Consumer Guide Album

M.I.A.: Mata [Island, 2022]
Always longer on political instinct than political acuity, Maya Arulpragasam tossed off a whopper of a tweet to draw attention to her first album in six years: "If Alex Jones pays for lying shouldn't every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?" Although anti-vax disinformation is somewhat more forgivable in parents whose kids seem to slot vaccine-sensitive, a malady she reports befell her daughter, the illogic here is total--even assuming that Jones has a right to his evil opinions, the money he's been ordered to cough up is money he lied egregiously to obtain, where celebrities delivering public service announcements generally do so gratis. Yet even so her first album since 2016 establishes not just that her hip-hop groove and rap dialect remain her own but that after six years she's ready with fresh proof. For all her "multiple relationships, drop them like a hair flip," at 48 she's set on launching brags beyond the reach of any rival, and not just because she sometimes raps in Tamil: "Art in the Tate," say, or "See me in the rubble of a Hubbell telescope." Keeping peace in the streets one minute, she's all "put your pickets down come on and riot" the next. And please note: "The slave trade was real and so was the Holocaust. It wasn't that long ago--you can ask someone's grandma about it." A-