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CD Review
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Chicago Tribune, CD Review >>
M.I.A. and Tinariwen serve as tour guides to some of the year's best music
At a time when the Internet has made music from around the world more accessible than ever, North America remains remarkably closed off to Third World culture.
Part of the problem is the lack of tour guides, artists who build bridges between cultures and provide a foundation for understanding. This year, I can’t think of a better bridge-builder than Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A.
Her second album, “Kala,” shares a label home (Interscope) with artists such as U2 and Eminem, an unsually high-profile platform for music recorded in Trinidad, India and Australia, fused with cutting-edge Western club rhythms.
Such multiculturalism comes naturally to M.I.A., who was born in London, spent much of her childhood in Sri Lanka and India, and now lives in Brooklyn. Her father is a rebel fighter in Sri Lanka, and much of her music reflects the struggle of oppressed minorities to find a voice of their own.
“I put people on the map that never seen a map,” M.I.A. declares on one of her latest songs, “$20.”
But the music isn’t so much strident as joyous. She doesn’t sing like a diva. In fact, she barely sings at all. Her vocals are chants and phrases, shaped by hip-hop, Bollywood soundtracks and the sounds of city life. But her songs are laced with hooks, and the grooves couldn’t be more infectious. Barking dogs, a battalion of drums, and didgeridoo bass lines conspire to create an exotic brand of club music, reminiscent in its flair to the recordings Timbaland and Missy Elliott were making in the late ‘90s. Oddly, the only track on “Kala” that falls flat is M.I.A.’s collaboration with Timbaland, “Come Around.” On the rest of the album, he’s outdone by the contributions of M.I.A.’s primary collaborators, British house maven Dave “Switch” Taylor and Philadelphia deejay Diplo.
M.I.A., who plays two shows in Chicago next week, still hasn’t figured out how to translate the power of her records to the concert stage. But she’s got charm; her audience relates to her because she could just as easily be one of them. She’s also an accomplished artist, photographer and filmmaker, and one senses that music for her is not a career, just another means of self-expression.
That’s also the case with Tinariwen, who headline two concerts at the Old Town School of Folk Music this weekend.
The group updates the desert music of northern Mali with electric guitars. On the group’s latest album, “Aman Iman: Water is Life,” guitars weave fractured lines through the hypnotic camel-walk dance rhythms. This is first-rate trance music, downright psychedelic at times, even as it expresses the harsh realities of Saharan nomads.
Guitar aficionados will immediately recognize the connection to the darker tonalities, brooding rhythms, and flickering, stabbing note clusters of the blues greats, from Son House to Junior Kimbrough.
Live, this band is built for dancing, the language barrier erased by those insistent, undulating rhythms. You can almost see the sun baking the sand as ghostly, hooded figures drift past, guitars in hand.
Greg Kot 11/14/07 >> go there
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