Two days before the release of her sixth album, MATA Sri Lankan-British rapper M.I.A took to Twitter, commenting on the recent ruling regarding alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones: “If Alex Jones pays for lying shouldn’t every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?” While the artist is no stranger to controversy, this was different. No one, literally no one, had ‘M.I.A aligns with alt-right rhetoric’ on their 2022 bingo card. This is the artist who presaged the militarisation of the internet by half a decade, who spun love songs into allegories about allied government forces ravishing the third world. Her political astuteness and uncompromising address of third-world politics, all while positioned at the centre of Western pop culture, made her polarising and brilliant. The latest in a recent string of off-brand behaviour, her recent comments echo the approach of MATA. Two years ago, it seemed unlikely that we would ever get an album M.I.A that was not self-released via Patreon. She seemed committed to whatever OHMNI was, and honestly with good reason. Following AIM, the sonic assault of the OHMNI songs felt like a return to form, with M.I.A relishing in the sort of creative freedom possible outside of the label system. This made the news of MATA, released via Island Records, a touch perplexing.
Download and listen to MATA here
The rollout for this latest project further muddied the waters, beginning with the insipid gospel pop of The One and the rapper’s confession that she was now a born again Christian. Then came Popular, an irony soaked reggaeton scorcher that felt like a minor course correction. Then, M.I.A the anti-vaxxer. Finally here in full form, MATA does little to clear up its ambiguity. On one hand, it’s full of inventive, bass heavy dembow and moombahton beats, laden with dhol drums and obscure Tamil folk music samples. On the looping Puththi, she’s rapping in her mother tongue, while on songs like Beep, she spits the syllables and rounds her vowels in a patois that bends English into Tamil. On the other hand, MATA is a touch reductive. Many of its ideas feel rehashed from more successful predecessors, making it frustratingly inconsistent. There’s about half a decent album in here, MATA’s strongest material foiled by unnecessary throwaways that add little to the whole. For every Puththi, there’s two more Marigolds. MATA LIFE, one of MATA’s brighter moments, is buried at the album’s bottom end, weakened under the weight of everything that comes before it. K.T.P is Paper Planes lite. While it embraces Sri Lankan folk and Afro-Caribbean riddims more steadfast than the experimental bounce of MATANGI and evolves whatever AIM proposed, it does all of these things to a point. Even at its most abrasive, there’s an ever present monotony bubbling just under MATA’s surface.
Perhaps the most alarming thing about MATA is how vague M.I.A comes across here. When flirting with the political, she’s uncharacteristically non-specific. Tracks like F.I.A.S.O.M Pt.2 feel like caricatures of her early self, it’s messaging delivered with fire but otherwise empty. She’s most coherent when approaching the matter of her new found faith. The One, for all its flaws, is direct with its intentions, as is the gospel minimal trap of Marigold. She’s filtered with spiritual enlightenment in her music before. Prior to this, MATANGI was likely her most spiritually aware with songs like YALA and Karmageddon. It’s also widely regarded as the beginning of the end of M.I.A’s imperial phase, with everything post-MATANGI feeling increasingly less inspired. Looking back at albums like KALA or // / Y /, MATA lacks the succinct sense of direction that made those albums brilliant. More significantly, those albums saw M.I.A at her cultural prime, commenting on the zeitgeist in ways that felt progressive and profound. MATA feels less like commentary, and more of an insertion of herself into the cultural discourse. Simply, MATA lacks the “powa powa” bite that has most defined her as a radical pop icon. The most outspoken songs on this album are some of the least outspoken of her career, which is saying something. To compare her to an equally vociferous and polarising figure in hip-hop, this is M.I.A’s Jesus Is King. For an artist who not long ago found herself flying high like a plane, let’s hope that MATA is a misguided misstep, and not the beginning of her descent.
Listen to a megamix of the tracks from MATA below.
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