When revisiting the culture that informed her 2005 debut album Arular, Maya Arulpragasam painted the 2000s with a rose-colored tint. “We had way better fucking music. People were having way better sex. People were eating way better food. It’s like we had progression,” she told Rolling Stone last year. She concluded that in 2015, broadly speaking, art was boring and safe, due to the lack of “fireworks,” the repetition, and the disappearance of the “new.” It was a recalcitrant comment, sure, but also unsurprising coming from M.I.A. What felt unnatural was all this nostalgia. M.I.A. has always been an artist interested in constant reinvention—the past, it seemed to her, was nothing compared to the future. Her music, her art, her years of public confrontation were once prophetic.
But today it’s increasingly clear that many pieces of her creative legacy, from the caustic inhuman sheen of Maya* *to the bullet casings that litter “Paper Planes,” have either been plundered or misinterpreted. The fake patois of Drake’s “One Dance” blaring from car windows all around the world, the ubiquity of greasy synths and rattling gun-shot samples in dance music (see any of the artists in NON or Fade to Mind), and the globalization of American and European pop music all can trace a thread back to M.I.A.’s experiments, both failed and successful. Her evaluation of art in the present was another middle finger pointed at watchful eyes, and now, with the release of her fifth album, *AIM, *it’s become an unintended self-criticism of her own inability to light the fuse.
The lead-up to *AIM *was not without expected provocation. Before the album had a name there was a music video. It was searing and combative, an addictive piece of agitprop that once again aligned M.I.A. as one of our best political artists. The video for “Borders” depicted a dramatization of border crossing that was at once complicated, blunt, and grandly rendered. The song was empathetic about the global refugee crisis, (“We’re solid and we don’t need to kick them/This is North, South, East and Western”) yet it was also a polemic against media saturation and the endless panoply of issues both serious and inane (borders, politics, identities, privilege, being bae, breaking the internet) that made any action impossible. When she summons these topics through the course of the song, she cooly punctures them with a simple question, “What’s up with that?” Overall, it was the type of sobering political gesture that was much needed in the music discourse. Then the controversies started.
She was dropped as the headliner for London’s upcoming Afropunk Festival after clumsily targeting Black Lives Matter and the activist inclinations of musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé, asking if questions like “Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters?" would function into the dominant conversation in pop music. Then she got mad about MTV overlooking “Borders” for this year’s VMAs, accusing the media corporation of “racism, classism, sexism, elitism” and essentially policing what kind of voices were institutionally sanctioned. And naturally, she threatened to leak *AIM *(which she also threatened to do with her last album), and claimed that Interscope refused to clear samples for a Diplo-produced version of “Bird Song.” After the predictably rocky months of rollout, the 17 songs of *AIM *read as a disappointment, lacking bite and bounce, and presenting only glimmers of what once was.
For what went wrong, look no further than what might’ve been the big pop hit of the album, “Freedun,” a collaboration with smoldering One Direction malcontent Zayn Malik. The song was apparently written over Whatsapp, and it certainly contains all the half-baked charm of a group text thread. “I’m a swagger man/Rolling in my swagger van/From the People’s Republic Of Swaggerstan,” she begins, extremely inauspiciously. It’s the forgivable brick from someone with a history of lyrics that are at the very least provocative or allusive. But this specific brand of poor writing haunts the album. In “Bird Song,” her avian puns are grating: “I believe like R. Kelly, we can fly/But toucan fly together/Staying rich like an ostrich.” Her voice seems flatter, inelastic, and without her early inventiveness.
At the same time, *AIM *isn’t saved by some world-beating or state-of-the-art production. Neither M.I.A. nor or her collaborators (including Skrillex and longtime producer Blaqstarr) come close to the vibrancy of her previous work. Take “Foreign Friend,” with its half-hearted drum beat, sleepy progression, and clunky construction. Its pallid form turns the song’s sharp narrative about cultural assimilation into a trying slog. This has never been a problem with her music before—even when it didn't work, it was wild and freewheeling, intelligently and deftly compacting rhythms from around the world under a single flag.
But these songs are diffuse, thin on hooks, and often recycle through old warhorses of polyrhythmic percussion and splattered sampling. It’s telling that “Visa” samples her debut single “Galang” in its back half. It creates a bizarre effect, like listening to M.I.A. do karaoke over her own music. “Visa” also heavily references—almost eulogizes—her past work (“They call me Arular, trendsetter, making life feel better/Breaking order like a leader now follow”). It’s as if she is well aware of how newness has escaped her, as much she feels it has escaped the world at large. This recursive comment would work better if the album were explicitly framed as a referendum on her career up to this point: the boredom and frustration of the present as an endless reflection of the past. Instead, whatever grand vision *AIM *is hoping for becomes muddled. While the highlights offer glimmers of hope, like “Ali R U OK”—an incisive narrative about capitalism’s degradation of immigrant hustle—*AIM *is in desperate need of a clear identity or throughline.
Diplo once said, “Albums now are a hit song and 11 other songs that are attached to it.” “Borders” will live on as one of many crown jewels in some future retrospective of M.I.A.’s music, but AIM is otherwise her dullest album. For all the accusations that she’s been blithe, unaware, or plain reckless with her messaging, there has never been a more crucial time for pop music that wrestles with globalization, transnational suffering, and the plight of immigrants. While she may never have been the most articulate and thoughtful messenger, in *AIM, *M.I.A. demonstrates her legacy as an artist eager to tackle issues that are volatile and antagonistic. But at this point her music is more potent in theory than execution.
