It was the ringing of a cash register, it was gunshots, it was the sound of a young and badass world coming knocking on our old and tired one. It was 2008 and Paper Planes it was one of the coolest things around. MIA didn't have great musical or singing talent, perhaps that could be understood even then, everything else yes: 30-something years old, beautiful and dangerous, an ambassador who came from below to propagandize the good globalization of music and society, moreover with a true revolutionary Tamil father. Under Paper Planes there was Straight to Hell of the Clash, but the hard-nosed rhetoric of rock was replaced by the awareness that the world was changing and the boundaries were collapsing. The only thing was to give up and it was easy to do while listening to the album Kala and the previous one Arular.
Since then and for a few years MIA has only done good things including the single Bad Girlsanthem of all the bad girls like her, remarkable videos, graphics inspired by guerrilla art, the middle finger raised metaphorically towards the record industry and literally towards the camera during the Super Bowl as Madonna's guest, a big mess that made her in the eyes of the let's say alternative public even more of an outlaw, but it caused her quite a few problems. And then the album Mayamore electronic and a reflection of an increasingly computerized and controlled society.
Then something went wrong, or maybe not, depending on your point of view. Not the accusations of being a truffle revolutionary in Lynn Hirschberg's article on the New York Times with a legendary photo of Ryan McGinley at the opening, but the deadly combination between religion and conspiracy theory, two different faiths but united by the unshakable certainty of the existence of superior and invisible forces that control the events of the world. She started tweeting about the glory of God, going so far as to say that Rosalía stole her job because of Luxof course, and began to take seriously certain dystopian songs he sang. It produced the Ohmni clothing line that stops electromagnetic fields by offering “the protection that comes from the ancient copper deposits of the Sinai Desert, the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia transported into this timeline,” no less. And so the limited edition balaclava is accompanied by the words of the Apocalypse of John: “Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he who is vigilant and keeps his clothes so as not to go naked and let his shame be seen”. Let the shameless ones dress up, not out of a sense of modesty, but to protect themselves from 5G.
She was recently seen at Coachella where she sang Paper Planes with Diplo dressed as the Telegram logo, the social network most loved by idiots. It's not the closing of a circle, but a way like any other to get back out there and make news in conjunction with the release of her new album which I don't think would have been very popular at Coachella given that it is a sort of gospel concept, or rather gospel according to MIA which would then be a mix of musical collages this time not exactly exciting and lyrics driven by the religious fervor that has animated her for many years now.
Published on the singer's label OhmniMusic, inspired by the Apocalypse according to John and the Book of Thiruvalluvar, a Tamil text composed of 1330 short couplets each consisting of seven words, MI7 was recorded in seven different locations around the world, Ethiopia, Egypt, India, the United Kingdom, Greece, Australia and the United States over the course of seven sessions each lasting seven days. 7 as the number of divine perfection, 777 against the demonic 666. The songs are interspersed with seven (how many otherwise) Trumpetshort interludes that refer to the seven trumpets of judgment and give the album a sense of direction and narrative context. And yet there is nothing apocalyptic in the album, but rather there are invitations to surrender to the light, calls to be saved sung with the help of Kanye West's Sunday Service Choir, pop prayers, rhymes like “your body is external, your spirit is eternal” and an often relaxed mood, broken here and there by a few pieces like Money which refer to the sketched constructions of Maya.
MI7 it resembles other musical patchworks by the English artist, it has the same charm and the same limitations as some of his records which seem homemade, as if they could always be amended or improved, as if the spontaneity of the message could not wait for a more orderly and pop definition, a better chorus, a strengthened musical thrust. It's not a great album, but at its best it conveys a sense of peace and completeness which is among the purposes of these 16 tracks. It lacks the sense of rebellion that made MIA interesting and the excitement that its best music conveys.
Despite passages like “I fight the lords of darkness, the demonic and the heartless” and “in the name of Jesus, I command the Devil to depart from you immediately,” MI7 it is not the album of a religious fanatic, nor does it contain paranoid outbursts, but it brings together the two aspects of the MIA of recent years: the apocalypse passes through the capitalism of surveillance and manipulation, faith guides virtuous behaviour. In any case, both the album and Ohmni's clothing, which now promises protection from 10G, are among the most anti-pop objects around. In a period of songs based on self-narration, MIA releases a record in which she sings that “when you think MIA is over and Satan puts a period, God puts a comma and says: continue” and proudly states that she has not been defeated by the System, “too global to be local, too real to be loco”. I wonder if anyone can fully believe stuff like that.
In an era where showing off pop stars' bodies is considered a sign of advancement and liberation, she says this is not the time to wear revealing clothing and that any form of overstimulation should be avoided. You have to hide bodies, sensitive data and yourself to get to the glorious ending of Everything: the seventh trumpet does not announce the end of times, but of tribulations and the arrival of the longed-for salvation, whether in this world or the other remains to be seen. 30 minutes of silence follow – perhaps a reference to the passage ofApocalypse which says “when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in the sky for about the space of half an hour” – and a ghost track, like in the 90s, when there were compact discs. Moral: “Leave the house, feel the grass under your feet and the breeze on your face”.
With these 64 minutes of music that are both ambitious and naive, MIA challenges contemporaneity by taking refuge in a sort of pop mystique. It is a strange and unfortunately bland album, between tablas and breakbeats, songs from musicals and electronic trumpets of judgment, in which the boasting typical of rap is transfigured into the mystical and instead of rivals and guns and there are Satan and in Prayer 777 a sword of fire, or rather a “sword of fire” (cit. Mario Brega). If in the past his music wanted to be the canary in the mine of information overload, especially in the days of the mixtape Vicki Leekxif once the songs were always more immersed in the world of zeros and ones in which we live, MI7 and Ohmni represent an escape into a reality in which Good triumphs, all you need is faith. Let's face it: in MIA's vocabulary today “fight” rhymes with “light”.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
