Politics and music have always been uneasy bedfellows, but 27-year-old Maya Arulpragasam knows about unease. The Sri Lankan native’s family fled that country’s civil war for Britain more than twenty years ago, and her father — linked to the divisive revolutionary outfit the Tamil Tigers — remains M.I.A., a moniker Maya has adopted for her equally revolutionary debut. Emerging from the same urban wilderness as the Streets and Dizzee Rascal — and putting those two to shame — M.I.A.’s Arular (a play on her missing father’s code name) is fearless and aggressive. She knocks listeners unconscious with her snarling, confrontational approach: part-Jamaican dancehall toaster, part-dirty American rapper, part-monastic Tibetan chanter, part-British jungle MC. She also disguises her very serious lyrical messages in what sounds like borderline nonsense; her topics range from teenage prostitution to war, all spit rough and ready over punky electro rhythms. Arular‘s cut-and-paste feel and politically fraught nursery rhyme babble brings to mind toys made of tin in crowded wholesale shops and Third World markets: noisy, man-made, harsh, and difficult to ignore.
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