Although London, England's Maya "M.I.A." Arulpragasam is not a particularly gifted singer or rapper, she might still be the most compelling artist to emerge this decade. In a medium dominated by machine-tooled precision, what's so fascinating about the 30-year-old Sri Lanka-born MC is how unkempt and unruly her songs are, and how powerfully they evoke the lives of people we usually only meet by getting on a plane and jetting off to faraway lands. A kind of audio travelogue of her visits to India, Angola, Liberia, and Trinidad, M.I.A.'s excellent new disc, Kala, succeeds not just musically it's one of the year's best records but as a powerful symbol of activism in an era of rampant political apathy and self-absorption.
