Album Review: A.I.M. by M.I.A.

M.I.A.’s palindromic album A.I.M. has more clangers than bangers. No wonder she’s calling it her musical farewell.

You won’t have M.I.A. to kick around anymore.

That’s if her retirement claims prove true. With the unveiling of her long-teased A.I.M., Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam has supposedly released her final batch of South Asian-influenced hip-hop.

(As she says on the album, she’s from “the People’s Republic of Swaggerstan”. I’d never heard of it before, but I am relieved we live in a world with an apparently liberated Swaggerstan.)

After listening to A.I.M. in full, it’s hard to know if she’s stepping away from music because of the backlash that has followed her since 2010 (beginning with a devastating, identity-shattering profile in NYMag and continuing to 2016, where she raised the ire of the #BlackLivesMatter movement), or because she is plumb out of ideas, lyrically and sonically, or worthwhile causes to call her own.

When the best song on your album - “Freedun” - is a poppy, ideologically-empty ditty with a hook and harmonies from Zayn Malik, your time as an icon of musical rebellion has come to an end.

Mild coarse language.

Having long fended off criticism for being a revolutionary poseur, M.I.A. kicks off A.I.M. by literally listing the political topics she’ll be covering over the next 40 minutes: “Your privilege, what’s up with that? Broke people, what’s up with that? Boat people, what’s up with that?”

You’d be forgiven for thinking her opening, half-hearted, Trump-era anthem “Borders” had been cribbed from The Lonely Island (if not this exact Saturday Night Live sketch). At least in this particular example, ADP’s pounding production – and M.I.A.’s hypnotic delivery – graduate it to the level of being listenable. The same, sadly, cannot be said of the banal “Foreign Friend”, which carries a series of lethargic platitudes: “Gonna be your best friend; gonna make that s*** trend.”

“Foreign Friend” comes later in the album, heralding the worst stretch of tunes in her recording career. Before that, the Skrillex-produced “Go Off” recaptures the classic M.I.A. feel, complete with chanted hook of “run-pama pama, pa-pam, pama pama.” It’s followed by the Blaqstarr remix of the idiosyncratic “Bird Song”, which utilises a sample from Tamil number “Oru Kili Urugudhu”. I’ll even forgive its constant stream of bird puns (“staying rich like an ostrich”) because of the rare hint of humour we get at the end, where a fowl-exhausted M.I.A. yells, “I need more birds!”

Now, M.I.A. has never relied on turns of phrase for her indelible singalongs. (Early single “Galang” is memorable for its urgent, warzone cry “shotgun get down”, while the bit everyone knows from karaoke favourite “Paper Planes” is the noise of four gun shots followed by a register opening.)

But here, she seems especially stranded and uninterested; unsure whether she should embrace onomatopoeic slam poetry or earnest storytelling. She tries the latter on album-closer “Survivor”, a failed attempt at a triumphant refugee tale, in which producer Justus Arison keeps the vocals disconcertingly isolated from the twinkling, saccharine music track. None of it works.

In the wake of Lemonade, a grand pop opus that successfully marries of-the-moment cultural commentary with innovative song-writing and production, A.I.M. can’t help but feel too late and too unengaged with the current climate (a death knell for any hopeful provocateur).

Back in the day, M.I.A. sounded like a futurist. Now, she can’t even outpace Twitter. What’s up with that?

2/5

A.I.M. is now available.

Mild coarse language.