M.I.A.'s Kala tears the roof off

09/28/07 - There isn't really a subtle way to go about this, but I encourage absolutely everyone, no matter what your musical tastes are, to buy M.I.A.'s new album Kala. History will most likely prove me wrong (I've found pessimism to be a good bet for most situations), but I have a very powerful feeling that Kala is a watershed album for M.I.A.For those who don't know already, M.I.A., ne Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, is a British singer/rapper/songwriter/producer of Tamil descent who has, over the past three or four years, synthesized a stunning electronic gumbo composed of hip hop, electro, Jamaican dancehall, dashes of punk and a myriad of other international musical styles.

Other musicians have trod the same "World Beat" ground that she has, from Joni Mitchell and George Harrison in the early 1970s to David Byrne and Brian Eno at the turn of the 1980s. The difference? M.I.A's amalgamations actually do justice to world rhythm's excitement in a way that white art rockers have never really been able to pull off.

Although few would place M.I.A. under the banner of "rock 'n' roll," Kala is a superb rock 'n' roll album in the classic sense: It is fun, deceptively unskilled, messy and subversively spectacular. Listening to it four or five times you say "Okay, this is complete awful - the songs don't go anywhere. Is she speaking English? And what's with her singing voice?"

Until, that is, you finally notice yourself shamelessly squawking along with the hook-laden, Bollywood love jam, "Jimmy." Tuneless-ness has been acceptable in popular music, at least since Bob Dylan, and Kala is proof that rock did not die- it simply moved to more fertile ground, namely outside the United States.

The album kicks off with "Bamboo Banga," a minimalist groove that builds into an unstoppable rump-shaker built upon a chant of the first lines of Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner." That is only the beginning of the adventure. Suddenly, we're thrown in a whole new world where avant garde funk, South Asian drums and didgeridoos collide seamlessly.

One of the album's many collaborative highlights is M.I.A.'s spitting session with the aboriginal Australian hip-hop group, the Wilcannia mob. It doesn't matter that every member of the Wilcannia mob is around 10-years-old, their inchoate raps are silly and imaginative, and M.I.A. manages to keep up with their tales of stilts and Jackie Chan.

M.I.A.'s last album, Arular, was a confident slice of militant electronic dance music. The influence of her estranged Sri Lankan rebel father, the album's namesake, broods all over the record. Kala's sound has the same blunt force impact, but it doesn't seem to have the heavy atmosphere of Arular.

On Kala, M.I.A. pulls out all the stops to blow her listeners away - pay attention and you'll hear the Clash, New Order, the Pixies, stories of love, stories of robbing to survive and, most importantly of all, an artist doing her "own thing."

But why does all this matter? As another great musical mish-masher once said, "It's cheaper to funk than it is to pay attention." If you don't like your dance music too heady, M.I.A. is not for you. But if you want a concise, elegant overview of what you might be dancing your ass off to in the next four or five years, Kala should do the trick.