M.I.A.
Arular

I hate hip-hop. Not so much for a specific reason, but for lack of feeling.

I've never understood the exuberance of certain individuals in front of rhymes scattered over the usual, old beats: the usual dutudun dutudun, to be clear, including oral noises. I’ve never liked a rap-loving song, or at least until "Arular" passed through my hands and I realized that what I hated was mainstream rap, the glossy kind. The horrendous hip-hop/R'n'b of folks like Ne-Yo, 50Cent, Eminem and their ilk, just to be clear.

M.I.A., on the other hand, is the emblem of a genre unto itself. Far from what is usually heard on the radio, because it is too original, too daring, too raw and dirty to appeal to the mass of perfect ignorants stuffed with Gigi D'Alessio (cold shivers of horror). "Arular" is a kaleidoscope of alternative-electro-rap, which as soon as it is inserted into the player rapes the brain.
Where do these sounds come from, these colors, these cutthroat voices that radiate my room? Cheerful yet haunting notes come from the stereo. It’s the epitaph of a prejudice with the taste of a palette destroyed by color.

M.I.A. manages to give meaning even to the very short skits, (non)songs that I've always found useless and incoherent, but here they take on the role of a subtle red thread between one part of the album and another and turn out, for once, to be pleasant and not just handfuls of seconds of life lost forever.

Skewed rhythms, explosions of sounds that radiate, hard and raw beats, voices as ungraceful as they are charming. The more the tracks go by, the more I realize that "Arular" is a little gem, a gem to be rediscovered and hardly compressible into a single genre. Alternative, grime, electronic, hip-hop, experimental pop: each track contains the fusion of a thousand sensations and emotions and presents them in a carefree and magnificent way.

What to say about a syncopated "Pull Up The People"? Broken electronics and energetic singing, which immediately captures you and you find yourself in between beats, lost in the destructive and explosive ensemble of volcanic trepidations. Or the extraordinary "Bucky Done Gun," cleverly chosen as the first single and dance peak: crazy trumpets, scattered and Caribbean rhythms, catchy and wild chorus.

"Sunshowers" is minimalist, wicked, imperfect but perfectly destructive and proves effective in its almost breezy and drunk carefree chorus, but M.I.A. proves even more incisive in the suspended "Hombre,” a diamond set with folkloric overtones and electro seductions. And then there's "Galang," a seductive journey into gentle malice that bites every playful thought, the growling "Bingo," the theatrical curve of edgy rhythms of the anthem "Fire, Fire" and "10 Dollars," a journey of electroclash impulses that explode in vortices of small beats and raw verses.

An inexplicable album, as effective as it is devastating, made up of skewed, harsh, and fierce songs that will break your heart.

A sincere yet unsettling revelation.