She Knew

M.I.A. said her third album was shit. Not diplomatically, not with caveats about artistic vision or misunderstood intentions—just, directly, that ///Y/// was bad. She had listened to it again and finally agreed with everyone else.

I remember when she mattered differently. ’Paper Planes’ had that perfect ugly vitality, and the first two albums felt like someone had real things to say, about dislocation and survival and violence that wasn’t performed for effect. Then something happened. The third one didn’t land.

What’s stranger than making a bad album is admitting it publicly. Most artists do the thing where they defend it as misunderstood, or they pretend it doesn’t bother them, or they just move on. Mathangi Arulpragasam actually looked at what she’d made and said yeah, that doesn’t work. There’s something honest in that, even if it’s grim. She knows she doesn’t want to be a pop machine, knows she can’t be one. The question is whether she figures out what comes next.

I hope she does. Those first two albums meant something.