The music of Mathangi Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.) finally broke through to the mainstream in 2008 when two of the year's biggest movies—""Slumdog Millionaire"" and ""Pineapple Express""—helped bring her joyous, Clash-sampling single ""Paper Planes"" to TVs and radios everywhere. But for anyone with more than a passing interest in pop, rap, indie rock, electronica or dance music, M.I.A.'s aggressive, genre-hopping jams had already been a fact of life for several years.
Her 2005 debut album, Arular, scrambled rhythms from all over the world with Arulpragasam's off-kilter raps into a set of irresistibly weird dance tracks with lyrics that are about half-politics, half-nonsense, and all bitingly clever. Take the Brazilian drum and horn breaks in ""Bucky Done Gun,"" which seemingly cut off the song's momentum every 30 seconds before bouncing it ahead into the next hook. The most political songs on Arular are also some of the most sex-centered. ""10 Dollar,"" the story of a Sri Lankan prostitute turned mail-order bride, builds up to the riotous hook ""And what can I get for ten dolla? / Every-ting you want!""
2007's Kala took M.I.A.'s mash-up of international genres in even wilder directions. ""Boyz"" is one of the most strangely funky songs in recent memory; ""Jimmy"" reworks Bollywood movie music; ""World Town"" is a literal call-to-arms (""Hands up / guns out / represent the world town""). And then, of course, there's ""Paper Planes,"" which sprung M.I.A.'s idiosyncratic brilliance on the world at large. The end of this decade has seen more and more bands working with international styles—M.I.A. helped to break down those boundaries by making it cool.
