MUSIC REVIEW: M.I.A. Returns With Flawed But Masterful ///Y/

Headphone connects to the neck bone

Neck bone connects to the arm bone

Arm bone connects to the hand bone

Hand bone connects to the Internet

Connected to the Google, connected to the Government

So begins ///Y/ by rapper/pop star/activist M.I.A., cutting to the heart of the cultural sea change wrought by the Internet. If there are only six degrees of separation between us and the feds, who monitor as much of our communication as they can, what’s the point of trying to keep anything private? It’s an introduction that piques our interest and prepares us for an uncensored albeit uneven look into the mind of an indie critical darling who, with fame, is losing the political edge that made her famous.

The Sri Lankan refugee, real name Maya Arulpragasm, has named her last two albums after her parents: Arular after her father, a Tamil political activist, and Kala after her mother, who raised her in Wimbledon after Sri Lanka erupted into civil war. Those albums created an exhilarating synthesis of exotic world rhythms, Western hip-hop attitude, subversive political references, and an ADD-addled, pastiche production style that does for music what Dogme 95 only wishes it could accomplish in film.

Starting out, M.I.A. proclaimed that she wanted to make her music about something more than the superficial fluff that normally populates the airwaves: “Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing,” she’s quoted as saying. “I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked.” With controversial name-drops of the PLO and rants against corporations, her lyrics swapped the sweet nothings of tween-targeting songwriters for the shrill nothing of her art school peers. Regardless, her style injected fresh life into the hip-hop world, which Jay-Z famously declared had entered its “hair metal phase.”

I was worried by the end of Kala that M.I.A. had lost sight of her mission statement. Despite its catchiness, the smash hit single “Paper Planes” was a jarring departure from the the rest of the album’s style, and album closer “Come Around” with Timbaland was a generic clunker about hooking up in clubs–a tawdry and boring loop-fest far below someone of M.I.A.’s talent. Now, with an album comprised of her unedited interior monologue, there are even more songs about nothing. The longest cut on the album, “Teqkilla,” is six minutes dedicated to what kinds of liquor exist in the world and how “freaky-eeky-icky-wicky-wheeeee” she becomes when drinking them.

What seems to have happened is M.I.A. was pressured by her label to write vapid chart-toppers, like the first official single “XXXO.” The track, a first-person tale of submission to a controlling lover, is a catchy but puffball Ke$ha sound-alike on autopilot. I suspect that since the punk-flavored “Born Free” leaked online and was given an R-rated shaky-cam video before “XXXO” came anywhere near pitchfork.com, M.I.A. is as embarrassed by the song as her fans will be, and she’s compensating for this pop-star turn with heavier, more “hardcore” music.

For the most part, it works; “Steppin Up,” the album’s first proper song, uses sampled power tools and lo-fi, choppy metal guitars to great effect. “Meds and Feds” is a thunderous, overdriven march that might make Sleigh Bells want to contact their lawyers. “Born Free” is a rollicking anthem that gets your toes tapping with a grungy bassline and chaotic live drums. But before those two tracks, the album breaks into saccharine sweetness with “It Takes A Muscle,” a bubblegum reggae love song inevitably bound for the radio, and “It Iz What It Iz,” an admirable but uninteresting ode to the singer’s newborn son. The revolutionary thriller “Born Free” loses some of its bite placed after songs that sentimentally embrace domestic, bourgeoisie concepts like romance and motherhood.

And though these stylistic jumps don’t make for great listening, they highlight the theme of the album. In response to a world that doesn’t care what she has to say, she alternates between screaming all the louder as M.I.A. and just letting it go, focusing on her personal life as Maya.

And, as M.I.A., she’s losing sight of her origins. In the stream-of-consciousness “Born Free,” she admits, “I was close to the ants, staying undercover/ with a nose to the ground I found my sound.” But now, as an iTunes-topping superstar, she’s 25 years and millions of dollars removed from the political violence she once escaped. She’s had an audience with Oprah, the world’s biggest Celebrity who Cares™, and seen nothing come from her pleas to raise awareness of the Tamil people’s plight. Instead of facing off with the armies of Sri Lanka, she’s taking on corrupt journalists by tweeting their private phone numbers. Her frustration couldn’t be symbolized more clearly than the rendering of her moniker in bars of gold; now, she feels, she is little more than a commodity, a brand to be packaged and sold, an image out of her control.

This tension is what makes the album as fascinating as it is. M.I.A. is at a crossroads in her career, one step closer to world domination but ever more powerless to stop the injustice she sees in her home country. She’s strapping herself into the jetski on the beach next to the shark-infested water, but she’s still looking over her shoulder for a way out. If you can overlook the banality of “XXXO” and its ilk, and if you can accept the know-it-all college hippie talking points for what they are, ///Y/ is an album with many masterfully crafted moments from a supremely talented artist, so you’ll want to pick it up in case they’re the last ones she’s able to make.

NOTE TO PARENTS: The album has a Parental Advisory due to explicit language.