Tiger Beat

By Robert Wheaton, PopMatters. Posted May 9, 2005.

In 1976, Cory Daye recorded a song called "Sunshower" with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band. She was 24. The band were well outside a recording deadline from RCA; when the album was eventually released, the label failed to notify the band.

"Sunshower" has been sampled for almost 20 years now; there's a snatch of its warped Hawaiian guitars and splintered percussion towards the end of A Tribe Called Quest's "Can I Kick It?", but like attempts by De La Soul and Doug E. Fresh, it's just dressing. The appropriations always seem piecemeal and placeless: Busta Rhymes' "Take It Off" is slick, but not convincing. Ghostface Killah's "Ghost Showers" attempts to wholly inhabit the song; it swallows him whole. There's simply too much in the original: swooping Hawaiian guitars, child-like chants, ambient noise, guitar barely recognizable in a flood of in reverb. The percussion is so richly syncopated, so densely layered, that it leaves Daye's vocal somehow isolated, exposed, as if shimmering in a cloud of dust. The melody itself sounds free and ungrounded, and takes on an almost atonal quality. The groove is woodlike, organic, pulmonary. Nobody has done anything as remotely convincing, assured, or unique with the same materials. Until M.I.A.'s "Sunshowers."

The difference between the original and M.I.A.'s second single, produced last year by Steve Mackey and Ross Orton, is more than one of genre or period; it is a difference in aesthetics, a difference in the place given to popular culture. The original material itself is gutted. The slightly adrenaline bliss of Davy's chorus sounds highly phased, over-exposed, washed-out at the edges. A percussive bass glissandi, which in the original gracefully eases the song into a final elaboration of the chorus, is ripped out and looped throughout the piece. The groove is a relentless throb that hammers its way throughout the entire song, rattling and lurching between violence and grace. "Sunshowers" erases the spirit of the original as it goes along.

Where Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band brought a wispy lyricism to disco, a feeling of dreamy nostalgia wrapped in their elaborate big band arrangements, M.I.A.'s use of the song is -- like the rest of her material -- a blend of hard unsentimentally and poplike glee. It's a striking contrast: strident political stances sit alongside made-for-ringtone hooks. There's no middle ground on Arular, her debut album. Even the wordplay is taken to a level of abstraction, with playground chants in place of intimacy and wit. There is very little that deals with the minutiae of personal relationships; even "URAQT," a song about betrayal, revolves more around the exchange of postures than of emotions. Relationships are almost transactions. There is no trust in this music.

It's a stance that echoes the details of her life: M.I.A. witnessed at first hand the violence of Sri Lanka's civil war, followed by an abrupt relocation to a neglected council estate on the outskirts of London.

London shapes much of her music. The touch of gleeful -- almost naive -- joy in her sound recalls early British experiments with hip-hop. It is the sound of the Wild Bunch, of Fresh Four's "Wishing on a Star," of Carlton's forgotten The Call Is Strong, where the sing-song lilt of Lovers Rock met the swallowed aggression of dub, where the structure and confidence of American hip-hop met the residual brashness of punk and ska. Though those influences have been replaced in the contemporary sound of London by dancehall, crunk, grime, and American R&B, the aesthetic is the same -- and one unique to London. "The thing that I'm a part of," M.I.A. agrees, "is that I listen to everything. And so do the grime kids. There are grime tunes where Lethal B could rap over a Kylie Minogue backing, because he knows it -- he hears it: he's on a bus, he's in a cab, he's in a Chinese takeaway."

The vocal cadence that is a part of her singing voice -- the rise in intonation at the end of almost every line -- is now near-ubiquitous among Londoners of a certain age. It is not, curiously, part of her speaking voice, which is a fairly cool and unremarkable London accent. "Everybody has access to all kinds of genres of music every day when you wake up. So why not reflect that? It's way more realistic than me saying 'I only hear dancehall when I walk down the street. I only hear dancehall for eight years of my life walking around in this city.' That's wrong. Because that's not the case. Every day I wake up in this city, the cosmopolitan Westernized fast first-world amazing foreign land that's got amazing technology, amazing information access, speedway, highway -- let's not kid ourselves: we do hear everything at once, so whether it's through television, on the radio, on people's CDs, people's cars going past you -- so why not reflect that in what you do?"

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