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M.I.A. - Kala
| Musicomh | | Where to start with an album as explosively ambitious as Kala? Bamboo Banga's Doppler effect engines, scrunchy beats and distorted vocals about driving at 100mph is where Maya Arulpragasam prefers to kick this extraordinary global hip-hop/dancehall smash-up off, and she's not a lady to argue with....full text |
| | Rollingstone | | Careerwise, the recent album M.I.A.'s Kala recalls is Kanye West's Late Registration -- an unexpectedly sure-footed follow-up to a brainy beat-adept's can-you-top-this debut. And though West is the more universal musician, especially as Americans conceive the universe, there are also musical similarities: Both albums challenge sophomore slump by risking pretension. But where West hired classically trained Jon Brion, the Sri Lankan-British rapper spread out and bent down low. Originally she'd hoped to trade the grimy beats of 2005's Arular for the more radio-friendly dirt of Timbaland. ...full text |
| | Pitchfork | | Given the hundreds of thousands of words hunted and pecked in the service of M.I.A.'s 2005 debut Arular, the odds on her delivering more grist for the mill with her followup were probably somewhere between slim and Amy Winehouse. Sure, Arular-- which has quietly sold 130,000 copies in the U.S.-- ultimately didn't seem to make much of an impact on the public at large, but the bountiful texts woven into its rich backstory worked like so much rockcrit catnip; momentarily setting aside the problem of M.I.A.'s own hazily defined personal politics, that album had the effect of nudging the critical forum back towards the kinds of issues it doesn't grapple with nearly enough....full text |
| | Stylusmagazine | | We don’t need to talk about politics right now. We don’t need to talk about Sri Lanka or Liberia or Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak or filmi or bhangra. We can strip ourselves from every moment of intertexuality, reference, and geography. In these next few breaths, you don’t have to search anything related to Dravidian languages on Wikipedia....full text |
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M.I.A. lyrics |
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