BLACKOUT IN A SHOT GLASS

There is nobody in the entire United States, even overweight midwestern soccer moms, who are not familiar with "all I wanna do is chk chk chk and take your money!" the iconic line from MIA's Paper Planes. On Arular and Kala, MIA crafted brilliant songs that were not only genre bending but insanely catchy. CXXX parties lived and thrived off them. When Paper Planes hit in late 2007 we were immediately ALL OVER THAT SHIT. Way before that godawful Pineapple Express movie pushed the song completely mainstream to the point that obnoxious frat boys and their lady friends in too short skirts drinking Coors Light out of Solo cups were miming gun shots while playing beer pong. The entire thought continues to make me shudder. At least we still have Bird Flu. and DIT DIT DIT (don't fuck my man! disturbingly this is currently Mike Moss. please fuck him). Those songs will be ours forever. Thank God.

But let's be honest here. /\/\/-\Y/-\, her latest outing, is a trainwreck. The first single off the album, Born Free, was an atrocious, overwrought, and self-righteous attempt at political commentary. In previous albums she did this in a much more subtle way that sort of kind of worked. With Born Free, I get what she was going for, but seriously? Ugh. I'm not even going to start on the video.

Critics eviscerated the album. Even Diplo, who worked with MIA and contributed heavily to her previous work, hardly had anything good to say about it. There is something to be appreciated about this, but MIA essentially took full creative control and ignored the suggestions of most of her collaboraters in creating it. What ensued was a tremendously mixed bag that those expecting another gem like Kala felt broken hearted and outright rejected. How could she attempt such an incredible departure?

I'm torn about /\/\/-\Y/-\.I did like the overall idea of the album: the internet is terrible and stealing all your personal data and yet we are still irrevocably and continuously connected to it. At the very least I enjoyed the Geocities aesthetic she appropriated for the album and single covers (see the images in this post). Design-wise, she's clearly a woman after our own hearts.

So here we go: when I pretended that this was never going to MIA as we knew her, I actually enjoyed /\/\/-\Y/-\. Why else would I bother spelling out the album name? I mean, right? Don't get me wrong. I will admit that even for Not-MIA some of the songs were downright awful, yet I continue to listen to the whole album. All except Born Free, which I skip every. single. time. I play it. On that note, all the songs sound like they had completely different production. Especially XXXO (which I love) doesn't have the same kind of fidelity that any of the others do. I suspect it's intentional but it's still really jarring.

I can't believe I've written this much about a single artist and a single album without even getting to the point. I'M FINALLY THERE, I SWEAR. My absolute favorite song from /\/\/_\Y/-\ is Teqkilla. I GUARANTEE that if this were still the Rikoloff days Teqkilla would get played right along Toxic and DIT DIT DIT. This is catchier and more-sing-along-able than any other track on the album. And it's LONG. Listen listen listen and tell me what you think! In the meantime I'll be bumping this while I work at my horrible, horrible "precision cut-and-paste" job. Awesome.


Teqkilla by Babasonicos

I promise I will never write anything this long ever again.