M.I.A.
Maya

Skillfully mixing multiple musical styles, knowing how to blend different rhythms and varied trends is not child's play. Experimentation (and experiments) represents the fruit of the labor of wise, brilliant and damnably intuitive minds, brains that had the courage to transform the musical staff into a potentially infinite cauldron of sounds and noises, from the most primitive, natural, and seminal to the more artificial and exclusively "made in Homo sapiens."

The authentic "experimental" spirit, however, is not born among the money and nine-figure contracts of the Majors, nor does it thrive comfortably on the podium of international mainstream charts: the hard work of collecting and mixing sounds is developed in a context of absolute creativity and ingenuity, a world where the god of money is rejected in favor of art, and the industrial repetition in the style of a record distribution assembly line is the last step to be taken, a step that must, however, be taken if the economic connections, unfortunately indispensable in any production context, are struggling and lacking. If it is true that entering the music biz provides popularity to a niche still unknown and/or hidden from "conformist" masses, it is important to emphasize that the approach to commerciality often marks a decline in productive quality. This is the case, for example, of the electronic genre and its derivatives (dance, dubstep, techno, house, industrial, synthpop...), a context until a few years ago predominantly underground and not very mainstream, and today at the top of the global charts.

Particularly inflated today is the combination of the aforementioned electronic sounds with hip-hop, a mix now reperformed in all possible dance versions by fake-dancer rappers et similia and emptied of the alternative-underground connotations of the past. Even if everything seems "lost," a little something shines from the afterlife of the anti-commercial niche, glimmers of quality that deny the total standardization of the sound-record offer: this is the case of M.I.A., the Anglo-Ceylonese exponent of the still radiant and rich experimental underground. Apparently eccentric in aesthetics and productions, yet damn eclectic and reactionary, M.I.A. freely blends the imperfection and cacophony of electronic subcategories (from grime to industrial, with notable flashes of dubstep, electroclash, techno, and trance) together with the essentiality of "true" and "pure" hip-hop. The latest work is Maya (stylized in /\/\ /\ Y /\), dating back to 2010 and following Arular and Kala, much more indie-oriented works.

The focal point of the album under analysis is the excerpt Born Free, a chaotic stew, dynamic and extremely boosted with heavy hard rock, garage-industrial, grime, and electroclash, a "protest" song that perfectly stylizes the astounding heterogeneity of sounds, noises, and even moods within the album. It then shifts to the crude dubstep seasoned with auto-tune, drills and jackhammers of Steppin Up, the triumphant march of wild synths and pseudo-animalistic electronic verses rapped in Teqkilla, as well as the enigmatic trance-hip hop expression of Lovalot.

The sound horizon that Maya unfolds to the unknown listener is much more expansive and nuanced: one can note the funky atmosphere of It Takes A Muscle, a track with dancehall and ambient connotations, the pseudo-disco techno-house flavor of Illygirl, the spasmodic military/tribal slowness of the "triumphant march" Tell Me Why and the adjacent Space. Notable finally are the straightforward hip-hop modesty without too many frills in Internet Connection, the incredible aloof rock-electroclash vigor of Meds And Feds and the relaxing lounge-ambient closure of Caps Lock.

An album that marks the difficult passage between anti-commercial underground and industrial mainstream, an expression of multiple inspirations and experiments carried out without the oppressive gaze of conformist majors, yet with a wink also to the more pop and conformist music biz (the news of her upcoming collaboration on the new Madonna single with colleague Nicki Minaj was recently announced). The alternative-commercial divide that distinguishes the work can seriously divide the two types of listeners: if the underground aficionado finds Maya less original than expected, those who feed almost exclusively on industrial radio-friendly products and wish to delve into the niche for the first time will find the album as a novelty to be fully appreciated only in the long term, not immediately and certainly not "reductive."