I'm not looking forward to more music by M.I.A. I'll admit she did some inventive things on Kala, but she was also very repetitive and obnoxiously loud. Why not just turn down the volume? I can hear you asking that very question. Unfortunately M.I.A. mixed the album in such a way that if I listened to it at a volume that didn't hurt my ears I couldn't hear half of what was going on in the songs. Arular came out 2 years before Kala so maybe M.I.A. wasn't so obnoxious in her younger years.
Ick... she might be worse. I don't know, it's been years since I heard Kala. But "Banana Skit" leads things off by patronizingly trying to teach someone how to mispronounce "banana". Then M.I.A. spends four minutes name-checking a famous singer named M.I.A. in "Pull Up The People". I might as well just kill myself now. This album has everything going against it. Shitty drum machines, over edited samples, cheap synthesized sound effects, loops that just go on and on, and rapping. Oh Christ with the rapping.
"U.R.A.Q.T." contains a sample from the theme from "Sanford and Son". I didn't know this at first, but I heard the song and thought to myself, "Wow, that's a really cool sound she's using. It must be a sample." So I looked it up, because I knew somebody somewhere had played an actual instrument and came up with a cool funky sound that M.I.A. or one of her asshole producers heard and just knew they had to rip off. The good news is they totally got busted for it and "U.R.A.Q.T." was kept off the US version of the album. Not that it appeared to matter too much, since the album was released in multiple formats anyway, with digital listeners getting access to "bonus tracks" that could have been included on the CD but were held back to reward people for downloading it or whatever.
So no surprise, Arular really pissed me off. 1 star.
No comments:
Post a Comment