One of the most genuinely original and politically charged albums of the 2000s, and a record with one of the most remarkable origin stories of its era. When M.I.A. was denied re-entry to the United States while working on her second album, told she matched the profile of a terrorist, she took her laptop and her ideas and recorded across India, Trinidad, Liberia, Jamaica, Australia, Japan, and the UK instead, absorbing the sounds and urgencies of each location into music that sounds unlike anything before or since. The album is named after her mother, and named its themes after her mother's struggles: immigration, poverty, capitalism, violence, and the relentless push to survive in a world designed to exclude you. Working with Diplo, Switch, and an array of co-producers, M.I.A. built something that music critic Robert Christgau called his favorite album of the 21st century. It debuted at number 18 on the US Billboard 200, topped the Billboard Electronic Albums chart for the year, earned a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year for lead single "Paper Planes," and was named album of the year by both Rolling Stone and Blender. The Metacritic score of 87 placed it among the most acclaimed records of its year. And yet none of those numbers quite capture what makes it so extraordinary. From the thunderous opening of "Bamboo Banga" through the Bollywood-sampled euphoria of "Jimmy," the street-level urgency of "Boyz," the baile funk chaos of "Bird Flu," and the deceptively simple brilliance of "Paper Planes," whose gunshot-and-cash-register hook is one of the most subversive pieces of pop craft of the decade, Kala moves with a restless, globe-spanning energy that sounds ceaselessly interesting and ridiculously danceable in equal measure. M.I.A. views music from half the planet's countries as potential source material, and the resulting album feels like a dispatch from a third place somewhere between the developed and developing worlds that she was trying to build a bridge toward. Thrillingly, gloriously, like nothing else.
