Brad tries understanding critical theory.

From NPR:

At a time when globalization is both dissolving and reinforcing national identities, M.I.A.’s music speaks from a blurry borderland through a lingua franca of agitated, propulsive pop.

From CBC:

Arular’s easy blend of vague threats (“I got the bombs to make you blow / I got the beats to make you bang”; “Growin’ up, brewin’ up, guerilla gettin’ trained up / Look out, look out from over the rooftop”) with schoolyard choruses (“Blaze to blaze, galang a lang alanga / Purple haze, galang a lang alanga”) has triggered wide-ranging music-crit speculation that M.I.A. is a rebel fomenter, some secret weapon of dance destruction in terrorism’s war on freedom. She is charmingly elliptical about her politics – her website contains smiling photos of gun-toting Tamils, but no explicit endorsement of their rebellion – a mystery that makes her seem dangerous in these edgy times.

From Fimoculous:

Maya’s critics seem to present her songs as equivocally advocating various causes. This seems foolish. I suspect what MIA is actually doing is more like acting. And I don’t mean just conveniently sampling subversive agitprop (she seems to legitimately understand the cultural issues). Rather, Maya uses songwriting to play out the roles of various third-world revolutionary characters. So when you hear her talking about the Tamil Tigers or Palestine, it’s not exactly “her opinions” as much as the voice of people she’s encountered. Critics insist on imposing autobiography on this album, but it seems more like contemporary historical fiction.

From Pop Life:

The more MIA works with other musicians, the more their individual styles are subsumed and flattened into a fairly one-dimensional sound; despite the global travelling, her sound has actually become less ‘ethnic’; and although MIA decries globalisation, this anti-globalisation is her very own global brand.

From Culture Bully:

Kala is a direct result of globalization, a direct result of mainstream pop, rap and rock, and without those influences it would have never been made; a scary thought indeed - that there might be an up-side to the down-sides of globalization.

The most engaging read (beware: it’s negative) comes from the Columbia Spectator. Here’s a bit:

M.I.A. commits many of the same transgressions often committed by politicians and other powerful individuals. For her, there is an identifiable space outside of the metropolitan West, but it is largely undifferentiated and basically exotic. It is, in a word, a “general” space. The lyrics of “Bamboo Banga” are proof enough: Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, and Burma exist not as unique places and people, but simply as abstract notions of foreign places. M.I.A. considers them together, with the word linking them being, unfortunately, bamboo.

The basic premise behind this borderline offensive formulation underwrites much of M.I.A.’s work—she produces foreign people and places for consumption in the marketplace, thereby destroying any agency she might have given these people. The children dancing in her video footage are not speaking for themselves, nor are they acting for themselves. We do not know what country they come from, and we do not know their stories. They disappear after her show, and we do not hear of them again. But they are smiling for M.I.A.’s camera lens, and for M.I.A. this seems to be enough—they will give her the kind of credibility she wants. In this sense, M.I.A. is roughly analogous to the Bonos , Angelinas, and Mia Farrows of the world—except that unlike those advocates for some abstraction of “Africa,” M.I.A. is not involved with any identifiable projects that are actually trying to improve conditions on the continent. M.I.A.’s stance, then, is politics-lite, a thin attempt to imbue her music with political energy. In the case of M.I.A., “Africa” sells, and we certainly buy it