Check out M.I.A.’s latest track off Kala, ‘Boyz,’ with a beat much like ‘Bird Flu.’ Filmed in Jamaica, the video reminds me of Keith Haring and ’80s video games (thanks, Turbanhead):

… she manages to stuff every major dance craze in contemporary Jamaica into one hypnotic short video. [Link]

The lyrics:

Hey now
Let me go hey now
Can we go riding on a motorbike
Up to Sugar Hill (in bequia)
Cooking chicken on the wall
With the system up on full [Link]

Here’s the ‘making of’ video.

Here’s another new track, ‘Hit That‘ with Bangladesh Production Company. For all her anti-establishment energy, Maya’s gone surprisingly square with twin albums named after her mom and her dad.

While Arular was fashioned in the image of Maya’s Sri Lankan activist father, Kala is named after the wife he left in London… “Arular was so political, it was a real masculine album,” agrees its author. “I wanted to make the feminine album…”

What about her dad? Has she heard from him lately? “Yeah, he said he wasn’t happy about me calling the album after my mum.” Didn’t he tell her to change the name of her first album too? “I know. He’s just not happy generally…” [Link]

She calls A.R. Rahman ‘the Indian Timbaland’

Maya’s courting of Bollywood’s finest producers was hugely influenced by the old Indian flicks she’d watched with her over the years, and the resulting tracks are peppered with cinematic snatches. Maya returned the compliment, furnishing the sound-hungry composers with mixtapes full of “baile funk, Baltimore club, the new shit people are doing…”

… in India we had to record 25 drummers, so we used A.R. Rahman’s studio, this $22 million studio, and we got the biggest room. Switch is like ‘I’ve got to get a bigger studio…’”

… Rahman is, to use Maya’s term, “the Indian Timbaland,” just one of a diverse selection of producers who chipped in to help give Kala its global feel. Also serving were Australian B-boy beatsmith Morganics (on the didgeridoo-laden track “Down River”), several “top, top” Bollywood soundtrack composers, and the real Timbaland…

“With A.R. Rahman, if I go 100% where he’s at, I’ll have a super amazing Bollywood hit. And if I go all the way to Timbaland I’ll be, like, Nelly Furtado. So you have to pull him to some other place…” [Link]

And she reminisced about the bad old days of Brick Lane:

… Brick Lane is a thriving tourist attraction… Back in Maya’s mid-teens, however, this was a no-go area ruled by South Asian gangs. As a Sri Lankan, she was something of an outsider herself, lured there by the promise of a “youth club with some decks in it,” and eventually accepted into a gang from the nearby estate, one of three girls among 100 often violent geezers… [Link]

Someone really misses the ’80s:

M.I.A. plays the Village Voice’s Siren Festival, July 21, 2007, at 6pm. The festival is free. Serena-Maneesh played last year, but sadly had no band members who vaguely looked like a Maneesh