M.I.A. performs at the Vic. View more pictures of M.I.A. in Chicago HERE. (Chris Sweda, Tribune)
As M.I.A. made her exit Wednesday in the first of two concerts at the Vic Theatre, her breakthrough hit “Paper Planes” was pumping through the speakers and the stage was packed with madly dancing fans.
The song then morphed into the subsequent hit it inspired, the massive hip-hop single “Swagga Like Us” – a flashback to the winter of 2009. That’s when a pregnant M.I.A. appeared on the nationally televised Grammy Awards to outswagger a handful of hip-hop kingpins -- Kanye West, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne and T.I. – who were performing "Swagga Like Us."
That song turned the agit-rapper, born Maya Arulpragasam 35 years ago to Sri Lankan parents, into a mainstream phenom, a smart, exotic master of cross-cultural mash-up who slid subversive content into her banging club hits.
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Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 4)
Within the first minute of M.I.A.’s third studio album, “Maya” (N.E.E.T./XL/Interscope), what sounds like a dentist drill revs up, sure to send an involuntary chill through anybody within earshot.
It’s a harsh, don’t-mess-with-me re-introduction to one of the most talked-about artists of the last few years, a British-born, Brooklyn-based art-school provocateur who spent her childhood muddling through the chaos of a Sri Lankan civil war. Yet a few songs later, she’s putting away “Teqkilla,” in a song rife with product-placement possibilities, and then offering a breezy, reggae-flavored cover of “It Takes a Muscle,” a drippy 1982 pop ballad by the thoroughly bland Dutch group Spectral Display.
After two highly lauded studio albums and a breakthrough hit in “Paper Planes” (featured in the movies “Pineapple Express” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” and sampled in the T.I.-Jay-Z hit “Swagga Like Us”), Maya “M.I.A.” Arulpragasam is trying to negotiate a middle ground between her status as an underground rebel and rising pop celebrity.
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