M.I.A.’s ‘Matangi’ is a Spiritual Manifesto

Three years after her last album and following a highly-publicized legal battle with her record label, M.I.A.’s new album Matangi was finally released. It’s a dynamic combination of spirituality and social commentary. (Photo courtesy Interscope Records)

M.I.A.’s fourth album Matangi is named after a Hindu goddess of music and learning. And from the first track “Karmageddon” (“my words are my armor, and you’re about to meet your karma”), the rapper uses her spirituality to give her confidence and force. The result? Her best album yet.

Her open spirituality takes her trademark combination of social commentary, political messages, and cultural criticism to a new level. It’s exciting to hear an album that’s meant for now and has so much to say about where we are as a culture spiritually. And musically it’s explosive — building on M.I.A.’s hybrid of rap, electronica and world music.

Conquering Stereotypes

M.I.A. is a survivor of sorts. Some of the best art has the feeling that someone has journeyed through the dark night and emerged stronger. And Matangi has that quality. M.I.A. hasn’t been away long enough — three years since her last album — to say it’s a full-fledged comeback album. But Matangi has a wisdom and purpose to it fueled by its spirituality. She’s more relevant than ever. 

M.I.A.’s Matangi combines a spiritual confidence with outspoken social, political and cultural commentary. The result is a powerful tour of the narcissism and materialism of Western consumer culture.

But this newfound purpose apparently wasn’t embraced by her record company. Since her last album Maya, she’s been entangled in a battle to get her music heard. Interscope rejected Matangi because they said it was reportedly “too positive.” Never heard that reason before. The album was released only after M.I.A. threatened to leak it on her own.

Because it’s such a bizarre reason to hold it back, it makes one think. Was the label’s dismissal of this album due to a vicious stereotype against a multicultural female? Is there a racist classist stereotype here? Was she supposed to play a jester-like role of an irrational angry Third World woman? (this is alluded to in her song “There’s Only 1 U” where she declares “I’m a lady of rage with an afro puff”). It’s difficult to imagine any male singer being the victim of such a stereotype.

So did her record label only see her as a caricature — someone incapable of adding something transcendental and spiritual to her political and cultural commentary? But there’s nothing lightweight here. Matangi is fiery, meaningful and confident. She seems to address this controversy when she says “my blood type is no negative, but I’m positive the dark ain’t deep” in the song “Exodus.”

In Matangi, M.I.A. emerges stronger and more sure of herself after she slices up the media and consumer culture that both attacks her and leaves her feeling empty. There’s little other current pop music that is as brave. (Photo courtesy Interscope Records)

There are  Eastern religion references and a chant at the beginning of the call-to-arms anthem “Bring The Noize.” But Matangi is about more than just name dropping religious figures and terms. It’s about the confidence her spirituality gives her to battle the opposition — an oppressive First World that wants to categorize her, stereotype her, and suppress her viewpoint. “Systems shouldn’t operate by keeping me in a cage,” she says.

Matangi is partly a tour of the wasteland of First World Western culture with its greed, racism and corrupting media and pop culture. She pounces on the emptiness of some of the music in the rap genre in the album’s title track saying: “They make big sounds with nothing to say/School of fakeness/I’m school of hard knocks.”

M.I.A. calls out Drake, materialism

In the song “Come Walk With Me” she dismisses rap stereotypes with “You ain’t gotta shake it, just be with me/You ain’t gotta throw your hands in the air/Cause tonight we ain’t actin’ like we don’t care.” Drake gets directly dissed a few times. She taunts him that he didn’t come up from the bottom like he boasts and she hijacks his annoying song “The Motto” with its overabused message of “You Only Live Once” — which led to the overused acronym YOLO. M.I.A. retaliates with  “YALA” which ends with “Back home where I come from we keep being born again and again and again/That’s why they invented karma.”

The album demands that we recognize there’s something spiritual beyond the Western world’s secular priorities. “Making money is fine, but your life is one of a kind” she says in “There’s Only 1 U.”  But perhaps the biggest statement of purpose is the song “Exodus.”  The song is named after the Old Testament book about the journey from slavery to the promised land. But here it’s a journey of liberation from contemporary society with its minefield of temptations. The world is divided between priorities of being aligned with a force of truth or following the conformist herd: “we’re running on a force that’s true, we don’t fear/You wear up-to-date shoes or fall for their point of view.” 

Its chorus of “You can have it all, but tell me what for?” is a haunting question. In our materialist culture we’re programmed to want it all — things, desires, status. But why? Few artists dare to target the core of our consumerist culture. M.I.A. is one of the few.

Here’s the video for M.I.A.’ song ‘Bring the Noize’: