Tanks, bombs, the PLO, grenades, pistols and shotguns, they are all featured on MIA's debut album Arular (real name: Maya Arulpragasam). If it is not in the lyrics, it is in the CD booklet she designed herself. MIA was born in London as the daughter of migrants from Sri Lanka and lived there herself for a while. Here her father was involved in the Tamil Tigers rebel movement under the name Arular,
… which explains the album title. MIA has its own sound, somewhere between hip-hop, dancehall and electro. She raps, but not in a standard way and in a sort of Jamaican patois. The beats, which are made with minimal drum machine sounds and deep basses, are a bit like ragga-riddims. At the same time it also sounds like hip hop, or more the English version of it: grime. In any case, it is exciting and good for the dance floor, if only because of the heavy basses and distorted sounds that blubber out of the speakers extraordinarily loud in every track. If MIA still raps sentences about it like it often quoted 'You wanna winna war? / Like PLO I don't surrendo' or 'Blaze a blaze / Galang a lang a lang lang', it is clear: we have not heard this before. . (IV)more
