"I don't pay attention to what's happening now," M.I.A. said in an interview a few weeks before the release of her notoriously-long-delayed fourth album, Matangi, "My references are beyond the [music] industry….I'm talking about the goddess Matangi, who invented music 5,000 years ago." That line is quintessential M.I.A.: artfully provocative, magnificently over-it ("If you don’t give a fuck," she declared in a pixelated deadpan on her last mixtape, "Then I don’t give a damn"), and difficult to square with a fact-checker. The Sri-Lankan-born, London-bred artist has hyped Matangi as her "spiritual album," and, sure, there are plenty of references to the titular Hindu goddess and other Eastern-spiritual phenomena throughout its 15 tracks. But contrary to her claims, there are also hints that she’s still paying (somewhat selective) attention to the kind of American music she so brilliantly re-appropriated on her pair of mid-aughts masterpieces, Arular and Kala: There’s a Weeknd sample, at least two different Drake disses, and a handful of tracks produced by Hit-Boy. Let’s also not forget when she took to Twitter all of 14 months ago to clear up rumors about the already-delayed album, claiming that the finished product would sound like "Paul Simon on acid."
Contradictory? Sure—but who cares. The people who treat M.I.A.’s controversial career like a never-ending game of gotcha miss the point; from day one, her contradictions have enlivened her music and saved it from heavy-handed moralizing. A decade after her first mixtape, it now feels safe to call M.I.A. one of the most forward-thinking pop artists of the last decade: She aestheticized deadpan cross-cultural juxtaposition before Tumblr was even a thing, she predicted the controversy surrounding the N.S.A.’s surveillance program, and professed that a pop star might be more like a fashion designer than a musician back when Kanye West was still wearing a bear suit. Matangi, then, is a disappointing record not for any reasons having to do with its (or its maker’s) lack of a coherent moral imperative. ("Ain’t no Dalai Lama," she shrugs unapologetically on the skronky intro track, "Karmageddon".) No, Matangi is a disappointing record because of how listlessly over and "beyond" everything it is—to the point that it often feels uncharacteristically weary and out of touch.
M.I.A.’s inability to compromise is, in some ways, what makes her music and attitude so appealing. But in more recent years that very quality has begun to wreak havoc on her recorded output. There was, of course, the fuck-all aural minefield that was her last proper album, ///\Y/. In light of the N.S.A. revelations, some have attempted to reclaim the album (some of which focused on the then-puzzling claim that "Google connected to the government") as an unsung masterpiece—though most people consider it a million-and-a-half-dollar middle finger towards the new fans who hopped aboard after M.I.A.’s accidental smash hit "Paper Planes". Matangi is not as abrasive or hook-averse as its predecessor, but it seems to have suffered because of her combative relationship with her label, Interscope. Initially slated for release in December of last year, M.I.A. and the label butted heads (they allegedly thought the material was “too positive”); it seems they only agreed on a release date when she threatened to leak the album on Twitter. In the meantime, much of this material seems to have sat on the shelf, growing staler by the month.
This is most glaring on "YALA" ("you always live again"), an ode to reincarnation (and also: pole-dancing) that flies in the face of the youth-cult of YOLO. "If you only live once," she muses in a stoner-voiced spoken word towards the end of the song, "Why do we keep doing the same shit? Back home, where I come from, we keep being born again and again." Fair enough, but "YALA" barks harder than it actually bites. The fact that its chorus is peppered with chants of "YOLO" makes it feel like it’s trying to have it both ways—an anti-YOLO song that can also slyly ride the phrase’s cultural coattails. (And maybe it would have, had that train not left the station at least a year ago now.) Much of Matangi’s sensibility feels similarly dated, limp, or just plain perplexing: There’s a decade-too-late Lara Croft line, another Drake diss on the riotous title track feels too vague ("Started from the bottom/ But Drake gets all the credit") to warrant a response, and then a moment when she calls out—and here the beat drops out like she’s about to say something seriously scathing—Julianne Moore…?
Matangi’s promised focus on "spirituality", too, often feels thin, avoiding most attempts at depth in favor of gauche puns ("Karmageddon") and easy rhymes like, "If you’re gonna be me you need a manifesto/ If you ain’t got one you better get one presto." That last line is from "Matangi", whose Switch-produced beat enlivens the proceedings a bit, though it does feel like a re-tread (#YALA?) of Kala’s hyperkinetic standout "Bird Flu". A much lower moment, though, is "Sexodus", a cardboard-stiff booty jam that repurposes the Weeknd’s "Lonely Star". The sample doesn’t add much to the pulseless track, but Abel Tesfaye should be grateful: By comparison, "Kiss Land" now sounds like a downright sexy thing to call a song.
Ultimately, some of these beats do redeem Matangi. Though marred by snoozy rapping ("I’m so tangy people call me Matangi"), "Bring the Noize" is a sensory-overloaded throwback to the best of Arular, and "Only 1 U" (which Maya herself co-produced) is a playfully clanging, chopped-and-screwed mosaic of bells and whistles. Towering high above the rest of the material, though, is the near-perfect early-2012 single "Bad Girls", which, nearly two years and infinite plays later, still feels fresh as the first time you heard it. When it appears on Matangi, though, it just feels like a tease of what this record could have been, had its vision been a little less cluttered and vague. As plenty of critics pointed out when ///\Y/ was released, M.I.A. is at her most radical when she’s participating in rather than fleeing from the pop world—all the better to stand as a stark (if forgivably flawed) presence laughing at its hypocrisies. After all, "Bad Girls" was so undeniable that a business, man referenced it in a song he released through a Samsung advertisement disguised as a mobile phone app that was later investigated for violating its users’ privacy. M.I.A., no doubt, would appreciate the irony—and, if she were channeling her disses with more laser focus, be uniquely qualified to point it out.
Matangi is not without charms, but unlike her most potent releases it sounds less interested in pushing and prodding the culture forward and more content to soar safely above it. "There is nothing that can touch me now," she sings on the nursery-rhyme earworm "Come Walk With Me”. It’s one of the only moments she feels like she’s actually channeling Matangi—she sounds blissfully free, superhumanly defiant, and 5,000 feet above it all. Is it selfish to say it’s a shame? We could use her down here.
