The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #181

#181: "Galang" (2005) - M.I.A.

We move from retro-sixties to retro-eighties, as M.I.A.'s producer drop all sorts of Casio-tone, video-game sound effects (I think a couple are from the Atari game Frogger) and beats, and then he just lets M.I.A. rap and sing and dance all over it, her rapping style as retro as the music is, but what's not retro is her mixture of culture and language, her melding of the East and the West (not Eastside American rapping and Westside American rapping, no), using every ounce of energy she's got into making her version of hip-hop a truly international language. And she comes pretty close, 'cause folks, it don't take much multilingualism to be able to sing "galangalangalanga," and that's part of her point, and it's a point that's fun to make. Go ahead. Try it. Sing it. You'll see what she means. And why she's an important voice, and why pop music is, too.

M.I.A. - Galang
by hushhush112