. It opens with the spare "Bamboo Banga," which samples Indian Tamil filmi composer Ilayaraja and sets Richman's roadrunner knocking on your Hummer's door in India, Ghana, Burma, Angola, Somalia, Sri Lanka. "Birdflu" disses dogging males everywhere--"selfish little roamers"--over another filmi sample and a barely synchronized four-four on some thirty deep-toned urmi drums. High kiddie/girlie interjections add a cuteness that's sustained pitch-wise on "Boyz." Only with "Jimmy," a Bollywood disco number a kiddie Maya used to dance to for money at Sri Lankan parties, does a conventional song surface. Throughout, Kala is less pop-friendly than its predecessor--it's heavier, noisier, more jagged. But the music does soften and, occasionally, give up a tune. There's melancholy melodica, Sri Lankan temple horn, seventeen-year-old Afrikan Boy describing his hustles, and several child choruses, notably on "Mango Pickle Down River," where subteens rhyme about bridges and fridges to rhyme with the didge--didgeridoo--that provides their groaning bass. A riot of human, musical, and mechanical sounds bubbles underneath these tracks. Not a white riot, that's for sure, and not a dangerous one either--unless you believe every Other wants what you got and has nothing to offer in return. Kala proves what b*llsh*t that is. The danger is all the evil fools who aren't convinced. (Grade - **** 1/2)