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Untitled

Maya (stylised as /\/\/\Y/\) is the third studio album by British recording artist M.I.A., released in July 2010 on her own label, N.E.E.T. Recordings, through XL Recordings and Interscope Records. Songwriting and production for the album were primarily handled by M.I.A., Blaqstarr and Rusko. M.I.A.'s long-time associates Diplo, Switch and her brother Sugu Arulpragasam also worked on the album, which was mainly composed and recorded at M.I.A.'s house in Los Angeles.

The album's tracks centre on the theme of information politics and are intended to evoke what M.I.A. called a "digital ruckus". Elements of industrial music were incorporated into M.I.A.'s sound for the first time. A deluxe edition was simultaneously released, featuring four bonus tracks. Critics' opinions of the album were generally favourable although divided, with both its musical style and lyrical content each attracting praise and criticism. In its first week of release, the album entered the UK Albums Chart at number 21, becoming her highest-charting album in the UK. It also became her highest-charting album in the US, reaching number nine on the Billboard 200, and debuted in the top ten in Finland, Norway, Greece and Canada.

M.I.A. promoted the album by releasing a series of tracks online, including "Born Free", which was accompanied by a short film-music video which generated controversy due to its graphic imagery. She also performed at music festivals in the US and Europe to coincide with the album's release. During her promotion of the album, she became embroiled in a dispute with New York Times profiler Lynn Hirschberg.

Composition and recording

British producer Rusko was one of M.I.A.'s collaborators on the album.

British-Tamil musician M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam) released her second album Kala in 2007, which achieved widespread critical acclaim and was certified Gold in the United States and Silver in the United Kingdom.[2][3] Six months after giving birth to her son Ikyhd in February 2009,[4] she began composing and recording her third studio album in a home studio section of the Los Angeles house she had bought with her partner Ben Bronfman.[5] Collaborators such as Rusko and Blaqstarr moved into the house to write and record songs for the new project before she mixed the record with them in a rented studio in Hawaii.[6] She collaborated with writer-producer Blaqstarr because, in her opinion, "he simply makes good music".[7] M.I.A.'s collaboration with Derek Miller of Sleigh Bells on the track "Meds and Feds" prompted her subsequent signing of the band to her label N.E.E.T., and according to Miller, this experience gave him the confidence to record the band's debut album Treats.[8][9]

Her creative partnership with the comparatively unknown Rusko grew from a sense of frustration at what she saw as her now more mainstream associates suggesting sub-standard tracks due to their busy schedules.[5] Diplo worked on the track "Tell Me Why", but at a studio in Santa Monica rather than at the house. He claimed in an interview that, following the break-up of his personal relationship with M.I.A. some years earlier, he was not allowed to visit the house because "her boyfriend really hates me".[10]

Tracks for the album were whittled down from recording sessions lasting up to 30 hours.[6] Producer Rusko, who played guitar and piano on the album, described the pair getting "carried away" in the studio, appreciating the "mad distorted and hectic" sound they were able to create.[6] Rusko stated "She’s got a kid, a little one year old baby, and we recorded his heart beat.[6] We’d just think of crazy ideas”.[6] Rusko has described M.I.A. as the best artist he has ever worked with, stating that she had "been the most creative and I really had a good time making music with her".[11]

Music and lyrics

M.I.A. called the new project "schizophrenic", and spoke of the internet inspiration that could be found in the songs and the artwork.[12] She also stated that the album centred on her "not being able to leave [Los Angeles] for 18 months" and feeling "disconnected".[13] She summed up the album's main theme as information politics. During the recording of the album, she spoke of the combined effects that news corporations and Google have on news and data collection, while stressing the need for alternative news sources that she felt her son's generation would need in order to ascertain truth.[14] Maya was made to be "so uncomfortably weird and wrong that people begin to exercise their critical-thinking muscles". M.I.A. stated "You can Google 'Sri Lanka' and it doesn't come up that all these people have been murdered or bombed, it's 'Come to Sri Lanka on vacation, there are beautiful beaches'...you're not gonna get the truth till you hit like, page 56, and it's my and your responsibility to pass on the information that it's not easy anymore".[14] Following these comments, M.I.A. received death threats directed at her and her son, which she also cited as an influence on the songs on the album. She summed up the album as a mixture of "babies, death, destruction and powerlessness".[15]

File:M.I.A singing at Atlantico, Rome 2010.jpg
M.I.A. performing in Rome during her Maya Tour

M.I.A. opted to sing, as opposed to rap, on several tracks on the album, telling Rolling Stone in early 2010 that she wished to produce something different from her previous album, which had "more emphasis on production [and] making beats and singing less".[16] In a January 2010 interview with NME she spoke of being inspired by the film Food Inc. and described the album as being about "exploring our faults and flaws" and being proud of them.[17] The closing track, "Space", which was reportedly recorded using an iPhone app,[18] is a ballad which Mikael Wood, writing in Billboard, described as "dreamy" and "sound[ing] like a Sega Genesis practicing its pillow talk".[19] In contrast, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune described "Lovealot" as sounding "like it was recorded in a dank alley, the singer’s voice reverberating amid percussion that sounds like doors creaking and rats scurrying across garbage cans".[20] "XXXO" draws its inspiration from M.I.A.'s "cheesy pop side",[21] and is based on the theme of the creation of a sex symbol.[22] "Teqkilla" is the only track to address her relationship with Bronfman, through a reference to Seagram, the company owned by his family.[22] "It Takes A Muscle" is a cover version of a track originally recorded in 1982 by Dutch group Spectral Display, and is performed in a reggae style.[23][24] The opening track "The Message", featuring a male lead vocalist, parodies the words of the traditional song "Dem Bones" to link Google to "the government".[25] Kitty Empire, writing in The Observer, stated that these conspiratorial government connections to Google and the thoughts of Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, the Russian teenager who bombed Moscow's tube system to vindicate the death of her husband, were inner-world issues pondered in "Lovealot" with "a mixture of nonsense rhyme, militant posturing and pop-cultural free-flow; her London glottal stop mischievously turns 'I love a lot' into 'I love Allah' ".[26] Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times stated "M.I.A. turns a call to action into a scared girl's nervous tic. Synths click out a jittery, jagged background. The song doesn't justify anything, but it reminds us that there is a person behind every lit fuse".[22] Powers also commented on how "Born Free" mixed the boasting style often found in hip hop music with lines depicting the lives of those enduring poverty and persecution.[27] "Illygirl", a track found only on the deluxe edition of the album, is written from the point of view of an abused but tough teenager, whom critic Robert Christgau said could be the "kid-sister-in-metaphor" of the swaggering persona adopted by M.I.A. on the track "Steppin' Up".[28]

Samples used on the album were taken from artists as diverse as the electronic duo Suicide and gospel choir the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers.[19][29] "Internet Connection", one of the bonus tracks on the limited edition of the album, was recorded in collaboration with a group of Filipino Verizon workers.[16] "M.I.A. stated that the sound and imagery of the album capture a "digital ruckus", adding that "so many of us have become typists and voyeurs". We need a digital moshpit like we’ve never seen, harder than how people were doing it in the punk era. We need that energy, but digitally".[14][30] Julianne Escobedo Shepherd of The Fader commented on the increasingly industrial feel of the tracks made available prior to the album's release,[31] a style which had not previously been incorporated into her music.[32] M.I.A. herself picked out "Steppin' Up", "Space" and "Teqkilla" as her favourite tracks on the album. She stated that she contemplated using only the sound of drills as the backing for "Steppin' Up", but concluded that this was "too experimental" an approach.[18]

Release and artwork

The album was originally set to be released on 29 June 2010, but in May M.I.A.'s record label announced a new release date of 13 July.[33] In late April, the artist posted a twitpic of the track listing for the new album. She also commented that at the time she was "open to suggestions" regarding the album's title.[34] Two weeks later, a blog posting on her record label's official website revealed that the album would be entitled /\/\/\Y/\, the punctuation marks spelling Maya, M.I.A.'s own forename.[35] The title follows on from previous albums named after her father (2005's Arular) and mother (2007's Kala).[36] Some reviewers used the stylised title while others did not.[37][38][39][40] M.I.A.'s official MySpace page uses both titles.[41] The album was released in conventional physical and digital formats and as an iTunes LP.[42]

The album's cover features the singer's face almost completely hidden by YouTube player bars.[43] MTV's Kyle Anderson described the cover, which was previewed in June 2010, as "a typically busy, trippy, disorienting piece of art" and speculated that it might be "a statement about 21st century privacy".[44] Additional art direction for the album was provided by Aaron Parsons.[45] M.I.A. used her mother's Tamil phonebook to find a wedding photographer to provide images for the album.[46] Photographers for the album were Ravi Thiagaraja, M.I.A. and Jamie Martinez.[45] Elements of the artwork had previously been used in one of a series of billboard images, all designed by musicians, which were projected onto landmarks in London by a guerrilla project called BillBored during the 2010 British general election.[47][48] A limited edition version of the album features a lenticular slipcase.[19]

When questioned about the difficulty of finding her album title on search engines such as Google, she noted that she chose to use forward slashes and backward slashes due to their ease at being typed, web politics and because she liked the way the album title looked on music players such as iTunes.[49][50] The Guardian's Sian Rowe commented that M.I.A.'s deliberate "shrinking away from a mainstream audience" by the use of difficult, unsearchable symbols was part of a growing new underground scene perhaps trying to create a "generation gap", where only "the youngest and the most enthusiastic" would seek out such band names by reading the right online sources.[50]

Promotion

In January 2010, M.I.A. posted a video clip on Twitter, which featured a new song but revealed no information about it other than the heading "Theres space for ol dat I see" (sic).[51] The following day her publicist confirmed that the track was entitled "Space Odyssey" and had been produced in collaboration with Rusko to protest a travel piece about Sri Lanka printed in The New York Times.[52] The track appears on the new album under the revised title "Space".[34] The same month, she filmed a short film for the song "Born Free".[17] At the end of April the track was released as a promotional single, and the short film accompanying the song was released.[53] The film, directed by Romain Gavras, depicts a military unit rounding up red-headed young men who are then shot or forced to run across a minefield.[54] The film, which also features nudity and scenes of drug use, caused widespread controversy and was either removed or labelled with an age restriction on YouTube.[13][55][56] In the weeks following the release of the film, M.I.A. was the most blogged about artist on the internet, according to MP3 blog aggregator The Hype Machine.[57][58] The singer stated that she found the controversy "ridiculous", stating that videos of real-life executions had not generated as much controversy as her video.[59] In the run-up to the album's release, "XXXO", which Entertainment Weekly described as the "first official single" from the forthcoming album,[60] "Steppin' Up", "Teqkilla" and "It Takes a Muscle" were released online.[61][62][63] On 6 July 2010 she made the entire album available via her MySpace page.[64] In December, "It Takes a Muscle" was released as a two-track promotional single.[65]

M.I.A. promoted the album with a headline performance at The Big Chill in August 2010.

The new album was publicised during Jay-Z's performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April, when a blimp flew across the venue announcing that M.I.A.'s new album would be released on 29 June 2010.[66] M.I.A. promoted the album with a series of appearances at music festivals, including the HARD festival in New York and the The Big Chill in Herefordshire. Her performance at the latter was cut short due to a stage invasion by fans.[67] She also performed at the Flow Festival in Finland, where she was joined onstage by Derek E. Miller playing guitar during her performance of "Meds and Feds",[68] and the LokerseFeesten in Lokeren, Flanders, Belgium, where her performance drew a crowd of 13,500, the biggest of the 10-day music festival.[69] In September she announced a tour which will last until the end of the year.[70]

M.I.A. also promoted the album with an appearance on "Late Night with David Letterman", during which she performed "Born Free" backed by a group of dancers styled to look like her and with Martin Rev of Suicide playing keyboards.[71][72] In November 2010 she appeared on "Later...with Jools Holland" on British television, performing "It Takes a Muscle" with members of The Specials and "Born Free".[73][74] While promoting the album, M.I.A. became involved in a dispute with New York Times profiler Lynn Hirschberg, who interviewed her in March 2010 and whose resultant article portrayed the singer as pretentious and attention seeking.[75] In response, M.I.A. posted Hirschberg's telephone number on her Twitter page and later uploaded her own audio recording of the interview, highlighting the discrepancies between what she said and what was reported. The piece was criticised for its yellow journalism by some, however M.I.A. received varying degrees of support and criticism for the ensuing fallout from the media.[76][77] Benjamin Boles, writing for Now, stated that, while Hirschberg's piece came across as a "vicious.....character assassination", M.I.A's subsequent actions were "childish" and made her "the laughing stock of the internet".[10] The paper later printed a correction on the story.[78] The incident prompted Boots Riley of the band Street Sweeper Social Club to comment on how artists had access to media that allowed writers to be held accountable and that M.I.A.'s move was brilliant.[79]

Reception

Critical response

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic[80]
Robert Christgau(A)[81]
Entertainment Weekly(C-)[82]
The Guardian[24]
The New York Times(favourable)[83]
Pitchfork Media(4.4/10)[75]
Rolling Stone[84]
Slant Magazine[37]
Spin[38]
The Village Voice(favourable)[85]

Music critics were divided in their reviews of Maya.[86][87][88] Simon Vozick-Levinson of Entertainment Weekly called the album "surely the year’s most divisive major-label release".[71] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 67 based on 39 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews".[89] Reviews of the album began to appear a month before its release after the album leaked in low quality onto the internet.[90] Charles Aaron, writing in Spin, gave the album four and a half out of five stars, his review deeming the song "Lovalot" her "riskiest gambit yet".[38] Matthew Bennett of Clash gave a similar score, calling it a "towering work".[39] Mojo writer Roy Wilkinson called it a "startling fusillade of to-the-moon pop music".[91] Writing for the BBC Online, Matthew Bennett characterised the album as "loud, proud, and taking no prisoners" and also praised the album's lighter tracks, such as "Teqkilla", which he called "enjoyably demented but utterly catchy".[40] Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield said the album was M.I.A.'s "most aggressive, confrontational and passionate yet", praising her "voracious ear for alarms, sirens, explosions, turning every jolt into a breakbeat" and her consequent lyrics as "expansive".[84] Los Angeles Times writer Ann Powers commended the album as "an attempt by an artist who's defined herself through opposition to engage with the system that she has entered, for better or worse, and to still remain recognizable to herself" characterising Maya's foregrounded ideas as "a struggle worthy of a revolutionary".[22] In his consumer guide for MSN Music, critic Robert Christgau gave the album an A rating and complimented its "beats and the spunky, shape-shifting, stubbornly political, nouveau riche bundle of nerves who holds them together".[81]

Other critics were not as complimentary towards the album. Charlotte Heathcote of British newspaper the Daily Express said that, while M.I.A. could "still lay claim to being one of our most imaginative, uncompromising artists", there were "only glimmers of brilliance" on the album.[92] Chicago Tribune writer Greg Kot gave the album two and a half out of four stars and expressed a mixed response towards M.I.A.'s "[embracing] pop more fervently than ever.[20] Entertainment Weekly's Leah Greenblatt was critical of the album, stating that it sounded "murky and almost punishingly discordant, as if the album has been submerged underwater and then set upon by an arsenal of exceptionally peeved power tools". She went on to state that nothing on the album sounded "truly vital", or as revolutionary as M.I.A. wanted the public to believe.[82] Stephen Troussé, writing in Uncut, described the album as "anti-climactic" and "self-satisfied" and stated that it suffered from "diminished horizons".[93] Mehan Jayasuriya of PopMatters noted her "self-aggrandizing" as a weakness and stated "/\/\/\Y/\ lacks the focus and confidence of M.I.A.'s previous albums".[94] Jesse Cataldo of Slant Magazine noted that the album "has the feel of a vanity project" and wrote "It may be an above-average album, but its aesthetic matches her persona only at its shallowest levels, in the thinness of its ideas and the often-forceful ugliness of its message".[37] Chris Richard of The Washington Post called it "a disorienting mix of industrial clatter and digital slush" and noted "there isn't much to sing along to".[95]

Commercial performance

The album entered the UK Albums Chart at number 21 in its first week of release, 18 places higher than the peak position achieved by Kala, immediately making it her highest-charting album in the UK.[96][97] The following week it dropped out of the top 40.[98] It also charted in a number of other European countries, entering the top ten in Finland, Norway and Greece.[99] In the US it debuted at number nine on the Billboard 200, nine places higher than the peak position achieved by Kala, although it sold only 28,000 copies in its first week of release, compared with the 29,000 which the earlier album sold in the same period.[100] Maya fell to number 34 in its second week on the chart, selling 11,000 copies.[101] The album also topped Billboard's Dance/Electronic Albums chart and reached the top 10 in two of the magazine's other charts.[102] Maya also entered the top 10 in the Canadian Albums Chart.[99][102] The single "XXXO" reached the top 40 in Belgium, Spain and the U.K.,[103][104] and "Teqkilla" entered the Canadian Hot 100 on digital downloads alone.[105]

Accolades

In December 2010, NME named "XXXO" and "Born Free" the number 2 and number 11 best tracks of the year respectively.[106][107] The album appeared in a number of magazines' lists of the best albums of the year. Spin placed Maya at number 8 in its list of the best releases of 2010,[108] and Rolling Stone listed the album at number 19 in its countdown.[109]

Track listing

No.TitleWriter(s)Length
1."The Message"Sugu Arulpragasam, Steve Loveridge0:57
2."Steppin Up"Maya Arulpragasam, Christopher Mercer, Dave Taylor4:01
3."XXXO"Maya Arulpragasam, Charles Smith, Cherry Byron-Withers2:54
4."Teqkilla"Maya Arulpragasam, Christopher Mercer, Dave Taylor, John Hill, Cherry Byron-Withers6:20
5."Lovalot" (Note: Contains elements of "I Said It" by Opal)Maya Arulpragasam, Dave Taylor, John Hill, Opal Josephs, Sheldon Pennicot, Sekou Davis2:50
6."Story to Be Told"Maya Arulpragasam, Christopher Mercer, Dave Taylor3:32
7."It Takes a Muscle" (Note: Cover of "It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love" by Spectral Display)Michael Mulders, Henri Overduin3:00
8."It Iz What It Iz"Maya Arulpragasam, Charles Smith3:29
9."Born Free" (Note: Samples "Ghost Rider" by Suicide)Maya Arulpragasam, Dave Taylor, Martin Rev, Alan Vega4:07
10."Meds and Feds" (Note: Samples "Treats" by Sleigh Bells)Maya Arulpragasam, Derek E. Miller3:09
11."Tell Me Why" (Note: Contains elements of "The Last Words of Copernicus" by Alabama Sacred Harp Singers)Maya Arulpragasam, Wesley Pentz4:11
12."Space"Maya Arulpragasam, Christopher Mercer3:08
Bonus tracks
No.TitleWriter(s)Length
13."Internet Connection" (Note: Samples Fonejacker, and features vocals of Verizon Wireless workers)Maya Arulpragasam, Charles Smith2:49
14."Illygirl"Maya Arulpragasam, Charles Smith2:12
15."Believer"Maya Arulpragasam, Charles Smith3:11
16."Caps Lock"Maya Arulpragasam, Charles Smith3:58

Personnel

The following people are credited on the album:[45]

  • Maya Arulpragasam – producer (tracks 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15), mixing (track 1, 5, 12, 15), creative direction, art direction, photography, A & R, executive producer
  • Rusko – producer (tracks 2, 3, 4, 6, 12)
  • Blaqstarr – producer (tracks 3, 8, 13, 14, 16), mixing (tracks 13, 14, 16)
  • Diplo – producer (tracks 7, 11)
  • Switch – producer (tracks 4, 9), vocal production (track 15), mixing (track 2)
  • Sugu Arulpragasam – producer (track 1)
  • John Hill – producer (track 4)
  • Derek E. Miller – producer (track 10), mixing (track 10)
  • Neal Pogue – mixing (track 2)
  • Ben H. Allen – mixing (tracks 3, 11)
  • Robert Gardner – mix assistant (tracks 3, 11)
  • Shane P. Stoneback- mixing (track 10)
  • Aaron Parsons – art direction

Charts

Chart (2010) Peak
position
Ref.
Australian Albums Chart 21 [99]
Austrian Albums Chart 53 [99]
Belgian Albums Chart (Flanders) 20 [99]
Belgian Albums Chart (Wallonia) 48 [99]
Canadian Albums Chart 7 [102]
Danish Albums Chart 17 [99]
Dutch Albums Chart 93 [99]
European Top 100 Albums 31 [110]
Finnish Albums Chart 9 [99]
French Albums Chart 79 [99]
German Albums Chart 48 [111]
Greek International Albums Chart 10 [99]
Irish Albums Chart 47 [112]
Japanese Albums Chart 37 [113]
New Zealand Albums Chart 21 [99]
Norwegian Albums Chart 8 [99]
Swedish Albums Chart 31 [99]
Swiss Albums Chart 27 [99]
UK Albums Chart 21 [96]
UK Independent Albums Chart 2 [114]
U.S. Billboard 200 9 [100]
U.S. Billboard Dance/Electronic Albums 1 [102]

See also

References

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