MIA: hipster-honed and boundary slashing. Photograph: Sarah Lee
She has had her videos banned, her US visa (temporarily) denied and now MIA looks set for a spell in quarantine. She has just posted a new track on YouTube with the title Bird Flu, so named because "THIS BEAT GON KILL EVERYONE!!"
MIA has clearly missed a marketing trick here (she could have said it was "painfully catchy" as well), but you've got to admire her prescience. When she arrived on the UK music scene in late 2003, she approached her records with a pick'n'mix, genre-hopping fervour that has now become the norm for everyone from indie bands (Klaxons, Hadouken!) to grime stars (JME). This new record is as hipster-honed and boundary slashing as ever thanks to the rattling Indian hand drums and, funnily enough, what sounds like a looped sample of a chicken clucking itself to death.
As we mentioned, it's not the first time MIA's music has stirred things up. Her track Sunshowers was banned by MTV thanks to its mention of the Palestinian Liberation Front, whereas her familial links with the Tamil Tigers probably had much to do with the US government refusing her entry into the country.
However, whereas it's all well and good dishing up cultural buzzwords in your music, you do wonder how far you can go before it starts to backfire. Arctic Monkeys filled their first album with references to text messages, fast food shops and taxis. They got away with it then, but newer tracks such as Despair in the Departure Lounge sound like a band struggling to look modern.
Calling a song Bird Flu almost reminds me of the time Catatonia released the singles Mulder & Scully and Road Rage, and critics wisecracked potential titles for the next one along the lines of My Internet Server's Crashed Again. A determination to stay on the cutting edge is to be applauded, but it runs the risk of soon leaving your tracks looking dated - as MIA may discover when her album Mo' Deadly than Polonium-210 drops later this year.
