The Student Playlist

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REVIEW: M.I.A. – ‘AIM’ (Interscope / Polydor)

  • 6/10
    - 6/10
6/10

Summary

If ‘AIM’ really is Maya Arulpragasam signing off, it’s the sound of her doing so in solid, unspectacular style rather than with a bang.

Ever since she landed two lethal knock-out blows on the mainstream with her excellent first two albums in the noughties (seriously, point to two records from that decade by the same artist that are both as revolutionary, or even just more goddamned fun, than Arular and Kala) Maya Arulpragasam – under her recording name M.I.A. – has struggled to make the same impact on popular music since, for reasons that are not entirely her own fault. She’s had problems with her record label for several years, regarding artistic control over and the timing of her output, and it was during the run-up to this fifth record AIM that she announced it would be her final album. It wasn’t clear whether she meant with her current record label or just altogether, but nevertheless the feeling there might not be any more M.I.A. albums is a sad one.

However, it would be blindness to argue that the quality of M.I.A.’s albums in the ‘10s hasn’t noticeably declined. 2010’s Maya was a mess of noise whose ideas overstretched the quality of its execution, and 2013’s Matangi, although a correction, still seemed to lack that cutting edge that made those first two records so dazzling. AIM comes across as a rationalisation of the aesthetics of Matangi, repurposed for a slightly more commercial sound, with her trademark samples and effects arranged a little more carefully, and it makes for an entertaining but not particularly memorable experience.

We open with ‘Borders’, a single that’s almost a year old but is one of M.I.A.’s finest cuts ever. Nominally about immigration and the European refugee crisis but which also doubles up as a metaphor for identity politics in the age of the internet and mass media, it’s a clear and uncluttered production that feels timeless and which M.I.A. challenges conventional thinking with “what’s up with that?”. These themes are prominent throughout AIM – ‘Foreign Friend’ satirises reductivist, Brexit-inspired notions of migrants (“we get out our tent, then we climb over the fence… then we get a Benz, flat-screen TV, then we pay rent…”) – titles like ‘Fly Pirate’ and ‘Visa’ plug in to this as well.

But while there may be a detectable manifesto on AIM, M.I.A.’s songwriting is inconsistent. ‘Freedun’, a collaboration with former 1D malcontent Zayn Malik, could be a big hit from the album but is spoiled by lyrics like “I’m a swagger man / Rolling in my swagger van / From the People’s Republic Of Swaggerstan”. It was apparently written during a Whatsapp conversation, and it shows a little bit. On the more positive side, she telescopes the global into the personal, such as on ‘Ali R U OK?’, which she wrote about an over-worked Uber driver she met, whose pinging, Eastern-based motif rails against the burgeoning gig economy of insecure, underpaid work springing up around the world.

Moments like that work more effectively than the kind of underthought sloganeering in the irritating Skrillex production ‘Go Off’, with world music snippets jumbled and warped to something approaching a mainstream sensibility. ‘Bird Song’, appearing in two remixed forms by Blaqstarr and her ex-boyfriend Diplo, is annoying both times around. On other occasions, M.I.A. seems to explicitly reference her own previous work – the ‘Paper Planes’-esque gunshots in ‘Finally’ and ‘Visa’, which directly samples her own 2003 single ‘Galang’. While this fits in with the atmosphere that AIM might be her last album, it also unintentionally makes the listener mindful of how brilliant she used to be. It’s not M.I.A. has become tame, or sold out, but she has definitely replaced her former hook-laden, kaleidoscopic pop brilliance with a slightly wearying over-reliance on percussion and sampling.

It’s possibly her most conventional and professional-sounding record to date, free from the overly-cluttered production that has made her last two records seem like they were trying a little too hard to recapture an old magic. But there’s still a little something missing, a shortcoming in the kind of clever songwriting that her old confrontational nature so appealing when she first broke onto the scene. M.I.A.’s been a great presence in pop for well over a decade, and if AIM really is her signing off, it’s the sound of her doing so in solid, unspectacular style rather than with a bang. (6/10) (Ed Biggs)

Listen to AIM here via Spotify, and tell us what you think below!

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