Markie Listening Notes 4: M.I.A.

M.I.A., Arular (advance--everntually supposed to be released on XL) The hype album of the spring, and perfectly fed into the hype by not being released in the U.S. on 2/22 as originally scheduled. So this is one of those albums that's almost completely beat-driven, and you can hear how she likes dancehall reggae in how she raps and how all her beats sound like two drum machines colliding halfway between Rio and Kingston. But the reason this has been throwing a nonstop dance party in my car the past two days is that the beats are crazy--I can hear this woman jamming with Ornette and Prime Time, or with a samba troupe (if the samba troupe played nonstop at 150 bpm). And the beats are as much with all of her overdubbed voices as with all of the crazy rhythm tracks. She sounds like she's having a ball, the way the Band used to on their first two records, or the way Funky 4 + 1 sounded on "That's the Joint." And whatever media-damaged gibberish she's dropping about freedom fighters and bombings, at least she's trying to telescope a lot of unstable news into the street party she's throwing with her unstable jump-rope rhymes. And in a perfect world, the baddest-assed 10-year-old-girls on the block would be doing the Double Dutch to it.