Kala is the second studio album by English recording artist M.I.A. It was released on 8 August 2007 through XL Recordings. M.I.A. named the album after her mother and has stated that her mother's struggles in life are a major theme of the album. It was mainly written and produced by M.I.A. and Switch, and features contributions from Timbaland, Diplo, Afrikan Boy and The Wilcannia Mob.
Initially planning to work with American producer Timbaland for the bulk of the album, M.I.A. was unable to gain a long-term work visa to enter the US. Therefore, she recorded Kala in numerous countries around the world, including India, Angola, Trinidad, Liberia, Jamaica and Australia. M.I.A. and Switch relied heavily on the digital audio workstation Logic Pro and recorded additional vocals and background sounds outside the studio environment. Kala incorporates prominent influences from South Asian music, featuring samples of Bollywood and Tamil cinema. The album draws on various styles, from funk carioca to African folk. The songs are about political themes related to the Third World, including illegal immigration, poverty and capitalism.
Kala was the best-performing album on the US Billboard Electronic Albums chart of 2007, and was certified gold by the RIAA for selling 500,000 copies in the US. It was certified platinum in Canada and gold in the UK. It spawned the singles "Bird Flu", "Boyz", "Jimmy" and "Paper Planes", the latter of which received a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year at the 2009 Grammy Awards.
The album received widespread critical acclaim and was ranked as one of the best albums of 2007 by many publications. Since its initial release, it has been included in several greatest albums lists. Renowned music critic Robert Christgau remarked that the album is his favourite of the 21st century.
Composition and recording
M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam) had released her debut album Arular in 2005, which achieved critical acclaim and sold 130,000 copies. Plans for a second album were first revealed when she spoke later that year of her intention to work with American producer Timbaland. At one point it was anticipated that he would produce the bulk of the album. However, she was unable to gain a long-term work visa to enter the US, reportedly due to her family's connections with guerrillas in Sri Lanka. This led to conflicts between the two artists' schedules and meant that Timbaland's involvement was restricted to a poorly received guest verse on the track "Come Around". M.I.A. instead opted to record the album at a variety of locations around the world, beginning by travelling to India following the last date of her Arular Tour in Japan in February 2006.
She initially travelled to India to meet A. R. Rahman, but found it hard to communicate her ideas to him and the planned musical collaboration did not take place. Rahman did, however, provide M.I.A. with a number of contacts and allow her to use his studio, where 22 members of drumming group The Tapes were recorded for Kala. Producer Switch, who had initially travelled to India purely to engineer the planned sessions, ultimately became involved in the composition of several tracks for the album. A visit to Angola to work with DJ Znobia was cancelled after Znobia was involved in a car accident, but M.I.A. was able to record in Trinidad, Liberia, Jamaica and Australia. She and Switch relied heavily on Logic Pro, a digital audio workstation produced by Apple, and were able to capture vocals and background sounds outside the traditional studio environment, using a microphone and a MacBook Pro. The album features guest vocals from Afrikan Boy, The Wilcannia Mob, and Timbaland, and further collaborations with Switch, Blaqstarr, Morganics and Diplo. She likened the process of recording the album to "making a big old marble cake with lots of different countries and influences. Then you slice it up and call each slice a song".
Music and lyrics Kala is named after M.I.A.'s mother, in contrast to her previous album, Arular, which was named after her father. She contends that Arular was a "masculine" album, but that Kala "is about my mum and her struggle—how do you work, feed your children, nurture them and give them the power of information". She further summed the album up as "shapes, colours, Africa, street, power, bitch, nu world, and brave". The album is musically more aggressive and sample-heavy than M.I.A.'s debut album, and features a range of musical styles, including dance music and makes extensive use of South Asian music such as that of the urumee, a drum used in gaana music native to Tamil Nadu, India, and features samples of Bollywood and Tamil cinema vocals. Like Arular, the album also draws heavy influence from funk carioca, while M.I.A. makes use of featuring African chanting and the indigenous Australian instrument the didgeridoo for the first time. Topics on the album are Third World themed, including illegal immigration, poverty, capitalism, violence, and the availability of guns in Africa, while also touching on facets of urban British Culture like rave culture.
According to Dominic Horner of The Independent, the album's music may not be appropriately described exclusively as either dance or world music, but it is a mixture of the two. Music critic Robert Christgau characterised its music as an "eclectic world-underclass dance amalgam", and Jonathan Brown of the Irish Independent cited Kala as a proper introduction to "world fusion", a genre that "blends sounds from across the globe which wouldn't – and some say shouldn't – be put together". By contrast, NPR's Oliver Wang argued that, rather than a "so-called world music fusion" attempt, Kala is "agitated, propulsive pop" informed by international sounds. Pitchfork likewise described the album as a pop record, stating: "But for every fantasy pop triumph on Kala, there's a hidden door or three." Music journalist Jody Rosen called it "an agitprop dance record" that reappropriates hip hop in an international setting with beatbox riddims, "playground" rhymes, unconventional samples, and gunshot sounds.
The tracks "Boyz" and "Bird Flu" use urumee drums, a signature instrument of Gaana, a Tamil genre of music, with which M.I.A. was familiar from her time spent living in Sri Lanka. She later worked on these tracks in Trinidad, where she absorbed influences from the country's love of soca music. The lyrics of "Boyz" deal with the artist's time in Jamaica, and reference Jamaican dance moves. The song "Hussel" began as an image in M.I.A.'s head of refugees being smuggled in boats, which she expressed musically by imagining how "if they banged that beat on the side of a boat, what would it sound like? That's why it's all echo-y and submarine-y". The sounds on the intro were recorded from Keralan fishermen chanting as they pull their fishing boats into the water. "World Town" used instrumentation from the temple music she recalled waking up to as a child in Sri Lanka. After playing the track to children in Liberia, she expressed a desire to record a video for the song there. M.I.A.'s "flat, unaffected vocals and delivery of lyrics" on some songs drew comparisons to British post-punk bands such as Delta 5 and The Slits. She says it "was just what was happening to me naturally ... I wanted it to be difficult and raw and not get into it so much".
M.I.A. described opening track "Bamboo Banga" as having a "bamboo-stick beat, house-y feel". Afrikan Boy, an exponent of grime, a UK-based genre of urban music, provided vocals on the song "Hussel". M.I.A. opted to work with him because she felt he seemed comfortable with his identity as a "real immigrant" and because his background was different to that of most MCs in the genre. She had originally planned to include "Mango Pickle Down River"—her remix of The Wilcannia Mob's song "Down River"—on a mixtape, but chose to include it on the album because she felt it was rare to hear the "aboriginal voice" in recorded music. "Jimmy" is a tribute to her mother and is M.I.A.'s version of an old Bollywood film track to which she danced at parties as a child. Despite the involvement of Baltimore club musician Blaqstarr, "The Turn" is the album's only ballad, and the track has been described as the least like club music. "20 Dollar" was written about the relative ease of buying AK-47s in war-torn Liberia. "XR2" recalls part of M.I.A.'s life growing up with rave music in early 1990s London, while "Paper Planes" jokingly plays on her problems with visas and certain perceptions of immigrants.
Release and artwork In April 2007 Rolling Stone reported that Kala would be released on 26 June of that year. After being delayed for unknown reasons, the album was eventually released by XL Recordings on 8 August 2007 in Japan and on 20 August in the UK, and by Interscope Records on 21 August in the United States. The Japanese edition featured three extra tracks not included on the versions released in other countries, with "Far Far" shortly being re-released on the How Many Votes Fix Mix EP. Following the unexpected commercial success of "Paper Planes", Kala was re-issued in the United Kingdom in October 2008. A 4 November 2008 US re-release was announced, but as of late 2009 the album had not been re-issued in the United States.
The album's packaging includes photographs taken by M.I.A. and others in Liberia and Jamaica. The cover artwork to Kala, designed by Steve Loveridge, features neon fractal patterns and repeated slogans, including "Fight On! Fight On! Fight On!", which surrounds her image on the front cover. The cover was considered garish, prompting The Village Voice to comment "Maybe one day [she'll] make an album cover that it doesn't hurt to look at". Additional graphics for the album were provided by English fashion designer Carri Mundane (also known as Cassette Playa) and Steve Loveridge. The album's artwork was inspired by African art, "from dictator fashion to old stickers on the back of cars," which M.I.A hoped, like her artwork extended "Okley Run" clothing range, would capture "a 3-D sense, the shapes, the prints, the sound, film, technology, politics, economics" of a certain time.
Promotion
M.I.A. began her promotion of the new album with a live appearance at Radio 1's Big Weekend in Preston in May 2007, where she performed six songs from Kala. In July she began the full KALA Tour with dates in the United States before going on to play a number of festivals in Europe and America. After dates in Asia, she returned to America for a series of shows in October and November, before ending the year with concerts in the UK. The tour continued during the first half of 2008 under the banner of the People Vs. Money Tour with further dates in North America, although the planned European leg of the tour was eventually cancelled.
The first track from the album to be made available to the public was "Bird Flu", which was made available digitally as a promotional single on 13 November 2006. The first official single to be lifted from the album, "Boyz", was released on 11 June 2007. The second single was "Jimmy", which was released on 1 October 2007. The EP Paper Planes - Homeland Security Remixes EP, featuring various mixes of "Paper Planes", was released digitally on 11 February 2008 and physically three weeks later. A new physical single version was released in the UK on 13 October 2008. Also in October 2008, How Many Votes Fix Mix EP was released, containing a remix of "Boyz" with Jay-Z and the tracks "Shells" and "Far Far".
Critical reception
Kala was met with widespread critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 87, based on 37 reviews.