It’s high time I shut my triflin’ yap about M.I.A. I’ve offered up my two cents, but I find I keep coming back to her month after month, as if the hype has maintained its freshness. I suppose she regains my curiosity so often because every time I skim through Arular, it enduringly strikes me as the most inimitable album of 2005. Or perhaps it’s due to her cunning choice of producers and growing remix archive. Or maybe it’s because she landed such a promising deal with Interscope. It could also be on account of her dreamy chicken legs and bashful, pouty brown eyes. Most recently though, it has to do with her latest music video, directed by Anthony Mandler, who has also afforded his directorial talents to 8Ball & MJG, Snoop and Black Eyed Peas.
The video for her Diplo-produced latest single, “Bucky Done Gun,” is by far the best visual manifestation of her labor yet. The healthy, high-budget camera work incorporates glimpses of Maya’s graffiti art as well as her keen fashion sense. It punctuates her good looks without exploiting them and showcases garbage pale percussionists, rando booty-tremblin’ breezies, and scenes from a modest, fictitious live show in a small club, showing that although she’s on her way up, she’s still very tied to the underground.
It is my wish that M.I.A. will one day become a bonafied superstar, that she’ll shatter the tired, aging staples of mainstream urban music and rebuild them from the ground up on an international scale. This would involve the eventual eradication and unemployment of the majority of current rap and R&B household names. 50 Cent would become the Winger equivalent of this much needed and long overdue upheaval. This video is the best indication I’ve had so far that such an aspiration may actually come true. Maya, sweetheart, this Bud’s for you. Kill ‘em dead.