Throwing Fire Like a Mob

Vickie Leekx, M.I.A.'s new(ish, dropped New Year's Eve) mixtape, seems to be spurring a ton of oops-maybe-she-is-still-good kind of blog posts and articles. After most sane people agreed that MAYA was a silly, largely unlistenable misfire, they used it in conjunction with the negative NY Times piece and M.I.A.'s own headscratching twitter behaviour as evidence that she now, in so many words, sucked. Myself included. For me it hit even harder because I found Kala disappointing aside from maybe 3 tracks, and thus viewed MAYA as the final nail in her coffin. We all moaned about how living in California in an upper-class neighborhood had stamped out her street cred and splitting from Diplo had left her without the sick beats to make up for it. The only glimmers of hope on MAYA were the shallow-but-catchy "XXXO" and "Steppin' Up." The latter is an excellent crashing, bashing anthem on which M.I.A. makes lines like "boy I need a rub, rub a dub a dub dub, rub a dubadubadub" sound intimidatingly cool. It probably comes closest to the aesthetic she wanted to achieve on the album, but it was far from enough to save it.

Thanks to all this, I barely bat an eye when I heard about Vickie Leekx. It wasn't until reading this article--though the author did like MAYA, so I still had my reservations--that I decided to finally download it; I was once a diehard fan of hers not so long ago, afterall. I felt like I owed her one more chance. Within moments of starting it up, I had to stop what I was doing and let it sink in that... I was actually loving it. Piracy Funds Terrorism may have been better than Arular, but if it was, its superiority was negligible. Vickie Leekx dwarfs the accomplishments of MAYA about fifteen times over.

Trying to describe this mixtape, let alone attempting to review it, isn't easy. It's hyper and urgent and completely unfocused, but that all works in its favor. M.I.A. herself sounds sexy, tough, and most of all, fed up--with delightful results. On "Marsha-Britney" she taunts "your shoes could feed a village, you should think about that." On the surface she's dissing some other pop starlet, but maybe it's also self-guilt (she persists "you can have my money, but you can't have me" on the anti-consumerism "Gen N-E-Y"). Throughout Vickie Leekx she tries to balance the angry, world-conscious M.I.A. with the bratty, irresponsible California M.I.A., and the end product--as Nicky Minaj growls "a bad bitch that came from Sri Lanka"--is more endearing than she's been in years. Best of all, she is able to portray all these roles and transmit her ideas (however fuzzy they are) through music that's also danceable and exhuberantly giddy where MAYA was a chore to get through and about as much fun as my dentist appointment yesterday. If you were ever a fan of M.I.A., you're screwing yourself over if you don't hear this.