M.I.A. - Bird Flu

I'm not a real big MIA fan. If you've heard of her, it was because she was everybody's golden child in 2007, and you may have heard her biggest 'hit', "Paper Planes". It's a good song, even if it does borrow the whole chorus from Wreckx-n-Effect's "Shake Your Rump". She has a lot of great musical ideas and a defiantly different way of thinking about and constructing songs, but I thought she lacked a little in her execution and that she was definitely over-hyped. Still, some of her songs were pretty good; "Paper Planes" for one.

"Bird Flu" is a high energy rap song that follows the blueprint of your typical 'club rap' (think Soulja Boy or Lil Jon). It's a real pounder, with a massive downbeat on the one, and an almost techno-like emphasis on the remaining three beats. The difference is, while the other producers are using classic 808-style drums, MIA is creating songs from whole cloth using chicken sounds, drum cadences, traditional central Asian percussion and kids shouting in what I can only assume is her native Tamil. She weaves these decidedly non-musical threads together into a thumping musical work that could easily hold its own on the dance floor (though it'd be kind of odd).

There are a few other things I really like about the instrumentation (besides the chickens, that is). First, during the chorus there's this descending bass tone. Imagine the sound effect for a falling bomb, but instead of a high-pitched whistle it's a very low electric tone. That's what it sounds like. It's very subtle, but it's very cool. I like that a lot. Second, near the end she samples some sort of chanting, and I really dig both the chant and the way she uses it. I wish it was used more throughout the song. And finally, I really like the way she uses the kids shouting as a breakdown. They are pretty well synced to the beat during the verse and chorus, but at the breakdown, she lets the sample run unfettered and it ends up sounding hyper-syncopated, almost an off-beat triplet against the beat, somewhere in the gray area between offbeat and on-beat. It's nice.

The song is, like most rap songs, pretty much about how much of a bad-ass she is, but from a totally different type of "hood". She doesn't shoot AK-47's, she makes bombs. She's not flying gang colors, but she burnt her ID papers, even though the cops are coming around to check them. She chews chicken feet and watches "Lost" on cable. (Okay, so that's not so bad-ass, but it is funny.) And went she gets pregnant, she's "gonna pop me out some leaders". That's awesome.

You can find "Bird Flu" on MIA's second release, 2007's Kala. I really should give it another listen. Maybe I knee-jerked against the hype.

[You can listen to M.I.A.'s "Bird Flu" by navigating to the post "Song050" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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