Guardian & LA Times Reviews Of M.I.A.’s Third Album Maya
MIA: /\/\ /\ Y /\
(XL)
MIA: a headache-inducing patchwork of ideas that’s actually rather brilliant.It is probably worth mentioning that /\/\ /\ Y /\ (but let’s call it Maya) is an album of pop songs by MIA, the nom-de-tune of Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam. It contains 12 songs, some of which are the kind of thing one might hear on the radio. It is MIA’s third – the first two are named after her father and mother, respectively – but it is her first since being catapulted to American renown on the back of two songs, “O… Saya”, from the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, and “Paper Planes”, her unlikely US hit – unlikely because the chorus consists of gunshots juxtaposed with the sound of ringing cash registers.
Such has been the hoopla surrounding Maya (album and artist) that it is easy to forget that this supra‑national, polymorphously polemical mother-of-one is, in the words of her latest song, “Haters” – posted on her own label’s blog – “just a singer”. There was the YouTube-banned video for the brilliant, electro‑speed-punk racket of “Born Free”, in which redheads were rounded up and assassinated. There was the hatchet job by a New York Times writer that provoked a riveting multimedia spat a month ago.
Now, here, finally, are the tunes heralded by all this furious meta‑activity. Maya is a headache-inducing patchwork of conspiracy theories, love, technological overload, world musics and sadness framed by the sort of poltergeist-in-the-machine noises you might expect from a new synthesiser called the Korg Kaosillator. It justifies all the cultural static by being rather brilliant.
So you may not agree that the CIA controls Google, as intro track “The Message” posits. You might not wonder what went on in the mind of Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, the Russian teenager who bombed Moscow’s tube system to vindicate the death of her husband, an Islamic militant. But MIA does, and her “Lovalot” ponders her inner world with a mixture of nonsense rhyme, militant posturing and pop-cultural free-flow; her London glottal stop mischievously turns “I love a lot” into “I love Allah”.
Agitprop earache is a given with MIA, a cultural irritant as beautifully designed for high-pitched attention‑grabbing as the anopheles mosquito. But she is closer to the mainstream than ever before with club-oriented tracks such as “XXXO”, an R&B track featuring a universal female lament. “You wanna be with somebody who I’m really not,” MIA sighs, as tongue-tied as the rest of us; “It Takes a Muscle” is another cockeyed look at love, disguised as a Vampire Weekend in the Caribbean.
Radical posturing is nothing new in pop, an arena with a proud tradition of garbled, ill-thought-out, passionate effusions. This is another. MIA’s defence? It comes in the magnificently truculent collisions of “Meds and Feds” when she sings, “I just give a damn”.
Pop & Hiss
The L.A. Times music blog
Album review: M.I.A.’s MAYA album
July 7, 2010 | 5:17 pm There are so many ways to say “I love you,” and if you’re singing, it can be hard to say anything else. Pop stars are our love machines, expressing desires people are otherwise too uptight or disconnected to put into words. And women artists can hardly find a way beyond that role. Springsteen sings for the working stiff, and Zack de la Rocha slaughters bulls on parade; but when Lady Gaga crafts a commentary on human trafficking, she still has to call it “Bad Romance.”
So, what if you’re a female artist who puts politics first? And then, what happens when you start to feel the muscle that is your heart?
Maya Arulpragasam, a.k.a. M.I.A., is in that nearly singular circumstance. The UK-born Sri Lankan war child turned agitprop-loving art-school kid achieved critical success and some popular renown with a global mash-up sound that cast her as ultimate street urchin — “Robin Hoodrat,” as the critic Jessica Hopper called her in her perceptive “/\/\/\Y/\” review.
Spitting slogans and throwing beat bombs, M.I.A. danced like a rapper, not a single lady. Her lyrics trumpeted self-confidence and spoke for others’ struggles, rarely dwelling on tender emotions. She always looked great, but never bared too much skin. Her androgynous charisma, in fact, was the source of her breakthrough, when two different films, “Pineapple Express” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” used her song “Paper Planes” as background to the antics of delinquent boys.
In the midst of M.I.A.’s rise, though, a couple of things happened: She started her own record label, the Interscope Records imprint N.E.E.T., getting into the music industry in earnest. And she met her future husband Benjamin Brewer, son of Warner Music Group CEO and Seagram’s magnate Edgar Bronfman Jr., a guy with a different set of issues than M.I.A. may be used to confronting. The two had a son, Ikhyd, last year.
“/\/\/\Y/\” responds to these changes, and it feels like a serious artist’s sometimes tentative but very promising step toward a broader vision of herself. In its 12 tracks, M.I.A. explores both what it means to serve as a sexual/romantic ideal in the Beyonce way, and what happens when a self-consciously political artist like herself confronts the sentimental streak deep within.
To be clear, she’s not beating her chest and belting out “My Heart Will Go On.” “/\/\/\Y/\” contains plenty of agitprop verses that would have worked on her first two albums, though the music on post-punk attacks such as “Born Free” and “Meds and Feds” (the latter provided by Sleigh Bells board-cruncher Derek E. Miller) spews more shrapnel than ever before. The ugliness of certain songs comes off as a built-in defense against the more conciliatory qualities of other ones; on “Meds and Feds,” Miller loops her saying, “I just give a damn,” as if other tracks, like the Robyn-ish “XXXO” or the dreamy, Diplo-produced “Tell Me Why,” might cause fans to think otherwise.
“XXXO” is actually not about sex, but about the making of a sex symbol, the other matter preoccupying M.I.A. these days. Against a chirpy background of “you want me,” she sings in a style not unlike the consciously girlish coo of early 1980s New Wavers, about a seduction that turns out to be artistic, not sensual. The male in the picture is her “Tarantino,” less likely a lover than a producer trying to turn her big ideas into something more containable, like a come-on. “I can be that actress,” she murmurs. But she really can’t. She’s all push and pull; like her fellow “post-feminist” art star Karen O, she understands that something’s gotta break — either the role designed for her, or herself.
“XXXO” is not the only case of M.I.A. pulling a switcheroo on a pop template. She’s trying to have it both ways — the virgules that form her name on the cover of “/\/\/\Y/\” are typographical marks used in phrases like “either/or” — and the effort sometimes feels a little stilted. “Teqkilla” is a party anthem that’s as cold as ice in a frozen glass; there’s an air of condemnation in the way she talks about sticky weed and wooze-inducing alcohol. (That song is also the only place where she addresses her relationship with the liquor-company heir Brewer, in the line, “When I met Seagram’s, sent Chivas down my spine.”) “Space” is a chill-out room seduction, but it stays pretty vague, and M.I.A. just can’t sing the phrase “You conquer me” convincingly.
What works as well as anything she’s ever done is her depiction of the personal as something worth fighting for. “Lovealot” is the album’s most powerful jam, inspired by one of those photographs of the battle dead that puts a heartbreaking face on unfathomable terrorist actions. M.I.A. merges her voice with that of the teen bride Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, who became a suicide-bomber statistic while avenging the death of her husband. Clipping her boasts, M.I.A. turns a call to action into a scared girl’s nervous tic. Synths click out a jittery, jagged background. The song doesn’t justify anything, but it reminds us that there is a person behind every lit fuse.
M.I.A. has to realize that she no longer lives in a neighborhood where anybody’s hiding an arms cache (no workers of the world, anyway — though who knows what Brentwood’s power brokers keep in their wine cellars). Forging her own relationship with the old slogan, “the personal is political,” she sometimes miscalculates the distance between herself and her beloved underclass. Yet what she’s experiencing is an absolutely necessary struggle — an attempt by an artist who’s defined herself through opposition to engage with the system that she has entered, for better or worse, and to still remain recognizable to herself.
She’s also trying, as a mother and a soon-to-be wife, to relate what she feels as Maya to what she says as M.I.A. The bevy of producers who shaped the soundbeds for the musings of “/\/\/\Y/\” push her sound away from grooves and riddims and toward noise, but the sonic and lyrical allusions to the Twitter lifestyle don’t really offer a critique. It’s more of an attempt to find the blood within the circuitry. What happens to political fervor when it’s turned into chatspeak and hashtags? Does a lullaby still soothe a little boy if it’s been refined through Auto-Tune?
One of M.I.A.’s most powerful tools is a voice that never sounds processed, even when it’s manipulated and chopped and screwed. When her songs have foregrounded ideas, or the stories of oppressed people she didn’t necessarily know, she always remains in the thick of it. On “/\/\/\Y/\,” she is trying to stay in the thick of her own life. It turns out to be a struggle worthy of a revolutionary.
— Ann Powers
M.I.A.
“/\/\/\Y/\”
N.E.E.T./Interscope
Three and a half stars (out of four)
UK Interview: Kelly Rowland Talks About Her Career & Independence From Beyonce Knowles & Her Family.
—Kelly Rowland was one third of Destiny’s Child until the world’s top girl group drifted apart. SHE’s relaxed about her solo career – as long as nobody mentions the b word
Interview: Kelly Rowland – Singer and actress
It’s the hottest day of the year so far in London. I’m waiting for Kelly Rowland in a hotel suite in Mayfair so big and bling and boiling it would make Lady Gaga wilt like a wallflower. The temperature is hotter than a Beyoncé photoshoot in the seventh ring of hell, with the pink and black soft furnishings to match. The air conditioning has been turned off. Windows have been closed. Curtains drawn to shut out the sun. “Can we turn up the AC?” someone asks faintly. “No,” replies Kelly Rowland’s PR. “Kelly likes the room to be warm.”
So Rowland is a hot-blooded diva. At least I hope so. What more could you expect from one third of the world’s most bootylicious girl group Destiny’s Child, the trio who made hands-in-the-air independent women of us all, at least for a few minutes?
Rowland later tells me she is now a “grown ass woman” in her own right (everything comes down to butts with this lot). Sure enough, when she shows up – only 15 minutes late – she looks every inch the part, towering above me. Rowland sweeps into the suite on a cloud of lip gloss and giant spray-scented hair. Feeling like a child, I reach up to shake her hand, bedecked in rings the size of golfballs. She flashes me a Miami-white smile. Then she shivers: “Is there a blanket in here?”
Rowland is brought a kingsize duvet, which she snuggles under, hiding her glamorous get-up: nose-bleed heels, skinny white jeans, slashed slate-grey top. I tell her she may as well be wearing pyjamas. She laughs. “I’m sorry,” she purrs. “You must be like what the heck kind of interview is this? Just pretend you can’t see the blanket, OK?”
She can’t seriously be cold. “I’m anaemic,” she drawls. “I feel the cold hard. I have to wear layers and layers of clothing during wintertime.” Performing must be a nightmare. Think of all the times she must have caught cold belting out Survivor in sequins into a wind machine back in the day. She shrugs. “Yeah, I get sick easily so I have to make sure I’m damn straight.”
Rowland is no prima donna, despite having lately been in the papers for changing outfits five times in a night at a New York gala. She’s confident rather than arrogant, has a warm and quirky sense of humour, and proper Deep Southern politeness. She apologises for the heat (“I’m melting my visitors!”), for interrupting me, which she only does once, and thanks me for taking time to talk to her. There is only one flinty moment. Halfway through our interview, having spoken at length about her new single, Commander, and forthcoming album, I ask Rowland about her friendship with Beyoncé Knowles, whom she met when she moved from Atlanta to Houston, Texas at the age of eight.
“When I met B her father was working with Xerox and her mother had a hair salon,” she says, going through the motions a little wearily. “Mathew wasn’t the manager yet. They were just the supportive parents. We were all just loving singing together.” I start to ask another question about her first impressions of Beyoncé but she cuts me short. “This isn’t going to turn into her interview, is it?” She says it without malice but the message is clear. Rowland has moved on. Or, as she puts it, “now I’m not in a team. The only person I can see is me.”
Destiny’s Child, made up of original members Rowland and Knowles and Michelle Williams, who joined in 1999, released their last album in 2004 and broke up a year later. At that point they were the world’s biggest girl group, successors to the Supremes, had sold more than 50 million records and had given female empowerment a bootie-shaking twist. But then they walked away. The usual rumours abounded. Beyoncé’s desire to go solo influenced the breakup. There was infighting. Rowland tended to be painted as the Mary Wilson to Beyoncé’s Diana Ross. Even more recently in the pilot of Glee, one character moans: “I’m Beyoncé, I ain’t no Kelly Rowland.” But Rowland maintains they all wanted to pursue their own music and that there was no acrimony. In fact she gets fed up of people assuming she is jealous of Knowles.
“That’s my sister,” she says. “One of my best friends, Serena Williams, told me she and Venus love each other. She said ‘we’re going to be sisters, period. When we have to play each other we are competing and we both want to win. But we still love each other at the end of the day.’ That’s simply the way it is. I think everyone wants us to hate each other. It’s not going to happen.”
All three have found success. Knowles has become the biggest female R’n’B artist in the world. Williams has released gospel albums and was the first African-American to play Roxy Hart in Chicago in the West End. And Rowland hasn’t done too badly either. She collaborated with Nelly, for which she won a Grammy, released two acclaimed solo albums, and is a judge on US reality TV series The Fashion Show, which has just hit UK screens. In September she releases a third album and the first two singles, When Love Takes Over and new track Commander are already global hits, big, sexed-up dance anthems. Producer David Guetta, the French DJ who has worked with everyone from Black Eyed Peas to Madonna, has given Rowland an electro-house treatment, and it works. She has gone a little bit Rihanna, a little bit Gaga, all robotic moves, killer shades and skyscraper shoulders. It’s the first time she’s felt she’s found her niche.
I’m surprised to hear this, considering she’s sold 10 million records since leaving the group. “Well, you know Destiny’s Child hasn’t done anything in a very long time,” she says. “But I think subconsciously I was still in that space. This is the first time I’m saying this – but I really didn’t think about it in that way (of splitting up]. You know it was like ‘well, we might do something together soon’. I didn’t know what would happen.
“My waking moment was when I said to myself, ‘What are you going to do?’ Suddenly I was like, I’m almost freakin’ 30! It’s important to be happy by myself and there’s nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with selfishness, with wanting happiness for yourself.” She sounds like she’s trying to convince herself.
“It’s important to have people around who want that for you as well,” she goes on. “So when I made the decision to leave my management and disconnect from my old label everything was destined to happen.” In 2008 Rowland, who had continued to be managed by Beyoncé’s father Mathew Knowles after Destiny’s Child split, decided to go it alone. Suddenly she had no label, no manager, and no idea what would happen next.
Why so much change? “I’ve been doing this since I was 12 years old,” she says, with all the world-weariness of a pop star in her late twenties. “When everything slowed down for me I was so humbled. I love being busy and I love having hit records. It’s not like it’s ever been taken away from me but there were a lack of records that I wanted to be number one and that was a jab. It hurt, but above everything God put me in a place to be humbled.”
Religion is hugely important to Rowland. She talks about her faith in the way that only American pop stars do, with great zest and earnestness, bringing God into every other answer. “I can’t live without it,” she says of her faith. “As kids we were so on fire for God. And then you grow up, travel and experience things and stop reading the bible every day. You don’t realise that you’re taking important things away from yourself. If all this were taken away from me right now I would still have my faith. If you don’t have faith the world will eat you alive.”
For Rowland, singing and faith always went hand in hand. “Music was infectious just from being in church,” she says. “It was there that I had my first solo. I was five years old with the worst dress on. I don’t know how my mum had the nerve to make me look like a darn cupcake. So much frosting on a kid. Layers and layers on my dress, even layers of socks!” Rowland would sing and her brother would play drums. It was when she was seven that her mother left her father and took the family to Houston. Rowland auditioned for a group, then called Girl’s Tyme, which would eventually become Destiny’s Child. “I sang Whitney Houston’s I’m Your Baby Tonight,” she says. “Thank you Whitney!” She sings a few lines for me.
Rowland and Beyoncé would go to her mother’s salon and sing for the women having their hair done. On a good day they got tips. “B said I had an X factor about me, too,” she says. “It’s really cool when you find people you click with when you’re young. We loved to sing together.”
At times Rowland still sounds wistful about Destiny’s Child but she tells me she’s got too much of a big mouth these days to be in a group. “B was the creative mind, Michelle was the faith and the heart, and I was the mouth. And I have more of a mouth now than ever. I’d be afraid to see myself in a group. People would have no behind – all their ass would be chewed.”
Not long after, at a club in France, Rowland met Guetta. “He was DJing in the place I was performing,” she recalls. “He played the instrumental of When Love Takes Over and I heard it and lost my mind so much I cried. I had to sing on that track. He was still DJing and I was like I need to talk to you. I need that track. I couldn’t wait.”
After working on the track with writers in London, Rowland returned to Miami where she has lived for four years. Rehearsing in a studio, she caught the attention of Sylvia Rhone, president of Universal Motown Records, who was next door working with Nelly. “She came in and asked me if this was the direction of my new record,” Rowland says. “God puts us in the right place at the right time. That’s definitely what he did that day.” When Rhone discovered she didn’t have a label she signed her on the spot. “And we’ve made a fantastic record.”
Her confidence about the album, which doesn’t yet have a title, is unshakeable. “I feel the same way about every song as I do about When Love Takes Over,” she says. “I don’t care who says what. I’m like screw you, this record is great.” Next she says she would love to collaborate with Fergie of Black Eyed Peas. “I’ve always been a great fan of her voice. She’s got really great stank.” I tell her I have no idea what she’s talking about. “Well the word swag is over right now. Anyway, I’ve asked her about it and she said she wants to sing with me. Between her stank and my vocals? Mmmm.”
Her willingness to show her ambition is unusual. But Rowland, who says the only thing she wants is a dog, which she can’t have because she’s away too much, has been living like this all her life. “You go out there to make a statement, to make a name,” she says with a shrug. “All of this is normal to me.” And does she think, now that she’s broken out of the mould of Destiny’s Child, that she would ever go back? “It isn’t about saying Destiny’s Child is no more,” Rowland insists, sticking a leg out of the duvet. “I never want to say that. But what I did eventually want to say was where does Kelly fit in? Now I feel ready. I’m not afraid anymore.”
Commander is available now on iTunes and is released on 28 June (Universal Motown). Rowland presents The Fashion Show on Really, weekdays until Friday, 8pm.
Canada’s New Governor General David Johnston Is Just A Wrinkled Old White Man. Is This Really Diversity?
It is so sad that Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not continue with diversity when he chose Canada’s new Governor General. The beautiful, elegant, sophisticated, Michaelle Jean will step down in a few months as the Governor General.
Now David Johnston a wrinked, old, white man is Canada’s new governor general. Is this really the best Harper could do? The Governor General is very important because he or she represents Canada on the international stage.
When the former Prime Minister Paul Martin selected Michaelle Jean to become Canada’s first black Governor General there was an uproar in the mainstream white Canadian media.
After all, black people can immigrate to Canada work hard and become Canadian citizens but we have to “know our place” and not become too involved in Canadian politics.
Canada has transformed from a white, Christian, Anglo Saxon, nation and is now a diverse country.
I applauded Paul Martin’s decision because if Canada is truly a multicultural nation then we need to see different communities represented in Canadian politics.
Why did Harper choose a white man to be Governor General anyway? Aren’t there already a plethora of old white guys in the Canadian senate?
Adrienne Clarkson and Michaelle Jean were wonderful Governor Generals. I am not impressed that Prime Minister Harper’s decision he just went with a safe boring choice.
I guess Harper’s voting bloc will be pleased that David Johnston is Canada’s new Governor General but this decision is so disappointing.
I just feel that David Johnston will not attract the imagination or passion of the Canadian society. Michaelle Jean is still very popular overseas she is very attractive, intelligent, and charismatic.
In fact, Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama both requested to meet Michaelle Jean when they visited Canada. Ms. Jean is well known and respected in the United States and across the world.
Gayblackcanada 