Philadelphia Weekly

Kala, Kala bill y'all: M.I.A.'s music is so hybrid it hurts.

"I put people on the map that never seen a map," M.I.A. boasts on "20 Dollar," her rebel yell accompanied by a distorted New Order sample, borrowed Pixies lyrics and thunderous South Asian beats that swirl behind her proclamations of dissent. The track, off this year's Kala, feels like an epilogue to "Amazon" (from her 2-year-old debut Arular) on which she cried, "I don't want your attention/ Under submission/ Out of frustration I'll do it/ I'll scream for the nation."

Kala finds M.I.A.--two albums, one much-blogged mixtape and hundreds of interviews and concerts into her career--still screaming and knocking down the doors of your Hummer with rubber-band bombs, choirs of aboriginal boys and sounds borrowed from across the globe but cut-and-pasted into something totally fresh. She's emerged as quite possibly the most complicated transnational pop icon since Madonna, becoming the only woman in the vast pantheon of pop sweating issues like child prostitution and freedom fighting, and organizations like the PLO.

She lyrically conflates violence and sexuality with power while simultaneously condemning bloodshed, poverty and all sorts of injustices that extend beyond their prescribed Third World borders. She denies her male producers' control, calls out reporters on myth-making, and populates her music videos with hordes of kids in dusty streets and screens that explode with candy-colored graffiti of tanks and peace signs.

Of course all the politicking might be a major bummer if her songs weren't so magnificently unique and danceable. M.I.A.'s music is--mix and match any or all of the following, if you please--Bollywood soundtrack, diasporic bhangra, Brazilian baile funk, D.C. punk, Jamaican dancehall, Italo disco, U.K. grime and straight-outta-Compton hip-hop. It's hybrid music at a fever pitch. Music that is "of the world," but somehow manages to avoid treading water in the dirty river of what has come to be known as "world music"--that genre relegated to a dusty Wal-Mart bin overstuffed with sad compilation discs.

The entire world music genre is problematic at best; Euro-centric, even racist, at its most stripped down. It engages in neo-colonial practices of domination and appropriation--ripping off other cultures and selling their wares to the West in a pretty ribbon of tradition. Why go to India or bother learning about its people, politics or problems when you can buy an album proclaiming itself the best of what India has to offer, eat a samosa and call it a day?

This touristic gaze is no less intense with "hybrid" music, yet it feels more palatable somehow. Beirut, Gogol Bordello and DeVotchKa seem more real than some Slavic or Romani anthology with the words borscht or shtetl in the title; the Mosquitos, Bonde do Rol� and Nouvelle Vague feel less manufactured and more alive than some record trying to evoke "Girl From Ipanema" with illustrations of caipirinhas and bikinis.

The argument could be made that all music bears the mark of global and local exchanges--not just M.I.A.'s so-hybrid-it-hurts music. But in the past it was considered kinda lame, a sign of unoriginality, to admit to these influences. Everyone wanted to be totally innovative. Now the combination of languages, genres and regional idiosyncrasies is seen as an asset, something that lands critical praise and popular recognition. Or as rock sociologist Simon Frith says, hybridity is "the new authenticity."

And with her Sri Lankan-by-way-of-South London roots, terrorist-chic aesthetic and hyphen-happy sound, M.I.A. is the pinnacle of that new authenticity.

M.I.A.
Sat., Dec. 1, 8:30pm. $20-$22. With Cool Kids + Santogold. Electric Factory, 421 N. Seventh St. 215.627.1332. www.livenation.com