Can’t Stereotype My Thing: M.I.A.’s Arular Turns 20
Despite her controversies then and now, the British singer/producer’s debut feels like a relic of a more innocent age in pop.

Early press around the M.I.A. who made Arular tended to paint her as a sort of human moodboard, a graphic designer with an eye for provocation and more connections than musical talent. That narrative would seem to ignore the fact that her idle experiments with the Roland MC-505 groovebox yielded some of the beats of the century, but if even the low-tech polyglot splutter of this now 20-year-old record didn’t give the lie to this narrative, the qualities that made her detractors skeptical early on are now pretty much a given in today’s pop industry. As the web democratizes the making of music, it’s not as shocking as it was 20 years ago that a serious and important musician could function as much as a curator of ideas, sounds and aesthetics as a performer or instrumentalist. In assembling both the skeletons of her songs and the roster of collaborators that would sketch them out—most famously Diplo, her then-boyfriend—Maya Arulpragasam tapped into everything that was exciting about pop music in its freaky, free-for-all 2000s.
M.I.A. was among the first generation of performers to find fame chiefly through the Internet, and her music has mirrored the seasons of the web in an uncanny way. In the 2000s, there was a sort of pervasive optimism about the ease with which music could be disseminated, legally and otherwise, and what it could mean for the development of pop. Arular and its predecessor, Piracy Funds Terrorism, which wedded that album’s unreleased vocal tracks to beats recycled from pop hits past and present, embodied this fuck-all mashup spirit. 2008’s sharper, stranger Kala took this angle even further, but by 2010’s em>Maya, concerns about surveillance and violation of privacy in the Facebook age were seeping into her work. M.I.A. is a tinfoil Trumpist now, leading to embarrassing appearances in the news followed by choruses of commenters saying that “Paper Planes” was the only good thing she ever did. That’s not true, but like Justin Timberlake and Drake, she seems fated to live out the rest of her career as someone vaguely lame.
I’ve played M.I.A.’s older music for a lot of people, and the most common reaction is shock: not necessarily that they didn’t know that she had a ton of great music other than her contribution to the Pineapple Express soundtrack, but that they didn’t know how anti-pop she was, how outré she could be sonically. Small wonder she was so often compared to Missy Elliott, whose collaboration with Timbaland on 1997’s Supa Dupa Fly helped kick open the door for arguably the most sonically experimental era of chart pop ever. The music on Arular is a barrage of videogame lasers, grime polyrhythms, girl-group chants and cheap synth horns, with Arulpragasam pattering in a slangy and knowing London deadpan. The idea is for it to sound like something you’d hear issuing from a boombox in a foreign country. It sounds like some kind of regional dance music you might stumble across in the most fervent music-nerd corners of the Internet, without being especially regional at all (save for its reflection of London’s multicultural nightlife).
Her music experiments playfully with what pop might sound like in a post-hip-hop, post-genre world. “U.R.A.Q.T.” is like a manifesto for the rising virtual pop era, with M.I.A. rapping about ringing her boyfriend on his “mo-bile phone”, eventually stumbling across a chorus that brilliantly ties together the singer’s fetish for illegality with her wry streak of pop classicism: “Is your daddy a dealer? / ’Cause you’re dope to me.” She and her comrades pillage from wherever they can; “Sunshowers” chops up a song from Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, a NYC disco band beloved by crate-digger types; while “Bucky Done Gun” borrows from Deize Tigrona’s “Injeção,” a song from an earlier generation of Brazilian funk than the one currently blowing people’s minds on YouTube rabbit holes. “Amazon” might boast the album’s best beat, a lumbering industrial funk monster that Maya is keen to emphasize was “made in London,” using the city as a byword for the kind of metropolitan post-everything fusion she made her own on Arular.