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THE ALBUM

Title: Kala

Release date: August 8, 2007

Genre: Dance // Electronic

Mood: Boisterous, Political, Cheeky

M.I.A. was 32 years old at the time of Kala's release. It is her sophomore studio album.

There was a big bump M.I.A. faced when she was making this album, but she used it to her advantage. From the Kala Wikipedia page:

M.I.A. initially planned to work with American producer Timbaland for the bulk of the album, but was unable to gain a long-term work visa to enter the US. She hence recorded the album at numerous locations around the world, including India, Angola, Trinidad, Liberia, Jamaica and Australia. [...] Kala incorporates prominent influences from South Asian music, featuring samples of Bollywood and Tamil cinema. The album draws on various styles, from funk carioca to African folk. The songs are about political themes related to the Third World, including illegal immigration, poverty and capitalism.

On the meaning of the song Paper Planes, M.I.A. told Entertainment Weekly in 2008:

When I wrote it I’d just gotten in to New York after waiting a long time and that’s why I wrote it, just to have a dig. It’s about people driving cabs all day and living in a s***ty apartment and appearing really threatening to society. But not being so. Because, by the time you’ve finished working a 20-hour shift, you’re so tired you [just] want to get home to the family. I don’t think immigrants are that threatening to society at all. They’re just happy they’ve survived some war somewhere.

THE ARTIST

Artist: M.I.A.

Nationality: British

From M.I.A.'s Wikipedia page:

Born in London to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, M.I.A. and her family moved to Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka when she was six months old. As a child, she experienced displacement caused by the Sri Lankan Civil War, which made the family return to London as refugees when M.I.A. was 11 years old; the war had a defining influence on M.I.A.'s artistry.

THE IMPACT

Kala is the album that contains the mega-hit Paper Planes (also M.I.A.'s biggest song), which peaked at #4 on the Billboard Top 100. The songs' music video is currently holding over 200,000,000 views on YouTube and the song itself has just over 496,000,000 streams on Spotify.

Critics were quite happy with Kala. Barry Walters wrote for SPIN in September 2007:

Like its creator (who was denied a U.S. visa while making much of this album), Kala is rooted in several cultures, but resides in none. [...] It's so heavy with percussion, both internationally man-made and machine-generated, that it evokes a street fair where each reveler is banging away on every available surface.

In 2017, this release was featured on NPR's 150 Great Albums Made By Women at #43, where critic Amelia Mason states, "Though M.I.A. has been accused of being more provocateur than activist, Kala showed that it was possible to tie radical sounds to radical notions — and still make people dance."

VMP published a fascinating article looking back at Kala over a decade after its release. I couldn't pick one excerpt, the whole article is informative and interesting. Click here to read M.I.A.'s Attempt to Decolonize Pop by Tara Joshi.

YouTube channel Alternative Wormhole has a 12-minute video review of this album. He briefly goes over M.I.A.'s background, her process of making Kala, and the impact the album had on electronic music. Click here to watch M.I.A. - Kala: A Classic Album.

THE REST

Jimmy, the fourth track on the album, is a cover of a song from 1982 Bollywood film Disco Dancer with English lyrics added in.

THE CONVERSATION

• Did you enjoy this album? Why or why not?
• Which tracks stood out to you from this album and why?
• Do you like this artist? Why or why not? Where does this project stand in their discography?
• What are some other works you enjoy from this genre or era? How does this album differ from the others in its field?