XXX-traordinary

Last month, MIA premiered her ginger genocide video for Born Free. At the time, we noted that the star was raising her middle finger to people who wanted her to follow up Paper Planes with something unabashedly commercial.

Now we have the first "proper" single from her third album, in which MIA pretends she was only extending her finger so she could scratch the side of her face, because she's got this dry patch of skin that's been bothering her for a couple of days, and maybe she should get a cream for it, but it's really hard to get a doctor's appointment at short notice and that's only going to get worse with the public sector cuts and by the way did I tell you my dad was a militant in Sri Lanka?

ANYWAY - The song is called XXXO. It has a chorus the size of Manhattan, paired up with a beat that will cause tremors in your trousers. It is among the best things she has done.

The lyrics, on the other hand, are fairly asinine - something about a boy "treating me like the tweeting bird on your iPhone"(???) but there's a great line about a famous film director in the third verse.


MIA - XXXO

XXXO should be available any minute now at your preferred legal download store. MIA's as-yet-untitled third album follows in July.

Edit: The album has a name - the typographically hard-to-render /\/\ /\ Y /\. We'll probably just call it Maya, which is (a) MIA's real name and (b) easier on the eye.

This means MIA's first album was named after her father, Arul Pragasam; her second was titled Kala as a tribute to her mother; and now her third is self-titled. Fascinating.

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