Las Vegas Critics

M.I.A. - Maya

By Nick Manteris · 2 Comments · Leave a Comment

The stylization of the title (/\/\ /\ Y /\) and the cover art of Maya, M.I.A.’s third studio album, both give accurate representations of the music that you will find inside. All of her efforts seem like a deliberate attempt to make it more difficult to appreciate her work. (Even the pronunciation of her name is the focus of an entire song by Emmy the Great.) M.I.A. is the stage name of Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, a musical and visual artist that has most recently been featured on Christina Aguilera’s Bionic. She has gained the most notoriety for her song “Paper Planes,” a song that is featured in a number of trailers in addition to being in the Academy-award-winning film, Slumdog Millionaire...as well as the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack.

Maya starts out with “The Message” – the message is literally, “Headbone connected to the headphones, headphones connected to the iPhone connected to the internet, connected to the Google, connected to the government” – and thus begins the repetition. Like the progress bars on the album cover, repetition is the most prominent feature of these songs. From the Xs in “XXXO” to “I fight the ones that fight me” in “Lovalot” (?) to the “sticky, sticky, icky, icky weed” in “Teqkilla,” there seems to be a segment of each song that is reiterated until my breaking point. As far as other messages are concerned, one of them is, “I don’t wanna talk about money, ‘cuz I got it” from “Born Free,” and how she's become popular enough to have money makes as little sense to me as the majority of the songs on any of her albums.

Score

27%

I’ve never been able to understand exactly what other people are hearing when they listen to M.I.A. – I just know that it’s not the same thing that I hear…since the main thing that I hear could best be described as noise. In general, her songs are as difficult to listen to as Aphex Twin's "Ventolin." There are, however, elements of “good” in most of her music, but the less-than-desirable elements overpower anything of worth in just about every case. I will say, though...if you’ve liked her stuff in the past there’s a good chance you will also like this new stuff, but that’s really pure speculation on my part…there’s not a single track from Maya that I could comfortably recommend.

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Tags: Music, Nick, Christina Aguilera, electronica, Emmy the Great, experimental, Hip-Hop, M.I.A., Slumdog Millionaire