I'm trying to get my head around the new MIA tune. It's called There's Space For Ol Dat I See. It's the first track from her forthcoming album Mission.Impossible.Area (due out this summer). She's come out and said it'll be odd, musical and gimmick free, presumably meaning she'll be taking it easy on the auld gunshots.
According to Rolling Stone (as I'm slow on the Twittereeting) the song was quickly written and recorded as an attack on the New York Times. They deduced this from a Tweet from MIA, that said, FUCK NEW YORK TIMES.
It was in response to an article written in the paper that named her homeland, Sri Lanka, as top of 31 Places To Visit in 2010. The singer is not only of the Tamil ethnic group but daughter of an activist who spent years on the run from the Sri Lankan army, who declared victory over the revolutionary LTTE only last May after over 25 years of Civil War, while 300,000 Tamil are still displaced.
Adding weight to her outrage was this horrible photograph which she Tweeted with a note saying "here is the lush coastline they are talking about". Fair enough.
Here's the song: M.I.A - Theres Space For Ol Dat I See
Gotta say, I'm not majorly gone on the usual music/politics crossover but I feel MIA uses her influence in music to highlight the problems within Sri Lanka purely as an act of desparation.
Purely musically I'm still not majorly gone on it, but am looking forward to hearing more from it. She has said that she's not looking to make something that will be trendy for three months or whatever the attention span of a DJ is. She may be on to something. We're a flighty old bunch. She may also be on to something with Rusko, BlaqStarr, Diplo & Switch on production duties.
To quote the jellybeans off the Lotto ads, "this is gonna be great"!
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