Anyone with a porch near a busy street anywhere in America has the strange, minimalist digital forest and “Let Me Work It” of Missy Elliot’s last massive hit firmly imprinted in his/her head. On her super-hyped debut, Arular, female emcee M.I.A. takes us deep into a similar jungle of sparse, harsh and supple layered beats. Listeners — and their best dancing butts — come out with bird-of-paradise bouquets.
On Under Construction, as a comparison to Arular, Elliot admitted that she wanted to go back to the basic beats of early-’80s hip-hop and hoped the re-exploration of the form at base would influence other artists. One can hear Missy in the sonic landscape of M.I.A.’s Arular. But to use Elliot as a reference is to misunderstand and miscast M.I.A. — born Maya Arulpragasam in Sri Lanka — as rising out of stateside hip-hop traditions. She is really ascendant from a long-ignored, international lineage in the music.
With the sun’s warm rays about to burst forth and stay awhile, an emerging sparseness in hip-hop seems to speak to a need to dance outside but with a beat relevant to these confused, even distressed times. That said, it seems with simultaneous hipster and street buzz over M.I.A., she’ll be both one of this summer’s biggest bomb-droppers booming in sync to the slow, June roll of chrome 24s and also on the iPod soundtrack of blithe vegan girls biking through hot urban blight.
Therefore, it’s worth mentioning these other non-American artists in the same vein to understand their influence on M.I.A. and the debt she owes to them as the newest hip-hop internationalist.
As a lyricist/rhyme-sayer, M.I.A.’s train of thought most immediately recalls king of reggaetón, Tego Calderon. But she also carries a bit of the butterfly-your-butt-to-the-ground dance-floor eroticism of reggaetón princess Ivy Queen.
Reggaetón exploded from the increasingly desperate and violent streets of Puerto Rico, taking over salsa as the dominant Caribbean club sound. M.I.A. beats recall the off-kilter pops of bass in an empty alley mixed with more optimist folk percussion that’s signature to Calderon.
She incorporates quick swatches from the palette of violence in her lyrics to rail against a new dank nihilism emerging from hopeless places. Not the full rounds shot off, racking up an imaginary body count normally found in modern music, but swift, short swipes with a machete. On “Amazon,” the “freedom fighters” she talks about are the daughters of Les Nubians and Le Tigre, chanting together.
And as soon as a little crimson is drawn, machete goes under the coat and out comes the dry brush again, painting bright green and yellow. In these songs, carnival percussion mixed with a metaphoric carnage, she recalls Brazilian rapper Gabriel O Pensador, especially on his early, controversial breakthrough, “Matei o Presidente (Kill the President).”
Unlike these peers, Arulpragasam delivers her slinky-then-staccato style in English, giving her better access to American charts. As far as female artists working digitally and transcending female artist conventions, Ivy Queen has her aggressive, girl-macho sexual come-ons, but M.I.A. has a full range of throw-down moves — to the cement and to the mattress.
Even though beats on Arular owe a lot as an amalgamation to reggaetón, Brazilian rap and that brief flash when hip-hop history overlaid with new wave, what makes her exciting is that she converges them all into her own sound. Like Kathleen Hannah’s success with screaming and Ivy Queen’s deep, dominant voice electrifying otherwise-mundane come-ons, M.I.A.’s confident delivery makes even dumb lyrics like “You drink to much rum / you make me wanna run” work.
As far as the way beats are cultivated from the expanse of electro-rock/hip-hop/international music history, Arular isn’t cross-pollination, it’s full-on sweaty alabaster arms-against-obsidian-thighs race mixing. Can she get a Hallelujah?
Below the basket weave of rhymes, the lanky electro-clash geek is on the floor seizure-dancing with devotees of Funkmaster Flex in his Tunnel-banger heyday. Tracks like “$10” even dare to mangle straight-out-of-the-box drum-machine rhythms into unbelievably hypnotic club-floor-packers.
But before the music seems too self-conscious of its potential to seduce multiple audiences (a problem with the U.K.’s Ms. Dynamite making a stateside name), on tracks like “URAQT” and the first single, “Sunshowers,” MIA drops straight-on booty bass. If Lil’ John mixed with dancehall is the height of the club at 1 a.m., these tracks are entangled hips and lips in the corner at 4 a.m.
Did I mention that Arular is also a worthy homage to early Prince?
Most of the time, when a non-American hip-hop artist catches fire with the post-Eurotrash lounge set outside the United States, buyer beware. In this case, that hype delivers like a truckload of iced watermelons driven straight up overnight from Mississippi on a hot August day. And like the satisfaction of that red fruit’s simple, sugary taste — a few bitter seeds chewed accidentally — it’ll be hard to articulate why you can’t get enough of M.I.A. by the time people’s air conditioning is blowing fuses.
Grade: A/B
